5 ms·

Are you, as a taxpayer, willing to pay (your share of) the extra $1000 or so per paper that it would take?

by ikeboy 11y ago

east2west 11y ago
Given academic salary and researcher publication rate, I am confident that it is far less than $1000 you pulled out of air. How much did your tax go up when NIH mandated free publication, after a 2-years period?
- ikeboy 11y ago
  FTA: >But that financial model requires authors to pay a processing charge that can run anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 per article so the publisher can recoup its costs. They may have pulled it out of thin air (although I've seen similar numbers elsewhere, this doesn't seem to be in dispute).
- anbende 11y ago
  https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/ https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/ Other open access journals are similar. Publication rates are high, because the vast majority of published research is NOT open access.
matwood 11y ago
$1000 for what? The research and paper writing was already funded by the tax payer. Peer review is done for free by other researchers today. Journals provide very little value for the money they extort for paper access.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  FTA: >But that financial model requires authors to pay a processing charge that can run anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 per article so the publisher can recoup its costs. Edit: also, I don't expect margins of 30% from companies producing very low value. Do you really think that if they'd lower their margin to 0, with prices of around 30% less, everyone would stop complaining?
  - mc808 11y ago
    Some portion of the other 70% is going toward legal fees to protect "their" intellectual property, developing new ways to monetize the windfall, lobbying to obstruct copyright reform, running lower-margin businesses unrelated to academic publishing, and so on.
    - jjoonathan 11y ago
      40% profit margins now, not 30%, but I completely agree: it's critical to keep an eye on what the company is actually doing rather than sweeping it under the skirt of the economic term "value," which never ceases to amaze in its ability to diverge from the more common definition of the word.
    - mirimir 11y ago
      Yes, I suspect creative accounting.
  - jkyle 11y ago
    > so the publisher can recoup its costs. Given that peers review a paper for free and it costs fractions of a penny to host a pdf, why should we care about the publishers? What value do they ultimately bring to the table? We should be rethinking how this is done entirely. This is off the cuff, but... Perhaps researchers applying for public funding should be required to register as peers. Each researcher submits their publication to a public service like data.gov (maybe research.gov?). Peers are automatically assigned according to area of expertise. The peering process proceeds much like it does today. On completion of review and approval, the paper and any materials needed to reproduce the research is made public and available to anyone. The cost for all of that would be relatively trivial. Also, many of those journal fees are paid for with tax dollars to begin with. An expense that would no longer be necessary.
  - matwood 11y ago
    Please tell me what someone like Elsevier does then? Basically they have a monopoly on various prestigious journal names and extract rent from both sides. Finally, researchers are taking a stand and slowly moving towards open journals. See here: http://openaccess.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2015/05/20/elsevier-ever-more-evil/ http://openaccess.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2015/05/20/elsevier-ev...
return0 11y ago
Universities already pay comparable subscription fees
- ikeboy 11y ago
  If most papers can be accessed for free, why would universities still pay?
  - return0 11y ago
    They cant be accessed legally. Most universities are too invested in the current system to stop paying. That's why publishers bundle their journals in extremely expensive packages they sell to libraries.
  - mirimir 11y ago
    Harvard is starting to complain. Harvard.
tlarkworthy 11y ago
Even if it did cost $1000, which it doesn't. Tax pays the salaries and materials to do the research, which is more like 10k to 100k, an additional 1k overhead is a drop in the ocean.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  FTA: >But that financial model requires authors to pay a processing charge that can run anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 per article so the publisher can recoup its costs.
- anbende 11y ago
  It's actually more than $1000. PLOS ONE starts at $1350 and tops out over $2000. And for a lab that's publishing a lot, it can add up. Some labs are putting out 10+ pubs a year. And depending on the field, that $10-20k can be a big deal.
mirimir 11y ago
Maybe public funders ought to claim copyright on any work produced, and require open access publication.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  That's a perfectly fine policy, if they want to implement it. Just note that it will increase the cost of every paper, because they now need to pay for open access.
  - mirimir 11y ago
    Publication costs are minuscule relative to research costs. Rounding error. And furthermore, they're minuscule compared to costs of journal access. Edit: I'm wrong on the second point. They're actually comparable. See comment below.
    - ikeboy 11y ago
      According to the article, they're 70% of publishers' revenue (straightforward extrapolation from 30% margin). I can't think of any sense in which that's minuscule. Research costs may be correct. Do you know where I can find data on average funding for published studies? Or how many government funded studies were published at what budget?
