7 ms·

I know we all hate Elsevier, and I do, too. But the assumption in this threat that one could get rid of publishers without any thought and with absolutely no do

I know we all hate Elsevier, and I do, too. But the assumption in this threat that one could get rid of publishers without any thought and with absolutely no downside is simplifying it slightly too far. Elsevier currently has a margin of about 35%. That's a lot, and probably too much. But it also means they are spending 65% of revenue on something. Even assuming a decent chunk is marketing and sales, there are a few billion in that industry being spent on editing and coordination tasks. Going from a final draft to a published, peer-reviewed paper involves quite a few menial tasks, and scientists will either need to fill those roles themselves, or someone needs to pay someone else. This is well proven by the current alternative, Open Access journals: they charge authors fees in the high 3-digit range to cover their costs. So, for authors, Open Access means going from providing your work for free to actually paying to publish your work. Of course the institutions will usually cover those fees, and they have exceptions for people who can't afford it (payed by those who can). The research will then be freely available, which is great. But the changeover isn't done with setting up some CMS on some virtual server somewhere.

plg 7y ago
Tell that to math and physics. They seem to be doing just fine.
- notyourday 7y ago
  A few of society journals are doing fine. They are funded by the societies and societies either outsource actual production to the publishers for pay but retain copyright ( and strong arm readers into paying for society membership as the condition of accessing the journal or make authors pay to publish in them ) or produce and publish journals themselves. Publishers make the most of their money by publishing second/third and fourth tier journals not the first tier because in the view of academia someone having access to "Journal of the Society of Librarians" ( circulation : 320 ), and "Cell" has the same value.
whatshisface 7y ago
Given a choice it's better for the author to pay for typesetting because once they have, it can be distributed to readers for free.
- notyourday 7y ago
  Yup. The right question to ask is "Why would the author not do it?"
  - gbrown 7y ago
    Because it's a big upfront cost.
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      (Actual question:) How is a standard journal-style typesetting a big upfront cost? Surely the authors do all the hard parts, make the graphs, section, maths markup, footnotes. What's left that can't be automated in almost every situation?
      - notyourday 7y ago
        You are seriously giving authors too much credit. The vast majority of the journal papers require enormous amount of production editing -- that's exactly why the EICs and societies sold those journals to publishers. Things that I have seen : ( wife was a production editor, I briefly helped an EIC of a society journal that was sold to a publisher ) 1. Graphs do not fit the page or space allotment - journal is uses two column format, author decided it did not apply to them. Graphs do not fit the color scheme - the author decided that the graph will be blue and the legend would be green. This is a black and white journal. Graph is a photograph of a graph, not a graph. Photo was taken on an iphone. 2. Sections went out of order. Author did not use the numbering system and numbered them by hand. Author cross referenced sections by hand, changed the ordering and did not update all of them, referring to non-existent sections. 3. Footnotes referred to non-existent papers. 4. Author included someone else's figures. Author did not obtain a permission to use them. 5. Accepted paper is written in a monospace font in WordPerfect for DOS. In 2014.
dagw 7y ago
Elsevier currently has a margin of about 35%. That's a lot, and probably too much. But it also means they are spending 65% of revenue on something. Elsevier have a lot of products/services other than just publishing journals that they're trying to push. I wouldn't be surprised in most that 65% went to fund those. I suspect even Elsevier sees the writing on the wall is using the massive profits from their publishing arm to try to bootstrap other revenue sources. It's not like the journal publishing side of the business has seen any massive technical improvements over the past decade.
boomboomsubban 7y ago
>there are a few billion in that industry being spent on editing and coordination tasks. I understand why you would think this, but most editing is done by unpaid volunteers. They have 20,000 editors and ~8000 employees. Which means institutions are already "paying" to submit reports, with exceptions for those who can't afford it.
- leemailll 7y ago
  The editing is not done by volunteers, the reviewing process is. Editing, proofreading, layout, and submit related info to different databases need to be done by someone. Editors for academic journals usually did not do the late part.
  - buboard 7y ago
    Editing -> done by authors and reviewers, (paid) editors never make editorial suggestions Proofreading -> $50 on mechanical turk (this is really just proofreading according to a list of detailed rules, they not validating the text) Layout -> Completely useless in the internet age. In fact pasting it all in an HTML page makes it easier to read. Submit related info to different databases -> This should not be a thing at all. It is a thing because their databases are closed-access so they submit data and metadata to paying customers. I dont even think this is covered by subscription/publication costs but from those paying customers. So yeah, i think most ppl would be happy to pay ~$200 for their paper. It helps to weed out trolls too.
geofft 7y ago
