A couple of days ago a version of this interesting statement dropped into my inbox, from Elsevier. It seems that you can now submit manuscripts in any field of endeavour, scattering your seed, to coin a phrase, in their general direction, and they will choose which of their journals would be the most suitable vehicle.
This fascinates me.
Many years ago when the world was young and I was a mere undergraduate, I was taught that part of the art of crafting a manuscript is to target the content at a particular journal, formatting a paper in tune with the precise requirements of each forum.
Nowadays, when journals are part of large publishing consortia, that model still holds true. Even though we at NPG have a massive portfolio, each journal is editorially independent. A manuscript submitted to Nature and found wanting will be rejected from Nature, and not passed on to some other journal in the stable. The decision on whether or not to submit to another NPG title rests with the author.
In one way, though, the move from Elsevier is a recognition of reality – that scientists read journals as whole entities much less than the particular contents in which they are interested; and that reformatting a paper rejected from one journal to fit the requirements of another journal is a chore that people can do without.
But apart from introducing another level of suspense – will my paper come out in Cell, or will it end up in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Axminster Women’s Institute? – one wonders how the internal procedures of Elsevier will manage the presumed flood of manuscripts submitted by this route. Will their journals be obliged to keep a few places free for manuscripts submitted through this clearing system? Or will preference be given to those researchers who have gambled on the excellence of their research by taking the trouble to target their work at specific journals? Will the format requirements of journals became completely standardized (a development which might, I guess, be very welcome for many)? Will the contents pages of journals make a distinction between manuscripts submitted in these different ways, perhaps by introducing a new category of manuscript? Or will the result be a kind of Elsevier PLoS One (if such a thing does not already exist)?Whatever the answers to these questions, I for one welcome this new development. I tend to shy away from arguments about the merits of open access versus subscription; author-pays versus subscriber-pays, and so on, believing in the freedom of the marketplace, and that a diversity of publishing models is a good thing and reflects not only on the general health of the science publications market, but on the willingness, it seems, of publishers to listen to scientists, whose publication requirements vary enormously between fields, and between one place and another.
But I would say that, wouldn’t I?
What do you think?
I received that email too and thought it didn’t quite look official. I’ve been meaning to look into it and then blog about it, but you beat me to it!
The “from” address (elsevierpublications45@gmail.com) was the first red flag for me, followed by the submission email address (elsevierpublications@live.co.uk). Why would they use these addresses when their domain name is www.elsevier.com?
On the other hand, why would anyone be phishing for manuscripts? It is all very strange.
Just googled the sender’s name. It is a scam, aiming to get hold of email addresses and potentially “article processing fees”. Article here
I wonder if the revisions will be more “pointed”. If you are submitting a paper to a “general editor” who then decides where your paper might fit and then you get it back with “in order for this article to be published in Journal A, the following has to be done….”
I guess I’m too traditional and not liking change since I think I prefer the “submit to a specific journal and write the article based on who the intended audience is”.
then again, I’m not that experienced…
A scam? Bloody hell!!! I hope Elsevier hunts down the perpetrators and cuts their balls off.
This is doubly dastardly because the scientific enterprise is based on trust. Without the trust between editors, researchers and referees, the whole enterprise will come crashing down.
Holy Manuscript Submission Process!
Firstly, this, and I quote ad libitum
“I tend to shy away from arguments about the merits of open access versus subscription; author-pays versus subscriber-pays, and so on, believing in the freedom of the marketplace, and that a diversity of publishing models is a good thing and reflects not only on the general health of the science publications market, but on the willingness, it seems, of publishers to listen to scientists, whose publication requirements vary enormously between fields, and between one place and another.”
is the most sublimely wondrous run-on sentence it has been my pleasure to have to re-read since I last read the works of a certain collaborator of mine.
Secondly, A scam! WTF! They’re geek scamming! That’s so cool! ahem a perniciously evil kind of cool, of course. Nature Neuroscience, I think, recently joined a consortium of neuroscience based journals who offer to pimp your manuscript to other venues if you don’t pass their muster. I think that’s kind of cool.
Thirdly, A scam! Holy way-to-pick-on-the-wrong-publishing-house-there-buddy!
Elsevier are part of Reed-Elsevier aren’t they? The same Reed Group who happen to also be some of the world’s largest arms dealers? (Oh, the irony!). I believe our poor scammer is already trying to hide from the Blackwater Death Squad dispatched earlier today…
Huff-puff (etc.) A game of
the Malaysian TLD for the PDF was the first clue, and the execrable prose the second. I didn’t finish the first paragraph before condemning it to the ‘junk’ mental pile.
