5 ms·

reviewers are not paid by the publisher in the current system either basically: - authors pay to publish their work - readers pay to read the articles -

reviewers are not paid by the publisher in the current system either basically: - authors pay to publish their work - readers pay to read the articles - reviewers review pro-bono now you are thinking "well where the hell goes the money" and you are in the same situation as 99% of scientists

ethanwillis 8y ago
It goes to funding distribution models that can't deliver unicorns, rainbows, OR puppies to your doorstep. See the following quote from William Gunn, Communications head at Elsevier. When one user argued that people in rare-disease families “shouldn’t have to jump through additional hoops to access information,” Gunn responded, “Yes, everyone should have rainbows, unicorns, & puppies delivered to their doorstep by volunteers. Y’all keep wishing for that, I’ll keep working on producing the best knowledge and distributing it as best we can.” https://slate.com/technology/2018/08/who-gets-to-read-the-research-taxpayers-fund.html https://slate.com/technology/2018/08/who-gets-to-read-the-re...
- swebs 8y ago
  I know it seems superficial, but the usage of the word "y'all" makes Elsevier lose a lot of credibility in my mind.
- freeone3000 8y ago
  Right, but we have the internet now. The costs of publication and journal subscription greatly exceed the costs of digital distribution.
- consp 8y ago
  Elsevier's profit was almost a billion pounds in 2017. They are the last people to complain about margins or cost/benefits.
  - rocqua 8y ago
    They post a profit or about 33% according to others in this thread. This means they still have ~2 billion pounds in actual operating costs. Not that I support the current model, but that work still needs to be done, and it seems naive to expect it to be done for free / substantially less. I wonder how far the 'fee per published article' gets to covering bare costs for e.g. the journal Nature.
    - consp 8y ago
      I highly doubt most of the operating costs come from the journals. Considering there are far more people working for other publications in the Elsevier company. Usually the publications with high turnaround have low profit or break even, and I do not think the journals are among those and actually raise the profit margin substantially. But then, I can't back this up with numbers as they do not publish specifics...
- zentiggr 8y ago
  I would have a very hard time not looking him dead in the eye, saying "F* you", and spitting in his coffee. When "best we can" obviously means "best (for us as) we can (scam the marks for)", you are a parasite.
- dwheeler 8y ago
  Elsevier is full of nonsense, and this self-serving quote from William Gunn is just another example. You might find this article of interest: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b... Per that article: "According to its 2013 financials Elsevier had a higher percentage of profit than Apple, Inc." There's no need to "distribute by volunteers". We have something called the Internet - put the articles on a website, click, and you're done. Indeed, for the most part publishing on paper is a mistake - what we need is the electrons, not paper. Editors aren't free, but they don't cost the money that Elsevier and others charge. Reviews are done by volunteers, almost without exception, so there's no need to pay publishers for review. For-profit scientific publishers provided an important service in the 1950s. It's not the 1950s any more, and they don't provide any valuable services any more. All the real services - namely the scientific work - are paid by others, and so those others should reap the rewards.
- buboard 8y ago
  > on producing the best knowledge at best he s publishing it
jcranmer 8y ago
It is actually quite time-consuming to do the editorial tasks of a journal: * Ensure that the content of a submission meets minimal guidelines for submission. * Figure out who appropriate reviewers might be. This means figuring out which research areas are relevant, filtering out reviewers who might have conflicts of interest (same institution, previous advisor/advisee relationship, recent collaboration, etc.). You also need to ensure that you load balance reviews across reviewers. * Appropriately double-blind the submission so that the reviewers don't know who submitted the paper, and the authors don't know who reviewed the paper. You are now an intermediary for all of this communication. * Make a judgement call of which papers will be accepted for publishing. * You need to facilitate necessary edits from the authors to get it ready to publish. * Convert paper formats, supplementary data, etc. for uploading. Basically all the editing tasks that you probably thought was the only thing on this list. * Oh, and reviewers and authors are likely professors who are horribly oversubscribed in terms of their time, so you need to play babysitter to make sure that the tasks actually get done in a reasonable manner. When you consider how few papers actually get published, and just how much administrative work is required to publish a paper, costing hundreds or thousands of dollars to publish a paper is not unreasonable.
- Someone1234 8y ago
  Scientific Journals make 36% margin[0]. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    Put another way, that means that if you eliminated all profit from costs, you'd cut the price by only a third (not to a third). That's still hundreds-to-thousands of dollars per article.
    - laurentl 8y ago
      More than that probably. At 36% margins you don’t really have to worry about cost efficiency - there’s probably a lot of cost savings to be had hiding behind all that free cash flowing around (and if that 36% margin disappears, it won’t take long for the CFO to find them).
jpeloquin 8y ago
To give an idea of how much pro-bono review costs the rest of the system: A thorough review of a journal article takes 6-12 hours. If the paper develops novel theory it is more likely to take ~ 24 hours to understand and check properly. The average return on 1 hour of grant writing for a PI or experience staff researcher is ~ $300, averaged over the year. One 10-hour review therefore has ≥ $3000 opportunity cost to my lab. Looking at the opportunity cost to my funders due to spending time on a review instead of on research, funders presumably believe that research is at least as valuable as the how much they pay to support it. At the rates I'm familiar with, the opportunity cost to them is therefore at least $800 for a 10 hour review. Worse, a portion of every grant from the NIH or NSF is filtered through the university system as "indirect costs" and paid to the publishers as journal subscription fees. (The amount paid in subscription fees is hidden behind NDAs.) There are 2-3 reviewers per paper, and a paper may be rejected and resubmitted 2-4 times. Reviews don't follow a paper between resubmissions—the whole process starts again from square one with new reviewers. So multiply the per-reviewer costs above by somewhere between 2 and 12 to get the total cost. One could counter that review generates similar value as other research activities. I doubt this. The cost-benefit tradeoffs involved in review strongly incentivize cutting corners or delegating the task to inexperienced workers, which lessens the average review quality. The median review is a list of gut reaction bullet points rather than an evidence-based critique. This promotes an adversarial relationship between reviewers and authors. Of course there are many idealistic people who fully commit to the process anyway, but the system as a whole is costly and wasteful. (All of this is based on my experience doing academic biomedical research in the US. It is probably laughably wrong for other fields or other countries.)
- buboard 8y ago
  its no different in europe since people are publishing in the same journals. And its not rare to see egregious or unprofessional behaviour.