This argument sounds very much like the arguments I remember hearing in the early 2000s about open source. "Sure, Microsoft is bad, but can random hobbyists on the internet produce something of the same quality?" "There's just no way that this Finnish dude wrote an entire operating system from scratch, he must have stolen work from this commercial UNIX that took years of paid engineering work to develop." "MySQL is good for people setting up websites at home, but professional users are going to prefer Oracle." Much like with open-source software wasn't so much about it being free as changing the development model (you could see the source, send in patches, and have a direct discussion with the engineers who wrote that code), one of the more interesting changes is how much research progress now happens via preprints or even just blog posts. There is definitely a valuable role for journals as the gatekeepers of what research you should pay attention to and the facilitators of communication, but like account reps that insulate engineering teams from customers and help prioritize what's important, in practice they aren't working well enough any more to justify having them. (And the implication, then, is that this work is hardly menial; you want a person actually familiar with your discipline to triage bugs or sort through preprints. And it turns out you're in a better spot to find or train up those people than the middlemen are.)
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
  So what's Linux market share for desktops these days?
  - geofft 7y ago
    About 40%, because if you're comparing relative to the early 2000s, mobile devices are now filling the role that only desktops filled them. Drawing a distinction makes about as much sense as distinguishing desktops and laptops. Plus, given that when folks like Darl McBride said "He can't have written an entire OS" they were clearly not thinking about just the Linux kernel, I think there's a solid argument for counting macOS and iOS too, both of which depend on the assumption that open-source code is of comparable quality to proprietary, commercially-developed code. Everything from their core kernel to the shell to the database for storing contacts (SQLite) is code developed in ways that the McBrides of the world said was untenable. That bumps it to almost 60%. (Don't try me, I still have my Slashdot-honed debate skills.)
buboard 7y ago
I agree that they provide some service. That service costs at best $500. I just don't see how they can even ask for $5000 for proofreading articles. I don't value the rest of their pre-publication work at all: It is all done by volunteers, and my experience with their (paid) editors is not good: they do just as much a lousy job on getting reviewers to respond in time as any other journal. They change their minds and are very, very swayed by politics. And , tbh, i don't care about the proofreading. Some journals have extremely detailed authoring guidelines that are useless: Typesetting a subscript in italics doesn't provide value to science, and most typos will be found out by anyone who reads your article. The assumption that a paper must be "print ready" is stupid in the 2010s. Anyone can spot your typos and you can correct them on the spot. Proofreading can in no way be a justification for publishing with elsevier or NPG. I found e-life's editorial process much, much more professional and it's open access too. They value the time of scientists and will reject your paper fast. In fact many other journals are experimenting with new formats. Hopefully the new established science reporting format will be something better. The key is to get reviewers to stop reviewing articles for them. It's this that keeps them relevant. Whether the end publication is on wordpress or on medium doesn't matter much. Also, https://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676 https://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-sci...
- sdenton4 7y ago
  (Well, if they become the new standard for academic publishing, it's real real easy to imagine Medium becoming Elsevier 2: Electric Boogaloo.)
sigwinch28 7y ago
> Going from a final draft to a published, peer-reviewed paper involves quite a few menial tasks, and scientists will either need to fill those roles themselves, or someone needs to pay someone else. Which stages are you referring to? In my experiences in CS, publishing a _conference_ paper required: - Writing the paper using a publisher-provided LaTeX documentclass (potentially a significant portion of publisher costs went into developing this style) - Submitting the paper, via third-party conference management systems - Review, performed for free by other researchers - Responding to reviews, performed by me - Submitting a camera-ready version of the paper. The checks were mostly performed automatically (PDF metadata, page size, fonts, text size, balanced last page, page limits, margins, etc.) - Checking of the camera-ready paper (this seems like an actual menial task performed by someone on the publishing side, although I think that this was also contracted out) - Assembling the proceedings PDF (again, I assume this was automated, with the menial task of checking TOCs, headers, and footers) - Attending the conference itself (I assume the most money goes into this, renting the venue, organising AV teams, large amounts of co-ordination) Things then get worse, because one specific publisher charges for intstitutional access, again for Gold OA (though Green OA is a free option), and then several hundred dollars for attending the conference. It seems to me that most of the menial tasks are already automated. A lot of the menial tasks are even contracted out. I have colleagues who go to great lengths to organise local seminar series, run workshops, Perhaps I am missing some, or some of these are much more involved than they appear on the surface.
- leemailll 7y ago
  Cs is different from many science fields. Many if not most fields rely on published papers on journals not a conference. Many of the post-accepted production work still need to be done by human. think about a magazine, they sort of like that for production work
  - ebiester 7y ago
    I know a lot of academics in the social sciences and humanities. Many of these pieces are handled by free labor in these disciplines as well. As paper copies have become increasingly disused, we are seeing that projects like sci-hub can handle the distribution - let's say that it gets a 500k grant for operating expenses and is in turn run on open source software contributed by academic professors who can count it as part of their community involvement for tenure considerations. That means we're talking about the editors and copy editors themselves as the majority of the cost. Solve that by creating a university consortium. Instead of paying Elsevier, they pay a non-profit run at a set of universities who are responsible for a pool of editors. Academia handles so much of this in-house already - there's nothing saying they couldn't do this as well.
foobarbecue 7y ago
