12 ms·
That $35 that scientific journals charge goes 100% to publisher, 0% to authors
- zokier 8y agoPreaching to the choir and racking up some cheap karma, are we?
- toomuchtodo 8y agoAn interesting point is that if you email the author, they can send you their paper for free legally. Couldn’t a platform be created (essentially an email autoresponder) where you send a formatted request to the author, and the platform processes the request and sends the paper to you on behalf of the author?
- abnry 8y agoSounds like a gap in the market.
- riscy 8y agoIsn’t that just HTTP?
- stan_rogers 8y agoThat would count as publication.
- fuzzyset 8y agoThat's basically https://arxiv.org/ https://arxiv.org/. The pre-print copyright (i.e. before editor/review comments) still belongs to the author so they can post it.
- gervase 8y agoThe IEEE recently revised their copyright assignment terms to explicitly permit authors to upload the POST-review publication to Arxiv, along with a few other outlets.[0] [0]: https://ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/publish-with-ieee/author-education-resources/guidelines-and-policies/policy-posting-your-article/ https://ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/publish-with-ieee/author-e...
- toomuchtodo 8y agoWould you know if there’s an effort to backfill Arxiv with post review publications (superseding the previously published drafts)?
- cgdcraig 8y agoNot an issue if you have low abandonment of subscribers but an issue if everyone exchanges papers that way. You get a lot of value out of being able to search all the journals in one place. Also what happens if the author is dead or has dropped off the face of the planet.
- a_bonobo 8y agoI think you are thinking of the Open Access Button: https://openaccessbutton.org/ https://openaccessbutton.org/
- jdietrich 8y agohttps://www.researchgate.net/ https://www.researchgate.net/ But really, anyone with half a brain is going to try sci-hub first.
- hprotagonist 8y agoNo scientific journal of any repute pays its authors. Or reviewers. Authors (more precisely, the grants we get to do our research in academia, or our employers in industry) pay the journal for the privilege of publishing there, and offer our services as reviewers for brownie points.
- ghaff 8y agoTBH though, for the most part, authors of tech books don't really make meaningful money either. Writing is something you do for some combination of personal satisfaction, extension to day job, or personal brand building. And tech reviewers of those books (and reviewers of proposals) may be paid, but it isn't much. None of this should be taken to suggest that there aren't issues with the scientific journal model but lack of author payments is probably not one of them.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fwip 8y agoYou might even argue that helps protect the integrity of the journals. If journals paid authors for published papers, there would be a greater incentive for an author to tweak/falsify data to make the conclusions stronger, the paper more exciting, and more attractive to publishers.
- hprotagonist 8y agowe have this perverse incentive, but it’s located at a different place in the chain: the grant agencies.
- cozzyd 8y agoFortunately everyone in my field puts our papers on arxiv anyway. Sure, the journal will format it differently and maybe catch some grammar mistakes, but the content will be the same.
- supernova87a 8y agoI agree it's become a problem and place for companies to milk the system. What is the alternative? There will be costs. How should it be paid for, which both maintains quality and is fair to authors?
- devoply 8y agoCosts are negligible. Plenty of free journals around.
- jdietrich 8y agoThere are lots of different ways to pay for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access
- mav3rick 8y agoMany private companies sponsor research and conferences. They'd be happy to pay and universities can self organize to do blind reviews.
- throwawaymath 8y agoIs it strictly true that authors are allowed to send you their papers if you email them? Are they allowed to send the published version, or must they send a preprint? If they can send you the published version, why can't they host it somewhere? And if they can only send the preprint version, why not put it up on arXiv anyway? I don't mean to cast doubt on the tweet's purpose (I agree with it), and for what it's worth I've emailed other researchers for paper access as well. I would just like to see some proper legal analysis behind these questions, because I see the same point repeated frequently by scientists who are not lawyers. It would be pretty cool if there were a platform that automated your request to get a paper from an author. I don't know how that would be plausible without hosting the papers though, and I imagine that would get into trouble.
- ms013 8y agoYes. We can send papers to whomever we want. At one point, when you published a paper in a journal you’d get a stack of printed copies of your paper in the mail from the publisher that you were free to share with anyone. I think I have a few of those stacks around from papers I published 20 years or so ago. Even if you technically aren’t allowed to share, that has NEVER stopped someone from sharing in my career. The only time I’ve had trouble with people sharing is if I ask for code to reproduce what they published. That usually is met with silence.
- adw 8y agoThis is highly field-dependent. My old field – solid state physics – did reasonably well on reproducibility, not least because of a bunch of committed open-source folks who had been burnt by exactly this (and by licensing their previous code commercially and getting screwed by their publisher, preventing them from reproducing their own work) working on ABINIT (abinit.org), led by Xavier Gonze. There's a culture around sharing pseudopotentials, too, which is good. SIESTA (icmab.es/siesta) is now open too, I note. That's the team I used to work alongside.
- ApostleMatthew 8y agoIn my field (computational biophysics), it's pretty common practice to post published code on a git repository. Code used to produce published results absolutely should be accessible.
