26 ms·

Elsevier journal editors resign, start rival open-access journal

940 points by dankohn1 8y ago

pfortuny 8y ago
The same thing happened with “Topology”, now “Journal of Topology”. After some years it was bought by Wiley and is no longer free... A journal is not an easy task to manage.
- est31 8y ago
  Often, journals aren't founded by the current publishers but instead by people who do actual research in that field. Then, a publisher approaches them and offers them a lot of money. Who would decline such an offer? You are right, this move might just be a strategic measure to get more money from the publisher.
  - wbl 8y ago
    That's not exactly the story with Journal of Topology. It's published by the LMS, which partnered with Wiley.
- averell 8y ago
  And Wiley / ProjectDEAL just yesterday reached a breakthrough: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/groundbreaking-deal-makes-large-number-german-studies-free-public http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/groundbreaking-deal-m... Suprisingly little coverage, but things aren't looking great for Elsevier.
- svat 8y ago
  Not quite: see this list of all such journals and events: http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Journal_declarations_of_independence#2006 http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Journal_declarations_of_indep... The editors of Topology resigned over the high price (apparently it was $1558 in 2004: https://pages.uoregon.edu/dps/journals.php https://pages.uoregon.edu/dps/journals.php), and started Journal of Topology which at the time of announcement (https://www.lms.ac.uk/sites/lms.ac.uk/files/About_Us/news/2007-1%20Topology%20journal%20(17%20January).pdf https://www.lms.ac.uk/sites/lms.ac.uk/files/About_Us/news/20...) was said would be published by LMS (in partnership with OUP), and priced at $570. Looking at the page now, it is still published by LMS (in partnership with Wiley now), and I can't figure out the pricing. It is fully possible that the price has increased, but there has been no change from free to non-free. Back in 2006, "free" was not one of the conventional options for a journal. Now it is. As for "a journal is not an easy task to manage", my favourite article is about the Journal of Machine Learning Research, the leading journal in the field of machine learning: https://blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-journal/ https://blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-j...
tokai 8y ago
JOI is a great journal. I hope they manage to keep QSS top tier.
vanderZwan 8y ago
> Rooryck, who was editor of Lingua and now leads Glossa, said the most challenging aspect of starting a new open-access journal is securing funding to ensure it survives. He said Glossa is doing well and has more submissions now than Lingua did. Lingua has been described as a “zombie” journal by some scholars, but it continues to receive hundreds of submissions. Is there a list of "zombie journals" somewhere? Would be interesting to see them all laid out.
- tokai 8y ago
  Not really. >Unfortunately, unless black and white lists are updated continuously, they can never keep up with changes in the publication industry. [...] So, the quick answer to the question ‘where shouldn’t I publish?’ is that [...] researchers need to engage in critical enquiry and reflection about a potential publisher. This should not come as a shock – the same advice would have been true long before the end of Beall’s List. https://ahrecs.com/research-integrity/world-hijacked-clone-zombie-publishing-shouldnt-publish https://ahrecs.com/research-integrity/world-hijacked-clone-z...
KasianFranks 8y ago
This is great.
dankohn1 8y ago
I have so much respect for the editors who were willing to make this jump. I've wondered if there is some cognitive dissonance between the strong feelings I have that scientific journals should be open access and my willingness to buy and use closed source software (even though I run an open source software foundation). But I don't think so. Fundamentally, I think authors have the right to determine how their work is used. If they want it to be used and available as widely as possible, they should publish it under an open source license and in an open source journal. But when for-profit companies like Elsevier control the journals in which publication is necessary for getting tenure, they are restricting information flow and harming science with no countervailing benefits. Furthermore, many journal articles are supported by government grants, and it's just appalling to me not to have access to the results of research that I am paying for. (If not for https://sci-hub.tw/ https://sci-hub.tw/ obviously.) I'm optimistic that the author-pays model of funding copy editing will work out and that for-profit journals will be seen in another couple decades as akin to leeching and phrenology.
- apathy 8y ago
  Except that leeching has benefits
  - dankohn1 8y ago
    It does! I wondered if someone would point that out. (Though blood letting does not). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting
    - tonyg 8y ago