ethanwillis 8y ago

It goes to funding distribution models that can't deliver unicorns, rainbows, OR puppies to your doorstep. See the following quote from William Gunn, Communications head at Elsevier. When one user argued that people in rare-disease families “shouldn’t have to jump through additional hoops to access information,” Gunn responded, “Yes, everyone should have rainbows, unicorns, & puppies delivered to their doorstep by volunteers. Y’all keep wishing for that, I’ll keep working on producing the best knowledge and distributing it as best we can.” https://slate.com/technology/2018/08/who-gets-to-read-the-research-taxpayers-fund.html https://slate.com/technology/2018/08/who-gets-to-read-the-re...

swebs 8y ago
I know it seems superficial, but the usage of the word "y'all" makes Elsevier lose a lot of credibility in my mind.
freeone3000 8y ago
Right, but we have the internet now. The costs of publication and journal subscription greatly exceed the costs of digital distribution.
consp 8y ago
Elsevier's profit was almost a billion pounds in 2017. They are the last people to complain about margins or cost/benefits.
- rocqua 8y ago
  They post a profit or about 33% according to others in this thread. This means they still have ~2 billion pounds in actual operating costs. Not that I support the current model, but that work still needs to be done, and it seems naive to expect it to be done for free / substantially less. I wonder how far the 'fee per published article' gets to covering bare costs for e.g. the journal Nature.
  - consp 8y ago
    I highly doubt most of the operating costs come from the journals. Considering there are far more people working for other publications in the Elsevier company. Usually the publications with high turnaround have low profit or break even, and I do not think the journals are among those and actually raise the profit margin substantially. But then, I can't back this up with numbers as they do not publish specifics...
zentiggr 8y ago
I would have a very hard time not looking him dead in the eye, saying "F* you", and spitting in his coffee. When "best we can" obviously means "best (for us as) we can (scam the marks for)", you are a parasite.
dwheeler 8y ago
Elsevier is full of nonsense, and this self-serving quote from William Gunn is just another example. You might find this article of interest: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b... Per that article: "According to its 2013 financials Elsevier had a higher percentage of profit than Apple, Inc." There's no need to "distribute by volunteers". We have something called the Internet - put the articles on a website, click, and you're done. Indeed, for the most part publishing on paper is a mistake - what we need is the electrons, not paper. Editors aren't free, but they don't cost the money that Elsevier and others charge. Reviews are done by volunteers, almost without exception, so there's no need to pay publishers for review. For-profit scientific publishers provided an important service in the 1950s. It's not the 1950s any more, and they don't provide any valuable services any more. All the real services - namely the scientific work - are paid by others, and so those others should reap the rewards.
buboard 8y ago
> on producing the best knowledge at best he s publishing it