Henry, I fear all that French wine has addled your remaining synapses.
Ian – that’s ‘first’, ‘second’ and ‘third’.
cough
Anyway, yes. I like the thought of Elsevier (spit) bringing arms to bear on these low-life pond scum. And that’s insulting some lawyers I know.
Hey, quit picking on poor Henry. Like most editors, he spends all day having to plow through execrable prose – how could he be expected to spot the difference?
snort
that’s another keyboard you owe me, Dr Rohn.
Whilst I hate to do it (anywhere – let alone here), as matters stand and from what we’ve seen/read/discussed thus far, for the first time evah at NN, it’s apparently, a straight ……………
re: that document
My local shop-keeper and now a ‘Legal Beagle’, has suggested that any queries relating to the above decision should be posted here
Hmmmph. My prose is always completely ecrable, but I suppose it doesn’t matter, as I’ve never had a manuscript accepted by Nature. Perhaps the science was execrable….
Fourthly Grant, I had that row ad infinitum with my PhD advisor. It appears twas a Phyrric victory…
Anyway, my prose (usually) glistens like Henry’s
bizarre dwarf fetishesEco*Mo in the morning sun!‘Phyrric’. Mm.
Anyone know of scams trying to take advantage of other publishers? (Just wondering how one might try to scam Nature readers…)
I know I’ve gotten suspicious solicitations for conferences before…
Hey, pholks, Phyrric is better than Phallic, any day.
Yes, I saw that the prose was execrable, but I’ve come to expect that from the kind of droids that send out advertising fliers, so I’m afraid it evoked no suspicions in the honest breast of Gee (an in any case, why couldn’t Elsevier have outsourced some of its ops to Malaysia?).
After all, I remember a press release for a certain journal I shall not name (OK, it was Science) that referred to the third period of the Mesozoic Era as the Crustaceous; and the marketing department of another prominent journal that once addressed a missive to stargazers as astronomists and, on another occasion, as if that weren’t bad enough (and I swear I am not making this up) astrologers.
Which journal was that, I hear you cry? Yes, it was Nature. You just can’t get the staff, you know.
There’s a very waspish response to that, isn’t there?
On the main topic, I agree with Henry that it would be an interesting exercise. I can see it working well for an Open Access publisher like PLoS, who need low rejection rates (over all their journals) to be financially viable. As most manuscripts get accepted in some form somewhere, this might be a close to a good model.
Come clean, Henry. You once had a rather unhappy love affair with an astronomer, and felt the need to get your own back.
Come clean, Henry. You once had a rather unhappy love affair with an astronomer, and felt the need to get your own back.
Curses. You rumbled me.
I do want to make it absolutely clear that my original post was not written in some ironic way, as if I already knew this was a scam, and I was pretending it wasn’t. I was, in all honesty, officer, completely fooled by it, and I took the functional illiteracy as something I have come to expect from certain quarters of our industry (which is in itself rather sad, I know). As for the strange email addresses? Well, there’s this bloke called Henry Barlow (no relation) who every now and then mails out a news-sheet purporting to be from the ‘Friends of the Natural History Museum’. He does this from his home — in Malaysia. The relationship, if any, between Mr Barlow and the Natural History Museum is, I guess, that of a lentil to a whale. Yet Mr Barlow has been doing this for many years. Nothing, therefore, surprises me any more. I have seen it all. Sic Transit, Gloria Mundi. Ars Longa, Vita Brevis, old son.
It’s actually a fascinating concept, for all that it’s a scam.
Would Nature ever consider something like it?
Um, I mean consider doing that with its stable, not scamming everybody…
Would Nature ever consider something like it?
I am but a lowly hindgut bacterium in the vasty organism that is Nature, so I couldn’t say. However, if past experiments are anything to go by, we might. After all, we do have one journal in the portfolio that’s run on the online-only, free-access, author-pays model, and various other business models – different from the magazine-style model found in Nature itself – have been explored, I believe.
and in any case, why couldn’t Elsevier have outsourced some of its ops to Malaysia?
From my experiences in outsourcing copyediting and editorial duties to Asians, I’m afraid they tend to have a much better grasp of English than most Brits.
BioMed Central sort of has a policy of the one you’re hypothesizing. All the BMC journals have the same formatting requirements, and though you submit your paper to one journal, it can be easily passed to any of the others, before or after review.
I’m afraid they tend to have a much better grasp of English than most Brits
That’s because they are still taught properly.