      Blood-letting also has benefits in some cases! For example, venesection is a standard treatment for haemochromatosis: http://haemochromatosis.org.uk/haemochromatosis/treatment/ http://haemochromatosis.org.uk/haemochromatosis/treatment/
  - sigi45 8y ago
    But he referred to the notion of how it was widley used in old times and didn't do anything.
sudoaza 8y ago
Hurra, Elsevier are a band of crooks, they have way more profit margin than giants like google and apple, science does good by moving away from them.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  Basically we want a similar system but at rates where profit is c. 0 (zero) and wages are around the median? But doesn't that translate to other "industries"? Or, is it recognition that science has a fundamentally greater importance to humanity ... it's that true though, arts are pretty fundamental too, medicine certainly is, housing, food, water supply, sewerage, ... Why do we accept rent-seeking and profiteering and excessive wages and whatever in these other things? Aside: Seems to me "science must seize [some of] the 'means of production'" is pretty communist.
  - collyw 8y ago
    > Aside: Seems to me "science must seize [some of] the 'means of production'" is pretty communist. When the research is funded by the state it seems reasonable.
    - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      So only industries that get government support - like rail, electricity supply in UK? Food production in USA? Farming across the EU? Then there's the premise that "private property is theft", so perhaps all industries that use land ownership or natural resources owe their utility to the public too?
  - PascLeRasc 8y ago
    We should improve society somewhat.
mothsonasloth 8y ago
Aaron Schwartz would be pleased to see this. Elsevier, Springer etc. are just syndicates sitting between researchers and consumers. They have no place in today's world.
- garethrees 8y ago
  Do you mean Aaron Swartz?
- readhn 8y ago
  RIP Aaron :(
n1000 8y ago
So, as an academic myself, I have been wondering. Why don't some tech-savy people (the kinds that roam around HN) create an open-source publishing platform and offer journals to use their services for free / cheaply? Something like a GitLab for publishing papers. I wouldn't be surprised if the German government would agree to fund such a thing these days. This would make such a jump for willing editorial boards much easier.
- jononor 8y ago
  Recognition/prestige is what the journals offer. Hosting is incidental. Editing and reviewing too.
  - n1000 8y ago
    Fully agree. But whenever an editorial board (like the one here) is fed up, they might be more likely to make the jump. I believe we may be about to reach a critical mass behind open access, but publishers won't make this easy.
    - jononor 8y ago
      Agreed that it could be useful to have a "go to" project to rally around. Arxiv.org is very successful for pre-prints, at least in some fields like computer science. Maybe a modern "journal" offering review and editing could be built on top of that? It would utilize open reviews instead of the traditional anonymous private reviews. Once a certain bar has been reached with reviews, the paper can be nominated for appearing in a journal, which editors can decide on.
      - Vinnl 8y ago
        The usual parlance for that is an "overlay journal", and there are quite a few of those now. Many of them use Scholastica [1]. [1] https://scholasticahq.com/ https://scholasticahq.com/
        8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ArtWomb 8y ago
Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques recently published a breakdown of their costs hosting an open journal. Approx. $100 per annum ;) http://jcgt.org/news/2018-01-04-expenses.html http://jcgt.org/news/2018-01-04-expenses.html
- mr_gibbins 8y ago
  I'd be interested to know if there are any additional costs involved to have the journal listed in the major directories, getting/calculating an impact factor, promoting it to institutions and so forth. This example calls itself a journal but looks a lot like a website and not much more.
  - a_e_k 8y ago
    Yes, JCGT is fairly small but it does have a pedigree. After the fifth and last of the Graphics Gems books series, the Journal of Graphics Tools was founded in 1996 as a venue to continue publishing gem-like articles. It was a print journal owned and published by A K Peters. Back in 2012, most of the editorial board resigned and immediately refounded as the open access, online Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques. No, it's not as prestigious as, say, Proc. SIGGRAPH. But it is reputable and you can still trace its lineage a good ways back. (Disclaimer -- I'm co-author on a paper published at JCGT and have been a collaborator with a few members of its editorial board. It's still a highlight of my career have published with Tom Duff of "Duff's Device" fame and had the paper get a nice twitter mention from John Carmack: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/846525438797086720 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/846525438797086720)
- besulzbach 8y ago
  It is literally just hosting in this case. However, even if you were to pay the people behind the journal for their work it should be fairly inexpensive as long as they did as little as Elsevier does.
