5 ms·

Have you ever published a paper in an academic venue? What publishers offered was delivering paper versions of articles to your local research library. Now the

by p4bl0 11y ago

Have you ever published a paper in an academic venue? What publishers offered was delivering paper versions of articles to your local research library. Now they only host PDFs online. Apart from that their added-value work is negligible. The biggest improvement I've seen by a publisher of one of my papers was changing "Sec." to "Sect." when I was referencing section, and putting page number in blue rather than black (true story). Anyway nowadays when a paper is accessible directly from a public repository, it is that version which will be used most often, and it includes literally zero work from the publisher. All the real work is done by the authors, and by the reviewers, who are other researchers doing their normal job (i.e., they're not paid specifically to review papers, and more importantly not paid by publishers). The only thing that publishers provide is reputation/prestige, and that's only because of inertia, and it's difficult to change because they own the titles of journals they publish. That's one of the numerous reasons why bibliometrics is an entirely bad idea and is counter-productive for science. Also, not all open access journal are charging author, that is a lie installed by publishers lobbying (and this is how they actually spend money). You can research "diamond open access" or "overlay journal" for some examples of economical models where journal are high quality, open access and free to submit to.

ikeboy 11y ago
>Also, not all open access journal are charging author, that is a lie installed by publishers lobbying (and this is how they actually spend money). You can research "diamond open access" or "overlay journal" for some examples of economical models where journal are high quality, open access and free to submit to. Those all seem to be sponsored. That won't scale to every paper unless some large organization funds it. The biggest open access journals all charge. > it includes literally zero work from the publisher. As long as their expenses are >60% of revenue, I find this hard to believe. If you think they're wasteful, you can run your own and try to spend less, but denying their costs won't convince me. >The only thing that publishers provide is reputation/prestige Like I said, this model doesn't fit with the numbers we have about their margins. I'd at least expect over 50% profit margin if they were merely extracting rent, and probably closer to 90%.
- p4bl0 11y ago
  > Those all seem to be sponsored. Even if that is true I would rather see public money sponsoring real open access journals than spend paying author fees and subscription to closed access and hybrid journals. > As long as their expenses are >60% of revenue, What I truly question is the nature of these expenses. From my point of view inside academia in the field of computer science, and knowing a lot of people in other fields of academia, the actual work put by publishers in the final product that is a published scientific paper is close to zero (except for those fields where there is layout work because they do not use readymade LaTeX documentclasses).
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    >Even if that is true I would rather see public money sponsoring real open access journals than spend paying author fees and subscription to closed access and hybrid journals. That's a legitimate argument. Shifting around who pays what may very well result in positive externalities. But merely complaining about publisher profits while ignoring their costs doesn't work.
- monocasa 11y ago
  Where are you digging up the 20% to 40% profit margin?
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676 http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie...
- ufo 11y ago
  Its hard to answer your argument directly because publishers like Elsevier never publish transparent accounting numbers. For all we know, their costs could mostly be "Hollywood Accounting". (not to mention, the profit they do report is already through the roof). It all does strike me as obviously inefficient though. In my day to day research as a grad student I almost never benefit from work the publishers did. I don't even use them to download my papers because the paywalls are so annoying that I usually go directly to the author's home page (google scholar will even find these for you). Every half-decent CS researcher makes their work available on their personal website, at no cost, In the end, what I am trying to say is that I don't trust Elsevier's reported expenses and that even if I did I think a huge chunk of them would be something that could be drastically reduced with a bit of technology.

by p4bl0 11y ago

ikeboy 11y ago

>Also, not all open access journal are charging author, that is a lie installed by publishers lobbying (and this is how they actually spend money). You can research "diamond open access" or "overlay journal" for some examples of economical models where journal are high quality, open access and free to submit to. Those all seem to be sponsored. That won't scale to every paper unless some large organization funds it. The biggest open access journals all charge. > it includes literally zero work from the publisher. As long as their expenses are >60% of revenue, I find this hard to believe. If you think they're wasteful, you can run your own and try to spend less, but denying their costs won't convince me. >The only thing that publishers provide is reputation/prestige Like I said, this model doesn't fit with the numbers we have about their margins. I'd at least expect over 50% profit margin if they were merely extracting rent, and probably closer to 90%.

p4bl0 11y ago
> Those all seem to be sponsored. Even if that is true I would rather see public money sponsoring real open access journals than spend paying author fees and subscription to closed access and hybrid journals. > As long as their expenses are >60% of revenue, What I truly question is the nature of these expenses. From my point of view inside academia in the field of computer science, and knowing a lot of people in other fields of academia, the actual work put by publishers in the final product that is a published scientific paper is close to zero (except for those fields where there is layout work because they do not use readymade LaTeX documentclasses).
- ikeboy 11y ago
  >Even if that is true I would rather see public money sponsoring real open access journals than spend paying author fees and subscription to closed access and hybrid journals. That's a legitimate argument. Shifting around who pays what may very well result in positive externalities. But merely complaining about publisher profits while ignoring their costs doesn't work.
monocasa 11y ago
Where are you digging up the 20% to 40% profit margin?
- ikeboy 11y ago
  http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676 http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie...
ufo 11y ago
Its hard to answer your argument directly because publishers like Elsevier never publish transparent accounting numbers. For all we know, their costs could mostly be "Hollywood Accounting". (not to mention, the profit they do report is already through the roof). It all does strike me as obviously inefficient though. In my day to day research as a grad student I almost never benefit from work the publishers did. I don't even use them to download my papers because the paywalls are so annoying that I usually go directly to the author's home page (google scholar will even find these for you). Every half-decent CS researcher makes their work available on their personal website, at no cost, In the end, what I am trying to say is that I don't trust Elsevier's reported expenses and that even if I did I think a huge chunk of them would be something that could be drastically reduced with a bit of technology.