      - mirimir 11y ago
        Sorry, I was wrong about publication cost vs the cost of published articles. They're comparable. Let's say that I'm writing a paper. Maybe the underlying research cost $100K. So paying $3K for publication isn't much. And let's say that I need to review 100 papers for background, discussion, etc. At $30 each, that's also $3K. Even less, for subscription-based access. So maybe it's a wash for grant-funded academics who publish in journals that charge $3K to publish and $30 per copy. But it certainly isn't a wash for academics with marginal funding, not-for-profits, etc, who publish at much lower cost.
ycmbntrthrwaway 11y ago
As a taxpayer, you already pay state universities to access those papers. If every paper was published as open-access, I am sure the price of open-access could be reduced.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  >If every paper was published as open-access, I am sure the price of open-access could be reduced. Do you have any evidence of such economies of scale in existing publishers? As the article says, their margins are around 30%. That means the maximum they could reduce the price without losing money (with simplifying assumptions) is in the 30% range. If you have a way to be significantly more efficient than the status quo, go ahead, I'm sure everyone will be thrilled. >As a taxpayer, you already pay state universities to access those papers. That's a fair point. Is the government paying more in access fees than they're saving by not using open access journals?
  - skybrian 11y ago
    You can't take the costs provided by journals as a minimum because they are likely providing services that are no longer necessary or could be made much more efficient. Here's an example of how to do it on the cheap: "Scholastica charges us $10 per submission. We have a grant to cover this and our other costs, which are very low. Our total costs probably average about $30 per accepted article. Therefore, there are no charges for authors, and obviously there are no charges for readers either. A typical article processing charge for one article published in a traditional journal would keep us going for around 50 published articles." https://discrete-analysis.scholasticahq.com/post/40-welcome-to-discrete-analysis https://discrete-analysis.scholasticahq.com/post/40-welcome-...
    - ikeboy 11y ago
      If authors find that such journals fulfil their needs, then the traditional publishers will have been outcompeted. But make that case directly; don't yell at traditional publishers for being expensive, when they also provide far more service. If you don't think it's needed, don't use it.
qq66 11y ago
Yes, as a taxpayer, I am 100% ok with that. The $1000 is a small fraction of the total cost, and I'd be paying close to or more than that amount for all the journal subscriptions that a federally funded research institution carries anyways. The benefit being, that the work that I am paying for is accessible to everyone instead of just the elite institutions.
- swsieber 11y ago
  Bingo. Putting the $1000 in context of the total cost makes it much more palatable.
return0 11y ago
They should be. It's better to pay for open access than lock science behind paywalls. There is vast knowledge that could be mined by machines, indexed by AIs , processed for finding novel patterns, but it's impossible when it's all locked behind paywalls. Want to buy "prestige" ? pay for it. That's more fair than "give us exclusive rights to your science for free or you don't get prestige".
4bpp 11y ago
In CS, conferences (which organise peer review and pretty much all publish open-access proceedings) hardly ever charge more than something like $200 for attendance, and this also pays for the conference venue, logistics and a slush fund of financial support for student attendees. Why would the peer review and publication part cost more in other fields? It seems much more likely that PLOS simply charges the "$1000 or so" because they can, and it's easy enough to piggyback on the traditional publisher narrative that they are actually providing this amount of added value.
- capnrefsmmat 11y ago
  PLOS is a non-profit, and employs full-time professional editors. People forget the weird workflow in any journal that does biomedical work (including most of the PLOS family): manuscripts are submitted as Word files, then converted to XML and reformatted by a semi-automated process. There's manual labor involved to format the references and cross-references, mark up tables and figures, and proofread the HTML, PDF, and XML versions. The XML is then submitted to PubMed Central for archival storage. There's a lot of manual labor involved in the profess. You can't just hand-wave away and say "peer review is provided for free" and assume the rest of the process is free.
  - return0 11y ago
    For all that matters , a badly formatted "times 12" word document is just as fine as a "polished" research article. This is science we are talking about, it's not an infomercial. Besides, all journals have strict and long guidelines that all presumbissions follow. I just don't buy the manual labor argument.
    - Fomite 11y ago
      I've read enough journal articles that I've come to appreciate proper formatting, rather than "Time New Roman 12" Word documents or "Generic LaTeX Template #17"
      - 11y ago

Are you, as a taxpayer, willing to pay (your share of) the extra $1000 or so per paper that it would take?

by ikeboy 11y ago

Are you, as a taxpayer, willing to pay (your share of) the extra $1000 or so per paper that it would take?