- specialp 8y ago
  Last year they published a grand total of 8 articles with the editorial staff doing the copy-editing, and web work for free. It is nice they are doing this but it isn't indicative of the cost of hosting/peer review/copy-editing more substantial journals.
avar 8y ago
There seems to be an even more effective solution to closed journals than just telling scientists that if they take money their paper needs to be in an open journal. Also tell them that when they apply for funding only scientific research which is available in open journals will be considered. You'd then get people not only submitting new research in open journals, but making all their backlog available as well to increase their odds of getting funding. That would chip away even more at the moat of companies like Elsevier since presumably much of their funding is from universities who'll need access to historical research for a long time.
- Vinnl 8y ago
  Yes, but this too is difficult. Funders outsource the decision of whom to fund to other academics, and despite quite a few of them already encouraging them to ignore things like the Journal Impact Factor and have signed DORA [1], old habits die hard. [1] https://sfdora.org/ https://sfdora.org/
- Fomite 8y ago
  One problem this does is it shifts the costs of this to individual projects. In my field, the average OA field is probably around $3000. Assuming a five year project that produces 5 papers a year (not unreasonable), you get $75,000. That's almost exactly what it costs, with salary, tuition, and fringe, to support two graduate students. So funders would have to accept getting less productivity from the same projects. It also favors large labs with senior PIs that have the funding to absorb those costs.
  - krull10 8y ago
    Exactly, this is a major issue that non-academics always miss when talking about OA. The replacement to charging readers seems to have become a shift of costs to researchers, with an expectation they'll have lots of grants that are willing to pay huge publishing fees. The only effective way I see to get around this is for granting agencies to start putting massive caps on what they are willing to pay for journal articles. If they mandate $200 max per article, no one is going to be able to afford a $5000 article anymore. Journals would be forced to adapt.
afpx 8y ago
Not too long ago, I had communications with Elsevier's technology team, and through that experience, I also spoke with some of their directors. Let me say that the experience was kind of mind-boggling and surreal. My impression is that Elsevier is a company locked into the past by a couple of decades. The leadership that I spoke with seemed to have worked in publishing for a very long time. And, probably because of that, they had an old-school publishing mentality with regards to how to reach their customers, provide value, and create revenue. I sensed that many in the technology team seemed frustrated with their leadership. They had new visions for how to evolve the publishing model to reflect the rise of sci-hub and changes in the industry. However, they were stymied by a very bureaucratic, well-entrenched, and siloed organization. I expected that the leadership would have some strategy for dealing with this, but it seemed like they were aloof, probably grown fat from decades of near-monopoly. They had a net profit margin of 37% in 2017! Talk about a business ripe for disruption. Elsevier has been around a very, very long time (wikipedia says 1880), and it shows. I can't imagine getting anything done within that company. So, it's no surprise that some of them are finally leaving to try out a new model. Let's hope for the best.
- mywittyname 8y ago
  > I sensed that many in the technology team seemed frustrated with their leadership. That's an understatement.
- currymj 8y ago
  These were almost definitely not even Elsevier employees. They were editors of an Elsevier journal, but likely were paid only a token amount for their work, and probably not even that. The world of academic publishing is very strange, almost inconceivably so. The publishers push off most of the substantive work to unpaid academics (reviewers, editors, and of course the actual paper authors) but then charge thousands of dollars for the results. It is a wonder their profit margin is not 100%.
  - techas 8y ago
    > It is a wonder their profit margin is not 100%. This!
burtonator 8y ago
This is awesome. I'm working on something that would VERY much benefit from open access journals: https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ With Polar you maintain all your research in one place and can annotate and share with other users. One thing I want to add is the ability to sync up with open access sources to fetch PDFs, get metadata for them, find related PDFs and research, etc. Going to go heads down into this today.
- visarga 8y ago
  Interesting app idea, I installed, but couldn't figure out how to create an annotation.
- Vinnl 8y ago