If they have a margin of 35%, they are wasting 50%. They do not copyedit. If you drop a nonsense sentance into an Elsevier journal after the volunteer editing stage, it'll be there in the published version. I've noticed plenty of typos in my own papers after publication. > they [open journals] charge authors fees in the high 3-digit range to cover their costs. Most Elsevier journals charge an ADDITIONAL ~$1500 if you want to open access, supposedly to make up for the lost profits. EDIT: correction, I just checked the fee for the Elsevier journal JVGR, the last one I published in. It is $2750 per article!!! https://www.elsevier.com/journals/journal-of-volcanology-and-geothermal-research/0377-0273/open-access-options#fee https://www.elsevier.com/journals/journal-of-volcanology-and... Oh and don't be confused by "green open access" -- that's not open access. It's just typical smarmy BS marketing. How the hell do we allow these people to be the guardians of science!? They don't accomplish anything beyond rent-seeking and rubber-stamping. They are as bad as the MPAA and RIAA. I've published papers in Elsevier journals several times, and I'll probably have to keep doing it, because they are the landlord. They are a major contributing factor to the really serious ignorance problem we have in this country.
- buboard 7y ago
  > It is $2750 per article!!! Elsevier and nature charge $5000 for full open access, and not even in their top journals. Cell reports and scientific reports have high impact factor but are considered second-tier compared to Cell and Nature (The editors of the latter will redirect you to pay to submit to those open access journals if rejected) https://www.cell.com/rights-sharing-embargoes https://www.cell.com/rights-sharing-embargoes And this is all paid with taxpayer money. Good thing that taxpayers don't know about this situation or we d have riots
  - dmitriz 7y ago
    It is public information, how can they not know it?
bigred100 7y ago
I like Elsevier cause they got lotta papers I like to read and I’m not the one who pays the fee anyway so it means nothing else to me
WhitneyLand 7y ago
To consider 35% a lot, it's not considered merely "probable" by most financial folks. It's simply too easy to compare to and see that relatively few businesses are higher. It's really a business dream come true. There's no way to support your reasoning on even roughly estimating their costs by bootstrap deduction, without more information. Maybe a single person could have compensation valued at 100 million dollars. Yes, it happens not to founders but to employees. Cost of sales at a large revenue company like this is usually very high. Top performing sales people are extremely well compensated. It's possible you've guessed correctly, I'm just saying there no reason to assume it's even roughly accurate from your premise. The bottom line is their very existence go against the concept of maximizing shared scientific knowledge. They also apparently consider unethical smear campaigns a standard business tactic.
whereistimbo 7y ago
> But it also means they are spending 65% of revenue on something Who knows if these money ends up in lobbying, manager salaries, etc?
segmondy 7y ago
How do you know the true margin? They can be employing Hollywood accounting. If they are not, that doesn't mean that they are spending 65% on something worth while either, perhaps a different entity could be more efficient and have a margin of 99%.
beowulfey 7y ago
I think a lot of people are confused about what it is UC is trying to accomplish here! They are not saying to Elsevier "we demand everything be open access!" They are not even saying "open access should not cost more in fees!" This is all UC is trying to request: 1) Allow any and all UC research the /option/ of being published open access (by paying the requisite >$1000 fees) --> Elsevier countered by structuring the open access ability such that only about 30% of UC's published output would be able to be open access (i.e. as before, not all journals allow for it still) 2) Allow this, without (massively) changing the total subscription fees UC pays towards the journals --> UC actually proposed a higher subscription cost to cover the transition to open access (based on the current fees associated with open access), and Elsevier countered with a much higher fee with, as stated in (1), 2/3rds of the research not given the option of open access. 3) Allow UC libraries to help cover the cost of the open access fee that researchers must pay to allow the research to be open. --> Elsevier countered with "that's not allowed" TL;DR UC wants ALL Elsevier journals to allow researchers to opt into open access (rather than a small number of them as is current) and they want that option with a reasonable increase in fees to the UC system.
jasonmorton 7y ago
There are some high-quality open access journals (e.g. https://www.emis.de/journals/SIGMA/ https://www.emis.de/journals/SIGMA/) that don't charge authors. They use arxiv overlay. It is entirely possible.
- Nemo_bis 7y ago
  A few hundreds more are listed here: <https://doaj.org/search?source=%7B%22query%22%3A%7B%22filtered%22%3A%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%22bool%22%3A%7B%22must%22%3A%5B%7B%22term%22%3A%7B%22_type%22%3A%22journal%22%7D%7D%2C%7B%22term%22%3A%7B%22index.has_apc.exact%22%3A%22No%22%7D%7D%2C%7B%22term%22%3A%7B%22index.has_seal.exact%22%3A%22Yes%22%7D%7D%5D%7D%7D%2C%22query%22%3A%7B%22match_all%22%3A%7B%7D%7D%7D%7D%2C%22from%22%3A0%2C%22size%22%3A10%7D> https://doaj.org/search?source=%7B%22query%22%3A%7B%22filter...
- dmitriz 7y ago
  In fact, as are all journals from Free Journal Network https://freejournals.org/ https://freejournals.org/, of which SIGMA is a member.
scott_s 7y ago
> Going from a final draft to a published, peer-reviewed paper involves quite a few menial tasks, and scientists will either need to fill those roles themselves, or someone needs to pay someone else. In computer science, the authors do all of this themselves already. The final pdfs me and my authors produce is what gets published.
dmitriz 7y ago
> ... the current alternative, Open Access journals: they charge authors fees in the high 3-digit range to cover their costs. Not the current alternative, just one of many and not the best one: https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/96 https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/96 Calling the APC "the OA model" and conveniently forgetting to mention other options has been precisely the common publishers' rhetoric feeding deliberate public confusion in trying to identify OA with APC, which needless to say, helps their business objectives.

