> If everybody were to just stop,
That's the root of all human-created hard problems on this planet; it's not exclusive to scientific publishing. People don't spontaneously coordinate. As long as it's in the short-term interest of any individual to not be the first one to stop, or to not stop when others are stopping, almost no one is going to stop.
Coordination problems (and very serious problems of information access & distribution) are why things like boycotts are in fact, however much we might wish otherwise, so laughably bad at enforcing community norms on e.g. large companies, and why the market doesn't do a great job of just "sorting out" all kinds of things most people would consider to be problems.
I think you are factually wrong and condecending in the way you express it.
One case I can bring is the vegan product market in Germany. For many years, individuals were "self-flagellating in a closet" and simply avoiding animals products and buying the alternatives that were offered. That triggered the production of more of these products, which triggered more consumption of them. Today the market is big and makes a meaningful difference. This the result of individual action without coordination by all market participants.
I don't make a claim about the relative cost of individual change. I rather call the thinking that individual cost will only be accepted if everybody changes arrogant. I've heard more than I'd like to count sentences like "If I/we change, the others still continue, so the problem won't be solved", while in fact it will be solved to the degree that I/we are causing it. Demanding that everybody changes just because you change is arrogant.
I'm not saying individual costs are negligible compared to the influence one can have with individual change. There may be good reasons to not change.
The problem's not so much that they can fail—any method can—as that they can fail with anything short of overwhelming and sustained support, that is, they can be wildly popular and still have no long-term effect at all. Better to look elsewhere—no amount of "if we'd all just do it, we could fix this!" will change that.
Again, as a personal choice, fine. As an alternative to more-effective means, no. It's not "arrogant", it's an outcome-focussed stance fitting with observed reality and current scholarship.
[EDIT] "They" being "movements mostly based on changes in personal behavior patterns, at some significant personal cost or risk"
My point is about recognizing the individual influence one has. Often that is avoided by the statement I'm criticizing.
How is that not essentially zero, in most political circumstances and for non-extraordinary individuals? That's my point.
[EDIT] and further:
> That is again a rather condescending spin you are giving to it.
I think I'm giving it a pretty fair shake by acknowledging there's any laudable purpose to actions of personal behavioral choice on large political problems. There is, but it has little to do with effecting change, if that's the part that's important.
Even when the problem is binary, the argumentative position becomes much stronger by individual change. For example, if Europe became fully carbon neutral, it's stance would be much more powerful when it comes to these questions compared to if it continued to build new coal power plants and told other countries to stop doing that.
To me it sounds like you just described a coordination problem. Can you clarify why you don't think it is?
It's always the value market which dictates what happens. Even a dictator has provide values for enough people (not necessarily its citizen) to stay in power.
Markets do love this sort of thing; this is one way of capturing customers and extracting money from them, whether they like it or not.
My point is just that you have to weight the cost: it provided tremendous value through the system of journals, while not really giving a "real" drawback since everyone in research who has ever wanted to get a given paper in the past 5 decades has been able to find it despite the locking by trying hard enough to bypass it.
i don't even understand the downvotes: i don't agree with the system and Elsevier can die but my point is just that they never were a really tangible "problem". Mostly a "1rst world problem".
If scientists write the content and other scientists review it, merely publishing the results of that process shouldn't cost that much. Elsevier is extracting a lot of value from the work of others, and locking the results of that work up.
The act of publishing does add value, but not nearly as much as the researcher and reviewer have added, and yet Elsevier takes ownership of it all, because they happen to be sitting in a position of power built on that work done by others.
not saying it's good, just that it's a fact
As it is, until Open Access journals become high impact journals, we're kind of between a rock and hard place
But there are also niches where the reality is that key people are happy as Elsevier Journal editors, and they function as gatekeepers, and for the foreseeable future the only route forward in those disciplines will be to get published in those high impact Elsevier Journals.
Because of this variation, lots of people can't do anything. It's a highly distributed problem. No amount of Computer Science professors however prestigious can change how Social Sciences do journals. And we shouldn't want it any different, even though in this case it kinda sucks.
But yeah, many scientists are paid by slow-moving bureaucratic machines that probably don't care about the issues involved and just want to see them published in old, well-established big-name journals, and not a new upstart that everybody else suddenly wants to consider more important.
The problem is that many bureaucracies attach some kind of point value to journals on this list, and a different on that list and so on. It's reforming those that is a problem, especially since according to their metrics, which are defined by counting the papers in journals in the lists, everything works perfectly.
That's irrelevant. Researchers are forced to publish in high-impact journals to preserve their career, and any newly created journal has zero impact.
Furthermore, some countries/universities enforce a journal whitelist, and evaluate the eir researchers based on the number of papers published in the pre approved list if publications.
And because those bureaucrats are often distributing public funds among those researchers, they should also have an interest in the results of that research being accessible to the public, and as many researchers as possible.
Of course, sending papers to OA journals, going the extra mile to cite them, and preferring them to non-OA alternatives when any paper will do (e.g. when you are just providing some examples of applications of X, without being exhaustive, and you can find some in OA and others in non-OA journals) does help.
They own the high IF journals, which scientists need to publish to in order to get cred'.
It's a chicken and egg problem, scientists can't move to OA journals until these provide the high IF they need to get cred' but OA journals can't get high IF without high impact articles being published in them, which requires paying Elsevier huge fees so you can publish in both.
Just like telcos, banks, internet behemoths and every other company that finds or builds a suitable set of barriers to entry.
Because researchers either publish or perish, only the work posted in established journals counts, and the likes of Elsevier controls those journals.
If everybody agrees Elsevier is terrible, you'd think it should be easy to set up a competitor that does it better, but someone everybody still wants to get published in Elsevier's journals, and everybody still wants to read what's in them. If everybody were to just stop, Elsevier would be out of business within a month.