  You probably know about it already, but you'll probably want to use Unpaywall: https://unpaywall.org/ https://unpaywall.org/ It catalogues Open Access links given a DOI, provides an API, and also provides links to direct PDFs (or web pages containing the complete article, if available).
bitwize 8y ago
I had a crooter approach me about a software position at Elsevier once. I told her no, and that you can't spell Elsevier without E-V-I-L.
apo 8y ago
The board's letter is linked in the article. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5683932-Resignation-Letter.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5683932-Resignation-... There appear to have been multiple complaints: 1. Ownership of the journal is non-negotiable. 2. Article Publishing Charges (APC) are non-negotiable. APC is the charge paid by an author to get an article published under the journal's current Open Access policy. 3. Unwillingness to participate in an initiative to freely publish article citation data (I4OC): https://i4oc.org https://i4oc.org Many journals have instituted author-pays Open Access policies. In my view, this model is just as unsustainable as reader-pays (or more accurately, library-pays). The crux of this entire problem is that nobody knows how much it really costs to run a journal in the digital age. Or at least they're not telling. I'm not talking about costs excluding unpaid volunteers. I mean the full cost. I suspect the board of JOI will find out for sure. It will be interesting to see: (a) whether it charges APCs; and (b) if it does, how they compare to those Elsevier charges.
- dougmccune 8y ago
  > The crux of this entire problem is that nobody knows how much it really costs to run a journal in the digital age. Or at least they're not telling. I'm not talking about costs excluding unpaid volunteers. I mean the full cost. I know you're asking about the full cost including the time of the people working for free, which you're right, is an impossible number to get. But I fail to fully see your point. The new journal that's going to be run by MIT Press isn't going to start paying editors and reviewers any differently than Elsevier (meaning not paying them). To answer one of your questions, the article mentions they are indeed going to try to charge less for APCs ($600-800 instead of $1,800), and they're going to be fully OA, but those are the only major changes. But to part of your question about the cost of publishing, PLOS publishes their financials [1], as does eLife [2]. eLife published 1,307 papers in 2017 and had total expenses of 5.3m GBP (~6.9m USD) for an average per-article expense of $5,244. PLOS published ~27,000 articles in 2016 [3] and had total expenses of $42.8m USD for an average per-article expense of ~$1,500. These of course aren't apples to apples comparisons, since what they're trying to do with this journal isn't the same as what PLOS does or what eLife does. But I think those are some good ballparks to understand what the range kind of looks like. [1] https://www.plos.org/financial-overview https://www.plos.org/financial-overview [2] https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/50d52087/annual-report-looking-back-on-2017 https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/50d52087/annual-repor... [3] https://www.plos.org/files/PLOS-Annual-Update-2016-online.pdf https://www.plos.org/files/PLOS-Annual-Update-2016-online.pd...
Lxr 8y ago
As a shameless plug, we are hiring right now (we’re a small remote team) working on this exact problem - neliti.com/careers
SomeHacker44 8y ago
Imagine if they had signed the ubiquitous non-competes we have in the tech-world outside California.
robertwalsh0 8y ago
Making academic journals more accessible is a problem that I’ve been working on the last few years with my project, Scholastica. We provide software that allows journals to manage their entire toolchain from peer-review to publication. Homepage https://www.scholasticahq.com https://www.scholasticahq.com Two journals that use our software: https://www.surveypractice.org https://www.surveypractice.org (OA journal published by American Association for Public Opinion Research) https://discreteanalysisjournal.com https://discreteanalysisjournal.com (arxiv overlay journal started by Fields Medal winner Tim Gowers)
- Vinnl 8y ago
  Heh, I mentioned you above :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18921700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18921700
  - robertwalsh0 8y ago
    Thanks, I really appreciate it :D
xiaodai 8y ago
If you have the means to do so, can I suggest you sponsor one paper that you like to support for open access? It's $600m, which is a significant sum, but if you feel that your career has been helped in a significant way by research performed by others that freely available to you, and if you have the means to do so, this would be a good way to start giving back to the community. Now I just wonder if any of the journals allow such individual contributions.
Xelbair 8y ago
Elsevier has editors?
jcobber 8y ago
this is a bold move for something that as controversial in the academic community about publications. I think this puts into perspective that there are certain biases on which studies gets published aka if you have money you can certainly get published on this paid publications.