plg 7y ago

Tell that to math and physics. They seem to be doing just fine.

notyourday 7y ago
A few of society journals are doing fine. They are funded by the societies and societies either outsource actual production to the publishers for pay but retain copyright ( and strong arm readers into paying for society membership as the condition of accessing the journal or make authors pay to publish in them ) or produce and publish journals themselves. Publishers make the most of their money by publishing second/third and fourth tier journals not the first tier because in the view of academia someone having access to "Journal of the Society of Librarians" ( circulation : 320 ), and "Cell" has the same value.

whatshisface 7y ago

Given a choice it's better for the author to pay for typesetting because once they have, it can be distributed to readers for free.

notyourday 7y ago
Yup. The right question to ask is "Why would the author not do it?"
- gbrown 7y ago
  Because it's a big upfront cost.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    (Actual question:) How is a standard journal-style typesetting a big upfront cost? Surely the authors do all the hard parts, make the graphs, section, maths markup, footnotes. What's left that can't be automated in almost every situation?
    - notyourday 7y ago
      You are seriously giving authors too much credit. The vast majority of the journal papers require enormous amount of production editing -- that's exactly why the EICs and societies sold those journals to publishers. Things that I have seen : ( wife was a production editor, I briefly helped an EIC of a society journal that was sold to a publisher ) 1. Graphs do not fit the page or space allotment - journal is uses two column format, author decided it did not apply to them. Graphs do not fit the color scheme - the author decided that the graph will be blue and the legend would be green. This is a black and white journal. Graph is a photograph of a graph, not a graph. Photo was taken on an iphone. 2. Sections went out of order. Author did not use the numbering system and numbered them by hand. Author cross referenced sections by hand, changed the ordering and did not update all of them, referring to non-existent sections. 3. Footnotes referred to non-existent papers. 4. Author included someone else's figures. Author did not obtain a permission to use them. 5. Accepted paper is written in a monospace font in WordPerfect for DOS. In 2014.

