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

[Valia Kordoni]

oh, wow! What a threat against the (young) members of the linguistics
community!

Is this statement in agreement with the president of Humboldt University,
the HR of the same HEI and/or the DFG or any other funding body?

Speechless...

VK

On Mon, August 24, 2020 16:32, Stefan Müller 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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