940 points by dankohn1 8y ago

The same thing happened with “Topology”, now “Journal of Topology”. After some years it was bought by Wiley and is no longer free... A journal is not an easy task to manage.

est31 8y ago
Often, journals aren't founded by the current publishers but instead by people who do actual research in that field. Then, a publisher approaches them and offers them a lot of money. Who would decline such an offer? You are right, this move might just be a strategic measure to get more money from the publisher.
- wbl 8y ago
  That's not exactly the story with Journal of Topology. It's published by the LMS, which partnered with Wiley.
averell 8y ago
And Wiley / ProjectDEAL just yesterday reached a breakthrough: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/groundbreaking-deal-makes-large-number-german-studies-free-public http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/groundbreaking-deal-m... Suprisingly little coverage, but things aren't looking great for Elsevier.
svat 8y ago
Not quite: see this list of all such journals and events: http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Journal_declarations_of_independence#2006 http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Journal_declarations_of_indep... The editors of Topology resigned over the high price (apparently it was $1558 in 2004: https://pages.uoregon.edu/dps/journals.php https://pages.uoregon.edu/dps/journals.php), and started Journal of Topology which at the time of announcement (https://www.lms.ac.uk/sites/lms.ac.uk/files/About_Us/news/2007-1%20Topology%20journal%20(17%20January).pdf https://www.lms.ac.uk/sites/lms.ac.uk/files/About_Us/news/20...) was said would be published by LMS (in partnership with OUP), and priced at $570. Looking at the page now, it is still published by LMS (in partnership with Wiley now), and I can't figure out the pricing. It is fully possible that the price has increased, but there has been no change from free to non-free. Back in 2006, "free" was not one of the conventional options for a journal. Now it is. As for "a journal is not an easy task to manage", my favourite article is about the Journal of Machine Learning Research, the leading journal in the field of machine learning: https://blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-journal/ https://blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-j...

tokai 8y ago

JOI is a great journal. I hope they manage to keep QSS top tier.

vanderZwan 8y ago

> Rooryck, who was editor of Lingua and now leads Glossa, said the most challenging aspect of starting a new open-access journal is securing funding to ensure it survives. He said Glossa is doing well and has more submissions now than Lingua did. Lingua has been described as a “zombie” journal by some scholars, but it continues to receive hundreds of submissions. Is there a list of "zombie journals" somewhere? Would be interesting to see them all laid out.

tokai 8y ago
Not really. >Unfortunately, unless black and white lists are updated continuously, they can never keep up with changes in the publication industry. [...] So, the quick answer to the question ‘where shouldn’t I publish?’ is that [...] researchers need to engage in critical enquiry and reflection about a potential publisher. This should not come as a shock – the same advice would have been true long before the end of Beall’s List. https://ahrecs.com/research-integrity/world-hijacked-clone-zombie-publishing-shouldnt-publish https://ahrecs.com/research-integrity/world-hijacked-clone-z...

KasianFranks 8y ago

This is great.

dankohn1 8y ago

I have so much respect for the editors who were willing to make this jump. I've wondered if there is some cognitive dissonance between the strong feelings I have that scientific journals should be open access and my willingness to buy and use closed source software (even though I run an open source software foundation). But I don't think so. Fundamentally, I think authors have the right to determine how their work is used. If they want it to be used and available as widely as possible, they should publish it under an open source license and in an open source journal. But when for-profit companies like Elsevier control the journals in which publication is necessary for getting tenure, they are restricting information flow and harming science with no countervailing benefits. Furthermore, many journal articles are supported by government grants, and it's just appalling to me not to have access to the results of research that I am paying for. (If not for https://sci-hub.tw/ https://sci-hub.tw/ obviously.) I'm optimistic that the author-pays model of funding copy editing will work out and that for-profit journals will be seen in another couple decades as akin to leeching and phrenology.