- olliej 8y agoThey also don't pay reviewers. The costs for a journal are only the cost of sending a webpage (which they charge what, $30 for?), the paper journal itself (for some absurd amount each year). They do not pay the authors for the content, they do not pay the reviewers (who are the "added value" they harp on about). They're basically a tool that converts tax payer money (the vast majority of those people writing papers are paid in part or entirely by tax payer funds) into private money for the publisher.
- twoslide 8y agoI agree with what you've said - one thing that is sometimes overlooked is that publishers pay academic societies for the right to use the journal. I am on an editorial board for a small-ish society: we make about $5000 per year in member dues (they are low) and about $120,000 per year in publisher royalties. We use this to fund grant programs, scholarships, conferences, etc, so it is not all bad, but yes the publisher is probably making much more.
- Fomite 8y agoThis. Several societies I am a member of are essentially only financially solvent due to their journals.
- wuliwong 8y agoI'm confused by the relationship. Don't the publishers own the journals? What rights are the getting from the academic societies? Please excuse my ignorance. :)
- dmurray 8y agoNaming rights, like when you want to call your journal the Proceedings of the X Society.
- prepend 8y agoI’m a member of a few professional societies and while we do get revenue and sponsor scholarships, we also employ a bunch of people to promote and represent the society. So it’s probably a wash if we lose the revenue, but don’t pay for the various people. Largely, I think it’s tradition.
- nickthemagicman 8y agoWhat a racket!
- mjfl 8y agoThey have found a way to bottle prestige which is extremely profitable. It has negative marginal cost and only you can distribute it.
- twoslide 8y agoDoes anyone actually access articles on a per-article basis? I would bet the lion share of downloads (and revenues) are institutional subscriptions.
- mrstew 8y agoWhen I worked at an academic publisher I was surprised by this, often it's researchers at small or private institutions that don't have a library or one that pays lots of subs. Also - used to be you'd set this to have a price context for reprints (printed version of the article with more logos) which were a much bigger & more profitable revenue source. Pharma companies would buy '00s to distribute at conferences.
- Fomite 8y agoThe pharma companies still do, at least at the conferences I go to.
- Vinnl 8y agoSometimes people ask their librarian for an article, and they pay for it without the requester knowing (or caring).
- pc86 8y agoDo the authors own the IP for their journals? I was under the impression that in most instances the IP was either public or owned by the university/instition.
- rflrob 8y agoAssuming here that you mean "Do the authors own the IP for their journal articles". The answer is that it depends on the journal, but in a lot of cases, you sign over copyright to the article itself to the journal [1]. However, you still retain the IP of the things that the article is describing. If J Random Professor, PhD wants to patent something that they invented in a university lab, the usual breakdown in royalties is something like 1/3 goes to the university as a whole, 1/3 goes to the department that the lab is in, and 1/3 to the inventors themselves. [1] https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/copyright https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/copyright, for example
- jhbadger 8y agoTypically no (except in open access journals), if you are talking about the paper rather than the rights to the discovery itself.
- ska 8y agoYour are confounding two issues. One bit of IP is the copyright assignment for the article itself. Typical for-pay journals require assignment in order to publish (i.e. they at minimum own the publishing rights moving forward). The various bits of IP that can be assigned for the work/discoveries you did vary very much from institution to institution, and may vary with the source of funding. Nothing is really simple here, an it runs the gamut from the investigator owning everything to the investigator owning nothing other than attribution, etc. rights
- knolan 8y agoThe journal usually takes copyright but any IP should be protected before publishing. Generally all the IP owned by the author’s employer.
- 8y ago
- PunchTornado 8y agowhy is this a surprise for anyone? of course you don't get paid for publishing in a scientific journal.
- jonknee 8y agoBecause most of the time when you publish something that gets sold part of that money goes back to you? For someone who isn't in academia it seems weird and pretty obvious that you're getting scammed. The answer probably isn't to pay the authors, but it's to not charge for the digital content.
- rflrob 8y agoIf Dan Brown sells 80 million copies of The Da Vinci Code, he has probably worked something out with his publisher that he gets some amount of money per book sold. If Michael Jackson sells 45 million copies of Thriller, he probably gets a cut of each sale. If, for some weird reason, a million people pay $35 to download the CRISPR gene editing paper, Jennifer Doudna is probably not getting a penny of that. It's surprising to many people not in science that the usual model of "I pay publisher $x for a bunch of bytes, then publisher gives y% of that to the person who came up with that sequence of bytes" doesn't apply in science.
- whatshisface 8y agoThat's because you have already paid for that sequence of bytes (probably with your taxes), and the journal is rent-seeking. The scientist has already been paid and now you have to pay the troll under the bridge.
- j7ake 8y agoMany papers in Nature can be found free. Here is a paper from Doudna lab published in Nature. It should be free through PubMed Central. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5918688/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5918688/
- sebleon 8y agoNon-academic here: why distribute electronic copies of a paper through a scientific journal? I can see why publishers existed pre-internet (printing and distributing paper journals costs money), but seems outdated at this point. What's the incentive for a scientist to hand over copyrights to a journal?
- pletnes 8y agoIn many cases, it’s a scientist’s only way to advance his or her career.
