I have become increasingly irritated by the practices of Elsevier (and other commercial publishers). Especially, one of my pet hatred these days is how they publish your article online before you have the time to check the proofs.
Thus, I have resorted to not signing the copyright transfer forms for the articles.This is creating an interesting situation, so I wanted to share my experience so far. It seems that in this case Elsevier becomes confused, as they have essentially placed your article online, but have no copyright transfer agreement. They can't take it down (not too sure why, as I have asked them to, but they refuse), and I have pointed out the fact that they were making money from my articles without having copyright over them (I told them to start transferring royalties to me, but they haven't, obviously).
Today when I checked it seems that everybody can download these articles for free? (correct me if I'm wrong). So, maybe this is an interesting route for those that want to have their journal article published with free access (i.e. have your paper accepted, but never sign the copyright transfer form...)
Article Effect of bed roughness on tsunami bore propagation and overtopping
Article Tsunami risk hazard in Tokyo Bay: The challenge of future se...
They may remove the article from online after some time. And both of your article are not found as open access.
Miguel, another new pratice that is becomming more clear in the recent times is that, with the decreasing on the signatures from Universities or governments, the Editors are more and more forcing the authors to submit papers to the pay-to-publish journals.
For example, I submitted a paper presenting a new software to Journal of Environmental Modelling & Software. The paper have 2 study cases. The first theoretical and second applied to a real case. The last case we added just because in the journla guidelines there is said that the papers must have " Real-world applications of software technologies ".
The answer we received was "please submitt the paper to Journal of Hydrology - Regional Studies".
When I responded the answer asking why, if the paper is focused in a new software, and the case was just an aditional testing to agree with the journal guidelines, they never answered me back.
Leonid Shumlyanskyy I am curious about this. How could I be banned exactly? You mean Elsevier would ban me from submitting to their journals? (is that even possible, and would it be legal/ethical from their side?)
Paramesh Venkatesh interesting, I thought they were not charging for these articles as I could download from home. So,
they are asking payment for them? (this makes the story interesting, as they are charging for something they do not have the copyright for...)
I am not cooperate with Elsevier before.
I hope to cooperate with Elsevier
Hi Miguel Esteban,
I do not know for how long time you have been "negotiating" with Elsevier, but I just checked one the mentioned publications above and it is not available online anymore. This is the message I got on the Elsevier page: "The publisher regrets that this article has been temporarily removed. A replacement will appear as soon as possible in which the reason for the removal of the article will be specified, or the article will be reinstated".
Hi Amauri,
After literally months of fighting, the article was finally taken down. I also finally talked to somebody a bit more senior in Elsevier, who seems to indicate that it is not just me who is annoyed with the production process. Anyway, it was a pretty amicable discussion... we agreed on many points, and agree to disagree on a number of issues. He did tell me to keep him informed of problems I have in the future, and I got the overall feeling that the senior management might have started to get concerned that there really are many issues, and why people are getting annoyed with all this...
The staff member at Elsevier also pointed me to a talk by the CEO of Elsevier:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSf7PFO3GJQ
Which I found incredibly annoying... around Min. 21 she says: "I met early career researchers, who are grateful for the way we rejected their article and constructively helped them move forward"...
So, it now seems that the constructive criticism from journals is by Elsevier staff, and NOT by independent reviewers! (I had to watch it several times, to really confirm that my ears were not lying to me...)
Miguel Esteban , I had the same issue with our adaptation paper. I spent at least an hour over multiple calls with production staff to be able to edit the proofs and to correct mistakes that should not have been made (a couple of typos have still slipped through!). The staff themselves were very nice, patient and willing to work with me, but the entire episode should not have happened. This is the only thing that Elsevier actually do for the fee they charge us, aside from hosting the paper online behind a pay-wall. I would expect they do a MUCH better job of it!
I hear you. At the moment (between my students and I) we have 3-4 papers in production for various journals. Not one of them has been formatted correctly. In all, figures appear pages (in some cases several pages!!) before they are cited in the text. This is some of the sloppiest formatting I have even seen (in my years as a student in university, then as an engineer, and now as an academic, this is considered the most elementary part of formatting guides... that figures and tables appear after they are mentioned (and certainly not in prior pages). For the money that Elsevier makes, I cannot believe that such things happen. And yes, as you say, when you then try to change things it's an uphill struggle against a deaf system...
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