apathy 8y ago
Except that leeching has benefits
- dankohn1 8y ago
  It does! I wondered if someone would point that out. (Though blood letting does not). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting
  - tonyg 8y ago
    Blood-letting also has benefits in some cases! For example, venesection is a standard treatment for haemochromatosis: http://haemochromatosis.org.uk/haemochromatosis/treatment/ http://haemochromatosis.org.uk/haemochromatosis/treatment/
- sigi45 8y ago
  But he referred to the notion of how it was widley used in old times and didn't do anything.

sudoaza 8y ago

Hurra, Elsevier are a band of crooks, they have way more profit margin than giants like google and apple, science does good by moving away from them.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago
Basically we want a similar system but at rates where profit is c. 0 (zero) and wages are around the median? But doesn't that translate to other "industries"? Or, is it recognition that science has a fundamentally greater importance to humanity ... it's that true though, arts are pretty fundamental too, medicine certainly is, housing, food, water supply, sewerage, ... Why do we accept rent-seeking and profiteering and excessive wages and whatever in these other things? Aside: Seems to me "science must seize [some of] the 'means of production'" is pretty communist.
- collyw 8y ago
  > Aside: Seems to me "science must seize [some of] the 'means of production'" is pretty communist. When the research is funded by the state it seems reasonable.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    So only industries that get government support - like rail, electricity supply in UK? Food production in USA? Farming across the EU? Then there's the premise that "private property is theft", so perhaps all industries that use land ownership or natural resources owe their utility to the public too?
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  We should improve society somewhat.

mothsonasloth 8y ago

Aaron Schwartz would be pleased to see this. Elsevier, Springer etc. are just syndicates sitting between researchers and consumers. They have no place in today's world.

garethrees 8y ago
Do you mean Aaron Swartz?
readhn 8y ago
RIP Aaron :(

n1000 8y ago

So, as an academic myself, I have been wondering. Why don't some tech-savy people (the kinds that roam around HN) create an open-source publishing platform and offer journals to use their services for free / cheaply? Something like a GitLab for publishing papers. I wouldn't be surprised if the German government would agree to fund such a thing these days. This would make such a jump for willing editorial boards much easier.

jononor 8y ago
Recognition/prestige is what the journals offer. Hosting is incidental. Editing and reviewing too.
- n1000 8y ago
  Fully agree. But whenever an editorial board (like the one here) is fed up, they might be more likely to make the jump. I believe we may be about to reach a critical mass behind open access, but publishers won't make this easy.
  - jononor 8y ago
    Agreed that it could be useful to have a "go to" project to rally around. Arxiv.org is very successful for pre-prints, at least in some fields like computer science. Maybe a modern "journal" offering review and editing could be built on top of that? It would utilize open reviews instead of the traditional anonymous private reviews. Once a certain bar has been reached with reviews, the paper can be nominated for appearing in a journal, which editors can decide on.
    - Vinnl 8y ago
      The usual parlance for that is an "overlay journal", and there are quite a few of those now. Many of them use Scholastica [1]. [1] https://scholasticahq.com/ https://scholasticahq.com/
      - 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ArtWomb 8y ago

Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques recently published a breakdown of their costs hosting an open journal. Approx. $100 per annum ;) http://jcgt.org/news/2018-01-04-expenses.html http://jcgt.org/news/2018-01-04-expenses.html

mr_gibbins 8y ago
I'd be interested to know if there are any additional costs involved to have the journal listed in the major directories, getting/calculating an impact factor, promoting it to institutions and so forth. This example calls itself a journal but looks a lot like a website and not much more.
- a_e_k 8y ago
  Yes, JCGT is fairly small but it does have a pedigree. After the fifth and last of the Graphics Gems books series, the Journal of Graphics Tools was founded in 1996 as a venue to continue publishing gem-like articles. It was a print journal owned and published by A K Peters. Back in 2012, most of the editorial board resigned and immediately refounded as the open access, online Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques. No, it's not as prestigious as, say, Proc. SIGGRAPH. But it is reputable and you can still trace its lineage a good ways back. (Disclaimer -- I'm co-author on a paper published at JCGT and have been a collaborator with a few members of its editorial board. It's still a highlight of my career have published with Tom Duff of "Duff's Device" fame and had the paper get a nice twitter mention from John Carmack: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/846525438797086720 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/846525438797086720)
besulzbach 8y ago
It is literally just hosting in this case. However, even if you were to pay the people behind the journal for their work it should be fairly inexpensive as long as they did as little as Elsevier does.
specialp 8y ago
Last year they published a grand total of 8 articles with the editorial staff doing the copy-editing, and web work for free. It is nice they are doing this but it isn't indicative of the cost of hosting/peer review/copy-editing more substantial journals.