jcranmer 8y ago

It is actually quite time-consuming to do the editorial tasks of a journal: * Ensure that the content of a submission meets minimal guidelines for submission. * Figure out who appropriate reviewers might be. This means figuring out which research areas are relevant, filtering out reviewers who might have conflicts of interest (same institution, previous advisor/advisee relationship, recent collaboration, etc.). You also need to ensure that you load balance reviews across reviewers. * Appropriately double-blind the submission so that the reviewers don't know who submitted the paper, and the authors don't know who reviewed the paper. You are now an intermediary for all of this communication. * Make a judgement call of which papers will be accepted for publishing. * You need to facilitate necessary edits from the authors to get it ready to publish. * Convert paper formats, supplementary data, etc. for uploading. Basically all the editing tasks that you probably thought was the only thing on this list. * Oh, and reviewers and authors are likely professors who are horribly oversubscribed in terms of their time, so you need to play babysitter to make sure that the tasks actually get done in a reasonable manner. When you consider how few papers actually get published, and just how much administrative work is required to publish a paper, costing hundreds or thousands of dollars to publish a paper is not unreasonable.

Someone1234 8y ago
Scientific Journals make 36% margin[0]. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...
- jcranmer 8y ago
  Put another way, that means that if you eliminated all profit from costs, you'd cut the price by only a third (not to a third). That's still hundreds-to-thousands of dollars per article.
  - laurentl 8y ago
    More than that probably. At 36% margins you don’t really have to worry about cost efficiency - there’s probably a lot of cost savings to be had hiding behind all that free cash flowing around (and if that 36% margin disappears, it won’t take long for the CFO to find them).

jpeloquin 8y ago

To give an idea of how much pro-bono review costs the rest of the system: A thorough review of a journal article takes 6-12 hours. If the paper develops novel theory it is more likely to take ~ 24 hours to understand and check properly. The average return on 1 hour of grant writing for a PI or experience staff researcher is ~ $300, averaged over the year. One 10-hour review therefore has ≥ $3000 opportunity cost to my lab. Looking at the opportunity cost to my funders due to spending time on a review instead of on research, funders presumably believe that research is at least as valuable as the how much they pay to support it. At the rates I'm familiar with, the opportunity cost to them is therefore at least $800 for a 10 hour review. Worse, a portion of every grant from the NIH or NSF is filtered through the university system as "indirect costs" and paid to the publishers as journal subscription fees. (The amount paid in subscription fees is hidden behind NDAs.) There are 2-3 reviewers per paper, and a paper may be rejected and resubmitted 2-4 times. Reviews don't follow a paper between resubmissions—the whole process starts again from square one with new reviewers. So multiply the per-reviewer costs above by somewhere between 2 and 12 to get the total cost. One could counter that review generates similar value as other research activities. I doubt this. The cost-benefit tradeoffs involved in review strongly incentivize cutting corners or delegating the task to inexperienced workers, which lessens the average review quality. The median review is a list of gut reaction bullet points rather than an evidence-based critique. This promotes an adversarial relationship between reviewers and authors. Of course there are many idealistic people who fully commit to the process anyway, but the system as a whole is costly and wasteful. (All of this is based on my experience doing academic biomedical research in the US. It is probably laughably wrong for other fields or other countries.)

buboard 8y ago
its no different in europe since people are publishing in the same journals. And its not rare to see egregious or unprofessional behaviour.