dagw 7y ago

Elsevier currently has a margin of about 35%. That's a lot, and probably too much. But it also means they are spending 65% of revenue on something. Elsevier have a lot of products/services other than just publishing journals that they're trying to push. I wouldn't be surprised in most that 65% went to fund those. I suspect even Elsevier sees the writing on the wall is using the massive profits from their publishing arm to try to bootstrap other revenue sources. It's not like the journal publishing side of the business has seen any massive technical improvements over the past decade.

boomboomsubban 7y ago

>there are a few billion in that industry being spent on editing and coordination tasks. I understand why you would think this, but most editing is done by unpaid volunteers. They have 20,000 editors and ~8000 employees. Which means institutions are already "paying" to submit reports, with exceptions for those who can't afford it.

leemailll 7y ago
The editing is not done by volunteers, the reviewing process is. Editing, proofreading, layout, and submit related info to different databases need to be done by someone. Editors for academic journals usually did not do the late part.
- buboard 7y ago
  Editing -> done by authors and reviewers, (paid) editors never make editorial suggestions Proofreading -> $50 on mechanical turk (this is really just proofreading according to a list of detailed rules, they not validating the text) Layout -> Completely useless in the internet age. In fact pasting it all in an HTML page makes it easier to read. Submit related info to different databases -> This should not be a thing at all. It is a thing because their databases are closed-access so they submit data and metadata to paying customers. I dont even think this is covered by subscription/publication costs but from those paying customers. So yeah, i think most ppl would be happy to pay ~$200 for their paper. It helps to weed out trolls too.

geofft 7y ago

This argument sounds very much like the arguments I remember hearing in the early 2000s about open source. "Sure, Microsoft is bad, but can random hobbyists on the internet produce something of the same quality?" "There's just no way that this Finnish dude wrote an entire operating system from scratch, he must have stolen work from this commercial UNIX that took years of paid engineering work to develop." "MySQL is good for people setting up websites at home, but professional users are going to prefer Oracle." Much like with open-source software wasn't so much about it being free as changing the development model (you could see the source, send in patches, and have a direct discussion with the engineers who wrote that code), one of the more interesting changes is how much research progress now happens via preprints or even just blog posts. There is definitely a valuable role for journals as the gatekeepers of what research you should pay attention to and the facilitators of communication, but like account reps that insulate engineering teams from customers and help prioritize what's important, in practice they aren't working well enough any more to justify having them. (And the implication, then, is that this work is hardly menial; you want a person actually familiar with your discipline to triage bugs or sort through preprints. And it turns out you're in a better spot to find or train up those people than the middlemen are.)

IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
So what's Linux market share for desktops these days?
- geofft 7y ago
  About 40%, because if you're comparing relative to the early 2000s, mobile devices are now filling the role that only desktops filled them. Drawing a distinction makes about as much sense as distinguishing desktops and laptops. Plus, given that when folks like Darl McBride said "He can't have written an entire OS" they were clearly not thinking about just the Linux kernel, I think there's a solid argument for counting macOS and iOS too, both of which depend on the assumption that open-source code is of comparable quality to proprietary, commercially-developed code. Everything from their core kernel to the shell to the database for storing contacts (SQLite) is code developed in ways that the McBrides of the world said was untenable. That bumps it to almost 60%. (Don't try me, I still have my Slashdot-honed debate skills.)

buboard 7y ago

I agree that they provide some service. That service costs at best $500. I just don't see how they can even ask for $5000 for proofreading articles. I don't value the rest of their pre-publication work at all: It is all done by volunteers, and my experience with their (paid) editors is not good: they do just as much a lousy job on getting reviewers to respond in time as any other journal. They change their minds and are very, very swayed by politics. And , tbh, i don't care about the proofreading. Some journals have extremely detailed authoring guidelines that are useless: Typesetting a subscript in italics doesn't provide value to science, and most typos will be found out by anyone who reads your article. The assumption that a paper must be "print ready" is stupid in the 2010s. Anyone can spot your typos and you can correct them on the spot. Proofreading can in no way be a justification for publishing with elsevier or NPG. I found e-life's editorial process much, much more professional and it's open access too. They value the time of scientists and will reject your paper fast. In fact many other journals are experimenting with new formats. Hopefully the new established science reporting format will be something better. The key is to get reviewers to stop reviewing articles for them. It's this that keeps them relevant. Whether the end publication is on wordpress or on medium doesn't matter much. Also, https://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676 https://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-sci...