avar 8y ago

There seems to be an even more effective solution to closed journals than just telling scientists that if they take money their paper needs to be in an open journal. Also tell them that when they apply for funding only scientific research which is available in open journals will be considered. You'd then get people not only submitting new research in open journals, but making all their backlog available as well to increase their odds of getting funding. That would chip away even more at the moat of companies like Elsevier since presumably much of their funding is from universities who'll need access to historical research for a long time.

Vinnl 8y ago
Yes, but this too is difficult. Funders outsource the decision of whom to fund to other academics, and despite quite a few of them already encouraging them to ignore things like the Journal Impact Factor and have signed DORA [1], old habits die hard. [1] https://sfdora.org/ https://sfdora.org/
Fomite 8y ago
One problem this does is it shifts the costs of this to individual projects. In my field, the average OA field is probably around $3000. Assuming a five year project that produces 5 papers a year (not unreasonable), you get $75,000. That's almost exactly what it costs, with salary, tuition, and fringe, to support two graduate students. So funders would have to accept getting less productivity from the same projects. It also favors large labs with senior PIs that have the funding to absorb those costs.
- krull10 8y ago
  Exactly, this is a major issue that non-academics always miss when talking about OA. The replacement to charging readers seems to have become a shift of costs to researchers, with an expectation they'll have lots of grants that are willing to pay huge publishing fees. The only effective way I see to get around this is for granting agencies to start putting massive caps on what they are willing to pay for journal articles. If they mandate $200 max per article, no one is going to be able to afford a $5000 article anymore. Journals would be forced to adapt.

afpx 8y ago

Not too long ago, I had communications with Elsevier's technology team, and through that experience, I also spoke with some of their directors. Let me say that the experience was kind of mind-boggling and surreal. My impression is that Elsevier is a company locked into the past by a couple of decades. The leadership that I spoke with seemed to have worked in publishing for a very long time. And, probably because of that, they had an old-school publishing mentality with regards to how to reach their customers, provide value, and create revenue. I sensed that many in the technology team seemed frustrated with their leadership. They had new visions for how to evolve the publishing model to reflect the rise of sci-hub and changes in the industry. However, they were stymied by a very bureaucratic, well-entrenched, and siloed organization. I expected that the leadership would have some strategy for dealing with this, but it seemed like they were aloof, probably grown fat from decades of near-monopoly. They had a net profit margin of 37% in 2017! Talk about a business ripe for disruption. Elsevier has been around a very, very long time (wikipedia says 1880), and it shows. I can't imagine getting anything done within that company. So, it's no surprise that some of them are finally leaving to try out a new model. Let's hope for the best.

mywittyname 8y ago
> I sensed that many in the technology team seemed frustrated with their leadership. That's an understatement.
currymj 8y ago
These were almost definitely not even Elsevier employees. They were editors of an Elsevier journal, but likely were paid only a token amount for their work, and probably not even that. The world of academic publishing is very strange, almost inconceivably so. The publishers push off most of the substantive work to unpaid academics (reviewers, editors, and of course the actual paper authors) but then charge thousands of dollars for the results. It is a wonder their profit margin is not 100%.
- techas 8y ago
  > It is a wonder their profit margin is not 100%. This!

burtonator 8y ago

This is awesome. I'm working on something that would VERY much benefit from open access journals: https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ With Polar you maintain all your research in one place and can annotate and share with other users. One thing I want to add is the ability to sync up with open access sources to fetch PDFs, get metadata for them, find related PDFs and research, etc. Going to go heads down into this today.

visarga 8y ago
Interesting app idea, I installed, but couldn't figure out how to create an annotation.
Vinnl 8y ago
You probably know about it already, but you'll probably want to use Unpaywall: https://unpaywall.org/ https://unpaywall.org/ It catalogues Open Access links given a DOI, provides an API, and also provides links to direct PDFs (or web pages containing the complete article, if available).

