[HPSG-L] Do not work for / publish with Elsevier, please (like Stanford, Harvard and so on)

[Stephan Oepen]

dear stefan:

my personal record is pure: i have never published in lingua, almost
certainly never will, and i rarely even read the journal.

but i understand your message to our professional community mailing list as
not only condoning but actually encouraging what i consider unprofessional
and unethical behavior.

subversively stalling the review cycle can negatively impact the careers of
our colleagues, in particular more junior ones—for example delaying
dissertations or promotions.

as a member of a search committee, i consider my responsibility to the
applicants, the hiring institution, scientific quality, fairness, and
transparency.  unless it was part of the job announcement, a subjective and
inherently moral knock-down criterion, in my view, is incompatible with
that role.

best wishes, oe


On Mon, 24 Aug 2020 at 19:08 Stefan Müller <St.Mueller at hu-berlin.de> wrote:

> Dear colleagues,
>
>
>
> Yesterday I got a request to review an HPSG paper for the Zombie journal
>
> Lingua. I am sort of shocked by this and I was tempted to reject this
>
> request right away, but here is what I will do: I will delay the review
>
> as long as possible and reject to review the paper then.
>
>
>
> Background: In 2015 the complete editorial board of Lingua resigned (31
>
> people) and founded a new (fair) open access journal Glossa with the
>
> same editorial board and the same output of papers since.
>
>
>
> https://www.rooryck.org/lingua-to-glossa
>
>
>
> I will not hire people with publications in Lingua after the Glossa
>
> transition. I will argue against people with Lingua publications in
>
> their CV in any search committee I am in since I consider publishing in
>
> Lingua unethical and against the scientific community.
>
>
>
> Furthermore, due to the status as Zombie journal the number of
>
> submissions to Lingua went down considerably, which of course has also
>
> an influence on competition and quality. (details below)
>
>
>
> Here are some further information on why working for Elsevier is
>
> unethical and against the scientific community: Elsevier is a billion
>
> dollar company that is basically killing academia. A parasite. They have
>
> profit margins of 37% in 2018. For comparison, the German bank once
>
> declared that they have a profit margin of 25% and this resulted in a
>
> huge outcry in German society. Labels like "turbo capitalism" were
>
> coined back then. Normal companies have profit margins of 5 or 7
>
> percent. The food sector even less. About 3%.
>
>
>
> 37%! If a university pays 1Mio for journal access 370.000 go to share
>
> holders. We can choose: Do we want to hire people or give our research
>
> money to the share holders of Elsevier? (Springer is similar and Wiley
>
> is even worse >70%!!)
>
>
>
> And note, we are not just paying the profit margin, we are also paying
>
> the income of the CEOs. I do not know the income of Elsevier's COEs, but
>
> I know the income of Wiley's CEOs:
>
>
>
> CEO salery
>
>
>
> This is $16 Mio for five people. Per year.
>
>
>
> These are quotes from the English Wikipedia:
>
>
>
> > In 2018, Elsevier accounted for 34% of the revenues of RELX group
>
> > (₤2.538 billion of ₤7.492 billion). In operating profits
>
> > <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/Earnings_before_interest_and_taxes
> >,
>
> > it represented 40% (₤942 million of ₤2,346 million). Adjusted
>
> > operating profits (with constant currency) rose by 2% from 2017 to
>
> > 2018. Profits grew further from 2018 to 2019, to a total of £982
>
> > million.
>
> > <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/Elsevier#cite_note-RELX_2018_Report-1
> >
>
>
>
>
>
> > In the 21st century, the subscription rates charged by the company for
>
> > its journals have been criticized; some very large journals (with more
>
> > than 5,000 articles) charge subscription prices as high as £9,634, far
>
> > above average, and many British universities pay more than a million
>
> > pounds to Elsevier annually. The company has been criticized not only
>
> > by advocates of a switch to the open-access publication model, but
>
> > also by universities whose library budgets make it difficult for them