- Vinnl 8y agoThis is the actual incentive, from a researcher's point of view. Even when there are plenty of outlets that provide quality control, archival, etc., researchers still submit to the same traditional journals because those journals' brand names are the stamp they need on their CV to advance an academic career that is already incredibly unlikely (due to their being far more applicants than positions).
- jampekka 8y agoIt's not the only way, but an easier one if the scientist just cares about their own ass.
- ApostleMatthew 8y agoIt's a (fairly) standardized, robust, and trusted way of peer-reviewing data and results. Without some mechanism like that, there's no easy way to tell if Dr. X's results are as well peer-reviewed as Dr. Y's, at least as it currently stands.
- throwawayaway12 8y agoExactly this. Also different journals act as a weak filter for impact of the research.
- DanielleMolloy 8y ago
- l9k 8y agoIn this increasingly digital world, the printed and distributed journal seem less and less important. Of course individuals are still free to download and print a paper for convenience. So what if the scientific community/industry focused on the real added value. Those are: 1. Peer review 2. Prestige Because the pre-internet problem of distribution doesn't exist anymore (a basic web server to host papers is relatively cheap), that would allow to bypass traditional journals. For that to happen, we would need a group of already reputed and respected researchers to review the submitted articles. But because the journal fees would be avoided, that means the money could be collected to pay those reviewers.
- DanielleMolloy 8y agoThis. I hope more people start thinking along these lines so that we can find a solution that respects and exploits the useful boundaries and incentives in the system, resulting in better science. > For that to happen, we would need a group of already reputed and respected researchers to review the submitted articles. But because the journal fees would be avoided, that means the money could be collected to pay those reviewers. Scientists are motivated by curiosity for their field, prestige, and having a stable job position were they can follow these motivations without fear. But they are not motivated by money (grant applications are a necessary evil). Due to this I don't think that you can start paying professors with stable positions, but you could start permanently hiring those many highly qualified mid-career academics who are still on the way towards a permanent position (and may never reach it). The review quality will be improved if people review full time, which can lead to journal prestige, faster review times, reviews with a broader look on science.
- titzer 8y agoI'm getting fed up with the for-profit scientific journal system. I was recently invited to submit an article to a new journal on computer networking of some kind. They mine publications and just start mailing authors, soliciting publications paid for by authors. I don't even work in computer networking! Ugh so I wrote back: Dear XXX, I mean you no personal disrespect. However after reviewing your request, I believe your institution serves no purpose in today's publishing world and absolutely will not be paying it USD 1,250 for the privilege of publishing of a paper in a field in which I am not an expert. Such a contribution would in no way advance either Science or humanity, but instead only create more confusion by frustrating several fields' fledgling efforts to sift the wheat from the chaff using a proper scientific process. Wishing your institution failure in the sincerest capacity, YYY
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- knolan 8y agoThe volume fake journal spam I’m getting lately is shocking. It seems they just trawl for emails form high impact journals.
- mrep 8y agoThe type of spam which has inspired one of my favorite papers titled "Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List": http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/remove.pdf http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/remove.pdf
- ghaff 8y agoSadly a low-quality pay-for-play journal trying to extract money from people who want the prestige of publishing in a journal isn't all that different from the multitude of conferences that seek speakers--often in areas where they have zero expertise (ask me how I know)--as an excuse to chase them for sponsorship dollars or to otherwise extract money from them. (In the US, it's mostly just about pay-for-play--i.e. you won't get a speaking slot unless you sponsor--but I've heard about much sleazier operations elsewhere.)
- quickben 8y ago"we are allowed to send them to you for free". Keyword: allowed. How can these smart and brave people, that push the boundaries of human understanding and knowledge, act so stupid.
- kazinator 8y agoWhat is the problem with "allowed"? Are they not, in fact, allowed (making it stupid to claim they are?) Or are they allowed in the sense that they don't require anyone's permission (making it stupid to believe that they do?)
- Fomite 8y agoBecause these smart and brave people need to keep their positions to push the boundaries of human understanding and knowledge. Especially for junior faculty, making a principled stand is a good way to kill their career.
- natosaichek 8y agowhat would be stupid about them sending someone a copy of their article for free?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Whitestrake 8y agoI think that GP has an issue with the implication that the publisher is in a position of power to allow this behaviour in the first place and could also possibly deny it.
- anorphirith 8y agoI don't see anything wrong with that.
- qrbLPHiKpiux 8y agoScihub
- cheeze 8y agoThank God for the arxiv and SciHub
- thetruthseeker1 8y agoWhile this is sad, if the scientific journals end up paying the authors, it won’t be 35$ anymore, it will be more(which I am happy to pay). The publishers I am sure won’t be taking a pay cut though!
- sytelus 8y agoThe rebellion against pay-walled research publications really needs to be holistically supported by all researchers. The big problem is that lot of "good" journals have also pay-walled publications that they pay nothing to authors but charge ridiculous amount per publication. This includes big names like Nature and several publications of IEEE.
- stilley2 8y agoEvery time stuff like this comes up I think of these guys http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/post/40 http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/post/40 This is the best model I've seen for modern publishing