bitwize 8y ago

I had a crooter approach me about a software position at Elsevier once. I told her no, and that you can't spell Elsevier without E-V-I-L.

apo 8y ago

The board's letter is linked in the article. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5683932-Resignation-Letter.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5683932-Resignation-... There appear to have been multiple complaints: 1. Ownership of the journal is non-negotiable. 2. Article Publishing Charges (APC) are non-negotiable. APC is the charge paid by an author to get an article published under the journal's current Open Access policy. 3. Unwillingness to participate in an initiative to freely publish article citation data (I4OC): https://i4oc.org https://i4oc.org Many journals have instituted author-pays Open Access policies. In my view, this model is just as unsustainable as reader-pays (or more accurately, library-pays). The crux of this entire problem is that nobody knows how much it really costs to run a journal in the digital age. Or at least they're not telling. I'm not talking about costs excluding unpaid volunteers. I mean the full cost. I suspect the board of JOI will find out for sure. It will be interesting to see: (a) whether it charges APCs; and (b) if it does, how they compare to those Elsevier charges.

dougmccune 8y ago
> The crux of this entire problem is that nobody knows how much it really costs to run a journal in the digital age. Or at least they're not telling. I'm not talking about costs excluding unpaid volunteers. I mean the full cost. I know you're asking about the full cost including the time of the people working for free, which you're right, is an impossible number to get. But I fail to fully see your point. The new journal that's going to be run by MIT Press isn't going to start paying editors and reviewers any differently than Elsevier (meaning not paying them). To answer one of your questions, the article mentions they are indeed going to try to charge less for APCs ($600-800 instead of $1,800), and they're going to be fully OA, but those are the only major changes. But to part of your question about the cost of publishing, PLOS publishes their financials [1], as does eLife [2]. eLife published 1,307 papers in 2017 and had total expenses of 5.3m GBP (~6.9m USD) for an average per-article expense of $5,244. PLOS published ~27,000 articles in 2016 [3] and had total expenses of $42.8m USD for an average per-article expense of ~$1,500. These of course aren't apples to apples comparisons, since what they're trying to do with this journal isn't the same as what PLOS does or what eLife does. But I think those are some good ballparks to understand what the range kind of looks like. [1] https://www.plos.org/financial-overview https://www.plos.org/financial-overview [2] https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/50d52087/annual-report-looking-back-on-2017 https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/50d52087/annual-repor... [3] https://www.plos.org/files/PLOS-Annual-Update-2016-online.pdf https://www.plos.org/files/PLOS-Annual-Update-2016-online.pd...

Lxr 8y ago

As a shameless plug, we are hiring right now (we’re a small remote team) working on this exact problem - neliti.com/careers

SomeHacker44 8y ago

Imagine if they had signed the ubiquitous non-competes we have in the tech-world outside California.

robertwalsh0 8y ago

Making academic journals more accessible is a problem that I’ve been working on the last few years with my project, Scholastica. We provide software that allows journals to manage their entire toolchain from peer-review to publication. Homepage https://www.scholasticahq.com https://www.scholasticahq.com Two journals that use our software: https://www.surveypractice.org https://www.surveypractice.org (OA journal published by American Association for Public Opinion Research) https://discreteanalysisjournal.com https://discreteanalysisjournal.com (arxiv overlay journal started by Fields Medal winner Tim Gowers)

Vinnl 8y ago
Heh, I mentioned you above :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18921700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18921700
- robertwalsh0 8y ago
  Thanks, I really appreciate it :D

xiaodai 8y ago

If you have the means to do so, can I suggest you sponsor one paper that you like to support for open access? It's $600m, which is a significant sum, but if you feel that your career has been helped in a significant way by research performed by others that freely available to you, and if you have the means to do so, this would be a good way to start giving back to the community. Now I just wonder if any of the journals allow such individual contributions.

Xelbair 8y ago

Elsevier has editors?

jcobber 8y ago

this is a bold move for something that as controversial in the academic community about publications. I think this puts into perspective that there are certain biases on which studies gets published aka if you have money you can certainly get published on this paid publications.