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The biggest thing I object to in this article is the following quote from Michael Eisen (one of the PLOS founders): "The costs are largely the same between ope
by dougmccune 11y ago
The biggest thing I object to in this article is the following quote from Michael Eisen (one of the PLOS founders):
"The costs are largely the same between open-access journals and non-open-access journals," said Michael Eisen, a co-founder of the open-access project PLOS. "We’re doing essentially the same thing as traditional publishers."
The type of peer review that megajournals (like PLOS One) do is categorically different than a lot of traditional journals. A megajournal will typically review for scientific soundness only. If the methodology is sound then the paper should be accepted regardless of whether it breaks new ground in the field or is seen as important.
This is not the same kind of peer review that you will find when submitting to Nature, where they are trying to curate for importance in addition to vet for soundness. I won't argue one way or the other about whether one type of peer review is better than the other, there are arguments to be made on all sides. But they are not the same, and they do not cost the same amount.
Methodological peer review is cheaper. That's why the megajournals like PLOS One, et al do it that way (well, it's one of the reasons, the other main one being a philosophical reason). You could not run the big OA operations at their price points with traditional peer review. Their revenue is purely driven by acceptance volume, and so therefore anything that slows down peer review or rejects too many papers has a serious material impact on revenue. It's a balancing act between ensuring you don't accept quack science accidentally but don't reject too much than you have to.
- dumbmatter 11y agoPLOS ONE is only one of many PLOS journals. The others do also review for importance. This is probably why PLOS ONE is cheaper than their other journals: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/publication-fees http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/publication-fees So Eisen is correct, it's the same thing. A non-open access publisher could make a non-open access equivalent of PLOS ONE if they wanted to (and maybe somebody has). It's not a question of open access.
- dougmccune 11y agoI agree that OA vs non OA isn't the argument, and that there are examples of OA journals with a particular focus on "impact", like eLife. My point is really about megajournal-style peer review vs traditional peer review. But in the press these two things get conflated, and when referencing how cheap publishing should be people always quote the lower price of megajournal APCs and not the higher price of traditionally peer reviewed journal APCs. But it is worth noting that a move to APCs dramatically changes the incentive structure for a publisher, and there are built-in mechanisms in such a system to produce new strange dynamics that we haven't really seen much of before (ie the tension between needing to accept a certain volume to stay in business vs try to keep the reputation of the journal high).
- capnrefsmmat 11y agoI don't think the cost difference comes from the type of review, or at least not entirely. Consider that PLOS ONE, because it doesn't review for importance, has a much higher acceptance rate. Only accepted papers pay processing charges, so each accepted article has to subsidize the review and rejection of all the rejected papers. In PLOS Biology or PLOS Medicine, with a low acceptance rate, each accepted article has to subsidize review of numerous other articles, driving the cost per published article way up.
- dougmccune 11y agoI was arguing the cost of APC can only be low in the megajournal review format precisely because of the points you mentioned. So I think we agree, the type of peer review drives the acceptance rate, so with a higher acceptance rate you can charge a lower per-article APC.