3 ms·

In most fields, referees are volunteers, and the editors who coordinate them are volunteers or get some trivially tiny recompensation. Distribution costs of a

by xamuel 9y ago

In most fields, referees are volunteers, and the editors who coordinate them are volunteers or get some trivially tiny recompensation. Distribution costs of a paper should be about as high as those of a blog post.

a_bonobo 9y ago
There's more to running a journal than that - you have formatting editors who make the PDF look good and give it a thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never found - missing or switched references, for example). The actual per-paper costs seem to be a few hundred dollars, as written in this article: 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... Profit margins are amazing though, it really pays to get into publishing. Elsevier (not all open access, and rather dodgy to many) is one of the most profitable businesses in the world: https://medium.com/@jasonschmitt/can-t-disrupt-this-elsevier-and-the-25-2-billion-dollar-a-year-academic-publishing-business-aa3b9618d40a https://medium.com/@jasonschmitt/can-t-disrupt-this-elsevier...
- Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
  make the PDF look good Yeah, as in forcing you to submit in an artificially crappy template with horrible double spacing (which is awful as a reviewer) to then apply their standard template and voilà! The paper looks good. give it a thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never found - missing or switched references, for example) They do that (with varying quality) but it's quite aggravating that they charge thousands of dollars mostly for that, while peer review, which is much harder, is done for free.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- snakeanus 9y ago
  https://cr.yp.to/bib/20050504-copyediting.txt https://cr.yp.to/bib/20050504-copyediting.txt
- a3_nm 9y ago
  > you have formatting editors who make the PDF look good and give it a thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never found - missing or switched references, for example). This may depend on the field, but in CS I have never seen this. There is essentially no change made by the publisher to papers, and when they do make changes, more often than not it is to introduce errors. In any case, the huge profit margins of publishers indicate that the cost of this dubious service is much lower than the charge. But the most important point is this: doing minor copyediting shouldn't be grounds to own the journal and own copyright on the published articles. The journals should be owned by scientists, or by a nonprofit scientific society. Even assuming that research needs to pay for copyediting services, these should be contractors of the nonprofit (with competition among them), not owners of the journal and articles.
  - capnrefsmmat 9y ago
    In the biomedical fields, many articles have to be deposited on PubMed Central, which requires them to be reformatted in their archival JATS XML format. Since articles are typically written in Word in those fields, this process involves a lot of manual tagging of references and figures and such, only partially aided by scripts. The process must incur a fairly hefty cost in maintaining warehouses full of people to do the tagging. In principle it's great that articles are uniformly in XML -- you could easily write reader software for tablets or phones, data-mine the text, extract references, whatever -- but I haven't seen much software taking advantage of it.
    - lsh 9y ago
      Typically there is a "script", not the code kind, that is followed for every dodgy Word document received, and following the script is outsourced. The production team is in charge of coordination with the outsourced team and final proofing of the XML and all the vagaries of pre publication that comes from 90s era processes and software and interactions with other ancient systems. However! Once published and out the door, the shiny XML is available for scraping and transformation, and, if OA, there is no reason the XML can't be made public: https://github.com/elifesciences/elife-article-xml https://github.com/elifesciences/elife-article-xml An excellent bit of software that takes advantage of it is Lens: https://github.com/elifesciences/lens https://github.com/elifesciences/lens
leemailll 9y ago
You must be joking. There is a lot in the line for an academic journal and its website. First one need an submission and review system, after a paper accepted there is proofreading and art department, and editors also need to decide whether to invite someone write a commentary on which paper, and subsequent comment and response section if a paper raise questions/interest, then billing department and production for the physical magazines who also handle the preprints(EDIT: should be "reprints"). Finally the website platform which keeps all those digital versions of current and previous publications. I am just talking about this from an end user point of view, and I believe there are other things behind curtain we are not familiar such as deciding the future directions of a journal, writing press release, etc. Also journals do promote themselves, which inevitable incur costs.

by xamuel 9y ago

a_bonobo 9y ago

There's more to running a journal than that - you have formatting editors who make the PDF look good and give it a thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never found - missing or switched references, for example). The actual per-paper costs seem to be a few hundred dollars, as written in this article: 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... Profit margins are amazing though, it really pays to get into publishing. Elsevier (not all open access, and rather dodgy to many) is one of the most profitable businesses in the world: https://medium.com/@jasonschmitt/can-t-disrupt-this-elsevier-and-the-25-2-billion-dollar-a-year-academic-publishing-business-aa3b9618d40a https://medium.com/@jasonschmitt/can-t-disrupt-this-elsevier...

Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
make the PDF look good Yeah, as in forcing you to submit in an artificially crappy template with horrible double spacing (which is awful as a reviewer) to then apply their standard template and voilà! The paper looks good. give it a thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never found - missing or switched references, for example) They do that (with varying quality) but it's quite aggravating that they charge thousands of dollars mostly for that, while peer review, which is much harder, is done for free.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
snakeanus 9y ago
https://cr.yp.to/bib/20050504-copyediting.txt https://cr.yp.to/bib/20050504-copyediting.txt
a3_nm 9y ago
> you have formatting editors who make the PDF look good and give it a thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never found - missing or switched references, for example). This may depend on the field, but in CS I have never seen this. There is essentially no change made by the publisher to papers, and when they do make changes, more often than not it is to introduce errors. In any case, the huge profit margins of publishers indicate that the cost of this dubious service is much lower than the charge. But the most important point is this: doing minor copyediting shouldn't be grounds to own the journal and own copyright on the published articles. The journals should be owned by scientists, or by a nonprofit scientific society. Even assuming that research needs to pay for copyediting services, these should be contractors of the nonprofit (with competition among them), not owners of the journal and articles.
- capnrefsmmat 9y ago
  In the biomedical fields, many articles have to be deposited on PubMed Central, which requires them to be reformatted in their archival JATS XML format. Since articles are typically written in Word in those fields, this process involves a lot of manual tagging of references and figures and such, only partially aided by scripts. The process must incur a fairly hefty cost in maintaining warehouses full of people to do the tagging. In principle it's great that articles are uniformly in XML -- you could easily write reader software for tablets or phones, data-mine the text, extract references, whatever -- but I haven't seen much software taking advantage of it.
  - lsh 9y ago
    Typically there is a "script", not the code kind, that is followed for every dodgy Word document received, and following the script is outsourced. The production team is in charge of coordination with the outsourced team and final proofing of the XML and all the vagaries of pre publication that comes from 90s era processes and software and interactions with other ancient systems. However! Once published and out the door, the shiny XML is available for scraping and transformation, and, if OA, there is no reason the XML can't be made public: https://github.com/elifesciences/elife-article-xml https://github.com/elifesciences/elife-article-xml An excellent bit of software that takes advantage of it is Lens: https://github.com/elifesciences/lens https://github.com/elifesciences/lens

leemailll 9y ago

You must be joking. There is a lot in the line for an academic journal and its website. First one need an submission and review system, after a paper accepted there is proofreading and art department, and editors also need to decide whether to invite someone write a commentary on which paper, and subsequent comment and response section if a paper raise questions/interest, then billing department and production for the physical magazines who also handle the preprints(EDIT: should be "reprints"). Finally the website platform which keeps all those digital versions of current and previous publications. I am just talking about this from an end user point of view, and I believe there are other things behind curtain we are not familiar such as deciding the future directions of a journal, writing press release, etc. Also journals do promote themselves, which inevitable incur costs.