4 ms·
Those numbers can't be right, honestly. Bjoern Brembs has been writing a lot about open access publishing and the costs associated, here he cites a few numbers
by a_bonobo 9y ago
Those numbers can't be right, honestly.
Bjoern Brembs has been writing a lot about open access publishing and the costs associated, here he cites a few numbers:
>There is ample material on how much the publication of a scholarly open-access article costs. SciELO publishes for under US$100 per article. SciELO, however, publishes largely in regions of the world where labor and other associated costs are comparatively low. How much costs do other organizations cite? The Open Library of Humanities is on the record with about US$500, Ubiquity, Hindawi and PeerJ are also on record within the US$100-500 range and Scholastica, RIO Journal, Science Open, F1000Research or arpha mention similar figures. Thus, there are now about ten different companies or organizations which all agree that open access publishing costs about US$100-500 and Independent analysts agree: it is established that the actual costs of publishing a scholarly article are in the low hundreds of US$.
Note that he focuses on open access articles, not closed access + open access articles, but I can't think of a reason why closed access would cost more.
http://bjoern.brembs.net/2017/11/is-a-cost-neutral-transition-to-open-access-realistic/ http://bjoern.brembs.net/2017/11/is-a-cost-neutral-transitio...
- sampo 9y ago> Those numbers can't be right, honestly. Just a very rough calculation: If Nature has a staff of around 150 [1], each paid $100,000 year, 50 issues per year, 20 research articles per issue. This gives 150 times 100,000/(50 times 20) = $15,000 per article. My numbers are probably off in more than one way. [1] https://www.nature.com/nature/about/journal-staff https://www.nature.com/nature/about/journal-staff
- gowld 9y agoThey have a staff of 150 to publish 20 articles each month. That seems quite top-heavy. Remember that authors and reviewers of the articles are not paid.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoPerhaps they have to manually apply Latex templates with a Morse key.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoGood point made by 'IanCal here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16339193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16339193 Nature drops about 95% of submitted papers somewhere in the pipeline, so part of the costs applies to 20x more papers than you see in the end.
- plopilop 9y agoAll right, but then why are most open-access papers under $3000? If an editor can survive with these fees even when the paper will be publicly available, how can Nature need $30,000 for a paper people will pay to read?
- sampo 9y ago> why are most open-access papers under $3000? Ordinary scientific journals don't have reviewers in paid staff. An editor sends an article (without reading it) to 2-4 non-paid reviewers, and makes the publish / don't publish decision based on the reviews. Also the editor is not paid, either.
- revelation 9y agoNot Nature, reviewers.
- dagw 9y agoNature has in house staff editors and reviewers that vet papers before sending them out to per-review. Most papers sent to Nature get rejected long before the per-review process starts.
- robotresearcher 9y agoBut Nature sells subscriptions and advertising...
- Finnucane 9y agoPublishing isn't that generous, in general, salary-wise. Only the folks at the top are getting that kind of money. Also, vetting submissions should be a relatively small part of your time. When you're reading a lot of submissions, you learn how to weed out the weak fairly quickly.