>
> > to afford current journal prices.
>
> >
>
> > For example, a resolution by Stanford University's senate singled out
>
> > Elsevier's journals as being "disproportionately expensive compared to
>
> > their educational and research value", which librarians should
>
> > consider dropping, and encouraged its faculty "not to contribute
>
> > articles or editorial or review efforts to publishers and journals
>
> > that engage in exploitive or exorbitant pricing". Similar guidelines
>
> > and criticism of Elsevier's pricing policies have been passed by the
>
> > University of California, Harvard University, and Duke University.
>
> >
>
> > In July 2015, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands
>
> > announced a plan to start boycotting Elsevier, which refused to
>
> > negotiate on any open access policy for Dutch universities. In
>
> > December 2016, Nature Publishing Group reported that academics in
>
> > Germany, Peru, and Taiwan are to lose access to Elsevier journals as
>
> > negotiations had broken down with the publisher.
>
> >
>
> > A complaint about Elsevier/RELX was made to the UK Competition and
>
> > Markets Authority in December 2016. In October 2018, a competition
>
> > complaint against Elsevier was filed with the European Commission,
>
> > alleging anticompetitive practices stemming from Elsevier's
>
> > confidential subscription agreements and market dominance.
>
> The whole scientific world is kept busy by finding ways to deal with
>
> ever increasing prices and with the unethical practices by Elsevier. You
>
> would think you can save money by cancelling one subscription of a
>
> journal you do not need? No, Elsevier sells bundles and next year you
>
> pay as much as last year but you have some journals less. Elsevier uses
>
> non-disclosure agreements for making it impossible to compare prices.
>
> Ask your librarian if you do not believe me. They will burst into tears
>
> if you name Elsevier.
>
>
>
> Librarians, research founders, university administrations spend hours
>
> and hours to deal with the publication crisis. Publishing with Lingua in
>
> such a situation is a sign of ignorance or uninformedness. Both are bad
>
> for job opportunities.
>
>
>
> If you want to publish in a responsible way, submit your papers to
>
> Language, the Journal of Linguistics or the Journal of Language
>
> Modelling. These are journals run by scholars or societies. The German
>
> journal Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft is published by De Gruyter
>
> but run by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft. It is open
>
> access (free for authors, fees are payed by us, the DGfS members) and
>
> the journal accepts English contributions as well.
>
>
>
> This is a list of journals I reviewed for and which are judged as OK or
>
> not OK. Elsevier, Wiley, Springer are not OK.
>
>
>
> https://hpsg.hu-berlin.de/~stefan/gutachter.html
>
>
>
> So, summing up:
>
>
>
> People who work for and publish in Lingua behave unethical and harm
>
> their field.
>
>
>
> Authors who submit there submit to a zombie journal with low competition
>
> since good and responsible authors boycott the journal.
>
>
>
> Authors who submit there get low quality reviews since high profile
>
> academics do not review for Lingua or Elsevier in general.
>
>
>
> The reviewing process will be delayed since it is difficult to find
>
> reviewers and people asked for reviews do not reply in time.
>
>
>
> Please check the English Wikipedia entry to find more reasons for not
>
> publishing with Elsevier.
>
>
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Academic_practices
>
>
>
> One is this:
>
>
>
> > In 2018, Elsevier reported a mean 2017
>
> > <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/Elsevier#cite_note-20
> >gender
>
> > pay gap
>
> > <https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/Gender_pay_gap
> > of
>
> > 29.1% for its UK workforce, while the median was 40.4%, more than
>
> > twice the UK average and by far the worst figure recorded by any
>
> > academic publisher in UK. Elsevier attributed the result to the
>
> > under-representation of women in its senior ranks and the prevalence
>
> > of men in its technical workforce.
>