Given academic salary and researcher publication rate, I am confident that it is far less than $1000 you pulled out of air. How much did your tax go up when NIH mandated free publication, after a 2-years period?

ikeboy 11y ago
FTA: >But that financial model requires authors to pay a processing charge that can run anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 per article so the publisher can recoup its costs. They may have pulled it out of thin air (although I've seen similar numbers elsewhere, this doesn't seem to be in dispute).
anbende 11y ago
https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/ https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/ Other open access journals are similar. Publication rates are high, because the vast majority of published research is NOT open access.

matwood 11y ago

$1000 for what? The research and paper writing was already funded by the tax payer. Peer review is done for free by other researchers today. Journals provide very little value for the money they extort for paper access.

ikeboy 11y ago
FTA: >But that financial model requires authors to pay a processing charge that can run anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 per article so the publisher can recoup its costs. Edit: also, I don't expect margins of 30% from companies producing very low value. Do you really think that if they'd lower their margin to 0, with prices of around 30% less, everyone would stop complaining?
- mc808 11y ago
  Some portion of the other 70% is going toward legal fees to protect "their" intellectual property, developing new ways to monetize the windfall, lobbying to obstruct copyright reform, running lower-margin businesses unrelated to academic publishing, and so on.
  - jjoonathan 11y ago
    40% profit margins now, not 30%, but I completely agree: it's critical to keep an eye on what the company is actually doing rather than sweeping it under the skirt of the economic term "value," which never ceases to amaze in its ability to diverge from the more common definition of the word.
  - mirimir 11y ago
    Yes, I suspect creative accounting.
- jkyle 11y ago
  > so the publisher can recoup its costs. Given that peers review a paper for free and it costs fractions of a penny to host a pdf, why should we care about the publishers? What value do they ultimately bring to the table? We should be rethinking how this is done entirely. This is off the cuff, but... Perhaps researchers applying for public funding should be required to register as peers. Each researcher submits their publication to a public service like data.gov (maybe research.gov?). Peers are automatically assigned according to area of expertise. The peering process proceeds much like it does today. On completion of review and approval, the paper and any materials needed to reproduce the research is made public and available to anyone. The cost for all of that would be relatively trivial. Also, many of those journal fees are paid for with tax dollars to begin with. An expense that would no longer be necessary.
- matwood 11y ago
  Please tell me what someone like Elsevier does then? Basically they have a monopoly on various prestigious journal names and extract rent from both sides. Finally, researchers are taking a stand and slowly moving towards open journals. See here: http://openaccess.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2015/05/20/elsevier-ever-more-evil/ http://openaccess.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2015/05/20/elsevier-ev...

return0 11y ago

Universities already pay comparable subscription fees

ikeboy 11y ago
If most papers can be accessed for free, why would universities still pay?
- return0 11y ago
  They cant be accessed legally. Most universities are too invested in the current system to stop paying. That's why publishers bundle their journals in extremely expensive packages they sell to libraries.
- mirimir 11y ago
  Harvard is starting to complain. Harvard.

tlarkworthy 11y ago

Even if it did cost $1000, which it doesn't. Tax pays the salaries and materials to do the research, which is more like 10k to 100k, an additional 1k overhead is a drop in the ocean.

ikeboy 11y ago
FTA: >But that financial model requires authors to pay a processing charge that can run anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 per article so the publisher can recoup its costs.
anbende 11y ago
It's actually more than $1000. PLOS ONE starts at $1350 and tops out over $2000. And for a lab that's publishing a lot, it can add up. Some labs are putting out 10+ pubs a year. And depending on the field, that $10-20k can be a big deal.

mirimir 11y ago

Maybe public funders ought to claim copyright on any work produced, and require open access publication.