> There is also racism, manipulation of citation indexes and so on.
>
>
>
> Thanks for reading this far and it would really make my day if I saw
>
> this paper published in another journal and no further submissions to
>
> Lingua. =:-)
>
>
>
> Best
>
>
>
>     Stefan
>
>
>
> Recommendations to deal with Zombie Lingua
>
>
>
> 1) Do not submit there.
>
>
>
> 2) If asked for review, do not reply via their editorial system.
>
>
>
>     After some time send the editor an email explaining why you do not
>
> work for Lingua/Elsevier.
>
>
>
> 3) If you cite work that appeared after January 17th 2017 in Lingua,
>
> cite it as Zombie Lingua, eg:
>
>
>
> Lin, Francis Y. 2017. A refutation of Universal Grammar. Zombie Lingua
>
> 193. 1–22. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.lingua.2017.04.003.
>
>
>
>
>
> Appendix:
>
>
>
> Proof that Lingua is a low quality journal
>
>
>
> Lingua was ranked 7th in Google Scholar’s h5-Index Top Publications –
>
> Humanities, Literature & Arts, and 3rd in the subsection Language &
>
> Linguistics in October 2015 (https://www.rooryck.org/lingua-to-glossa).
>
>
>
> Now it is not contained in Humanities any longer and it is ranked 14 in
>
> Language & Linguistics, but all papers with a high number of citations
>
> that are responsible for this listing were published by the old
>
> editorial team (they had contracts for volumes till beginning of 2017).
>
>
>
>
> https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en&vq=hum_languagelinguistics
>
>
>
> In 2021, Lingua will be gone since the 2015 items will not be counted
>
> for the h5 index and there aren't any new ones.
>
>
>
> I also had a look at stuff published there. One piece is open access:
>
>
>
> Lin, Francis Y. 2017. A refutation of Universal Grammar. Zombie Lingua
>
> 193. 1–22. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.lingua.2017.04.003.
>
>
>
> I had a look since the title caught my attention and I have to say it is
>
> below any scientific standards. I am not a fan of UG, but the paper is
>
> really bad. For example it argues that Chomsky is wrong in making claims
>
> about languages since he has not seen/cannot examine all existing human
>
> languages. (p.4)
>
>
>
> Another pet peeve of mine is infinitely long sentences. The author goes
>
> into some detail expalaining why we could in principle process
>
> infinitely long sentences:
>
>
>
> > A couple of clarifications are in order. First, one might object that
>
> > an infinitely long sentence, e.g.:
>
> > (11) John believes that Peter believes that Bob believes . . .
>
> > is a sentence in a human language but the brain, being a finite
>
> > substance, cannot process it. In fact there is no contradiction here.
>
> > To say that (11) is a sentence in a human language is to say that
>
> > speakers of that language can speak or understand it. In a strict
>
> > sense, a human being cannot speak or understand an infinitely long
>
> > sentence. So, what is going on here is that when saying that (11) is a
>
> > human sentence we mean something like this: if there were no
>
> > limitation on memory and other relevant factors, then humans would be
>
> > able speak or understand it. In this sense, (11) is a human sentence;
>
> > and in the same sense, it can be processed by the brain.
>
> Note that no formally trained syntactician (in the Chomskyan tradition)
>
> ever claimed that we can formulate or process infinitely long sentences.
>
> We can't. And PSGs do not license infinitely long sentences. This is
>
> easy to see if you consider Merge-based systems. If we combine words or
>
> roots with a binary operation, we have objects of length two. We can
>
> combine these with other simple or complex objects but all of these have
>
> a finite length. So there is no way to get objects of infinite length.
>
>
>
> Apart from formally and conceptually flawed content, the language is
>
> week (even I with my limited command of English could spot this) and you
>
> will find an example of this in the quote above. So, our high price
>
> publisher does not even care for copy editing.
>
>
>
> Conclusion: Do not submit there.
>
>
>
> Thanks!
>
>
>
> Best
>
>
>
>     Stefan
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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