ikeboy 11y ago
That's a perfectly fine policy, if they want to implement it. Just note that it will increase the cost of every paper, because they now need to pay for open access.
- mirimir 11y ago
  Publication costs are minuscule relative to research costs. Rounding error. And furthermore, they're minuscule compared to costs of journal access. Edit: I'm wrong on the second point. They're actually comparable. See comment below.
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    According to the article, they're 70% of publishers' revenue (straightforward extrapolation from 30% margin). I can't think of any sense in which that's minuscule. Research costs may be correct. Do you know where I can find data on average funding for published studies? Or how many government funded studies were published at what budget?
    - mirimir 11y ago
      Sorry, I was wrong about publication cost vs the cost of published articles. They're comparable. Let's say that I'm writing a paper. Maybe the underlying research cost $100K. So paying $3K for publication isn't much. And let's say that I need to review 100 papers for background, discussion, etc. At $30 each, that's also $3K. Even less, for subscription-based access. So maybe it's a wash for grant-funded academics who publish in journals that charge $3K to publish and $30 per copy. But it certainly isn't a wash for academics with marginal funding, not-for-profits, etc, who publish at much lower cost.

ycmbntrthrwaway 11y ago

As a taxpayer, you already pay state universities to access those papers. If every paper was published as open-access, I am sure the price of open-access could be reduced.

ikeboy 11y ago
>If every paper was published as open-access, I am sure the price of open-access could be reduced. Do you have any evidence of such economies of scale in existing publishers? As the article says, their margins are around 30%. That means the maximum they could reduce the price without losing money (with simplifying assumptions) is in the 30% range. If you have a way to be significantly more efficient than the status quo, go ahead, I'm sure everyone will be thrilled. >As a taxpayer, you already pay state universities to access those papers. That's a fair point. Is the government paying more in access fees than they're saving by not using open access journals?
- skybrian 11y ago
  You can't take the costs provided by journals as a minimum because they are likely providing services that are no longer necessary or could be made much more efficient. Here's an example of how to do it on the cheap: "Scholastica charges us $10 per submission. We have a grant to cover this and our other costs, which are very low. Our total costs probably average about $30 per accepted article. Therefore, there are no charges for authors, and obviously there are no charges for readers either. A typical article processing charge for one article published in a traditional journal would keep us going for around 50 published articles." https://discrete-analysis.scholasticahq.com/post/40-welcome-to-discrete-analysis https://discrete-analysis.scholasticahq.com/post/40-welcome-...
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    If authors find that such journals fulfil their needs, then the traditional publishers will have been outcompeted. But make that case directly; don't yell at traditional publishers for being expensive, when they also provide far more service. If you don't think it's needed, don't use it.

qq66 11y ago

Yes, as a taxpayer, I am 100% ok with that. The $1000 is a small fraction of the total cost, and I'd be paying close to or more than that amount for all the journal subscriptions that a federally funded research institution carries anyways. The benefit being, that the work that I am paying for is accessible to everyone instead of just the elite institutions.

swsieber 11y ago
Bingo. Putting the $1000 in context of the total cost makes it much more palatable.

return0 11y ago

They should be. It's better to pay for open access than lock science behind paywalls. There is vast knowledge that could be mined by machines, indexed by AIs , processed for finding novel patterns, but it's impossible when it's all locked behind paywalls. Want to buy "prestige" ? pay for it. That's more fair than "give us exclusive rights to your science for free or you don't get prestige".

4bpp 11y ago

In CS, conferences (which organise peer review and pretty much all publish open-access proceedings) hardly ever charge more than something like $200 for attendance, and this also pays for the conference venue, logistics and a slush fund of financial support for student attendees. Why would the peer review and publication part cost more in other fields? It seems much more likely that PLOS simply charges the "$1000 or so" because they can, and it's easy enough to piggyback on the traditional publisher narrative that they are actually providing this amount of added value.

capnrefsmmat 11y ago
PLOS is a non-profit, and employs full-time professional editors. People forget the weird workflow in any journal that does biomedical work (including most of the PLOS family): manuscripts are submitted as Word files, then converted to XML and reformatted by a semi-automated process. There's manual labor involved to format the references and cross-references, mark up tables and figures, and proofread the HTML, PDF, and XML versions. The XML is then submitted to PubMed Central for archival storage. There's a lot of manual labor involved in the profess. You can't just hand-wave away and say "peer review is provided for free" and assume the rest of the process is free.
- return0 11y ago
  For all that matters , a badly formatted "times 12" word document is just as fine as a "polished" research article. This is science we are talking about, it's not an infomercial. Besides, all journals have strict and long guidelines that all presumbissions follow. I just don't buy the manual labor argument.
  - Fomite 11y ago
    I've read enough journal articles that I've come to appreciate proper formatting, rather than "Time New Roman 12" Word documents or "Generic LaTeX Template #17"
    - 11y ago