sdenton4 7y ago
(Well, if they become the new standard for academic publishing, it's real real easy to imagine Medium becoming Elsevier 2: Electric Boogaloo.)

sigwinch28 7y ago

> Going from a final draft to a published, peer-reviewed paper involves quite a few menial tasks, and scientists will either need to fill those roles themselves, or someone needs to pay someone else. Which stages are you referring to? In my experiences in CS, publishing a _conference_ paper required: - Writing the paper using a publisher-provided LaTeX documentclass (potentially a significant portion of publisher costs went into developing this style) - Submitting the paper, via third-party conference management systems - Review, performed for free by other researchers - Responding to reviews, performed by me - Submitting a camera-ready version of the paper. The checks were mostly performed automatically (PDF metadata, page size, fonts, text size, balanced last page, page limits, margins, etc.) - Checking of the camera-ready paper (this seems like an actual menial task performed by someone on the publishing side, although I think that this was also contracted out) - Assembling the proceedings PDF (again, I assume this was automated, with the menial task of checking TOCs, headers, and footers) - Attending the conference itself (I assume the most money goes into this, renting the venue, organising AV teams, large amounts of co-ordination) Things then get worse, because one specific publisher charges for intstitutional access, again for Gold OA (though Green OA is a free option), and then several hundred dollars for attending the conference. It seems to me that most of the menial tasks are already automated. A lot of the menial tasks are even contracted out. I have colleagues who go to great lengths to organise local seminar series, run workshops, Perhaps I am missing some, or some of these are much more involved than they appear on the surface.

leemailll 7y ago
Cs is different from many science fields. Many if not most fields rely on published papers on journals not a conference. Many of the post-accepted production work still need to be done by human. think about a magazine, they sort of like that for production work
- ebiester 7y ago
  I know a lot of academics in the social sciences and humanities. Many of these pieces are handled by free labor in these disciplines as well. As paper copies have become increasingly disused, we are seeing that projects like sci-hub can handle the distribution - let's say that it gets a 500k grant for operating expenses and is in turn run on open source software contributed by academic professors who can count it as part of their community involvement for tenure considerations. That means we're talking about the editors and copy editors themselves as the majority of the cost. Solve that by creating a university consortium. Instead of paying Elsevier, they pay a non-profit run at a set of universities who are responsible for a pool of editors. Academia handles so much of this in-house already - there's nothing saying they couldn't do this as well.

foobarbecue 7y ago

If they have a margin of 35%, they are wasting 50%. They do not copyedit. If you drop a nonsense sentance into an Elsevier journal after the volunteer editing stage, it'll be there in the published version. I've noticed plenty of typos in my own papers after publication. > they [open journals] charge authors fees in the high 3-digit range to cover their costs. Most Elsevier journals charge an ADDITIONAL ~$1500 if you want to open access, supposedly to make up for the lost profits. EDIT: correction, I just checked the fee for the Elsevier journal JVGR, the last one I published in. It is $2750 per article!!! https://www.elsevier.com/journals/journal-of-volcanology-and-geothermal-research/0377-0273/open-access-options#fee https://www.elsevier.com/journals/journal-of-volcanology-and... Oh and don't be confused by "green open access" -- that's not open access. It's just typical smarmy BS marketing. How the hell do we allow these people to be the guardians of science!? They don't accomplish anything beyond rent-seeking and rubber-stamping. They are as bad as the MPAA and RIAA. I've published papers in Elsevier journals several times, and I'll probably have to keep doing it, because they are the landlord. They are a major contributing factor to the really serious ignorance problem we have in this country.

buboard 7y ago
> It is $2750 per article!!! Elsevier and nature charge $5000 for full open access, and not even in their top journals. Cell reports and scientific reports have high impact factor but are considered second-tier compared to Cell and Nature (The editors of the latter will redirect you to pay to submit to those open access journals if rejected) https://www.cell.com/rights-sharing-embargoes https://www.cell.com/rights-sharing-embargoes And this is all paid with taxpayer money. Good thing that taxpayers don't know about this situation or we d have riots
- dmitriz 7y ago
  It is public information, how can they not know it?

bigred100 7y ago

I like Elsevier cause they got lotta papers I like to read and I’m not the one who pays the fee anyway so it means nothing else to me

WhitneyLand 7y ago

To consider 35% a lot, it's not considered merely "probable" by most financial folks. It's simply too easy to compare to and see that relatively few businesses are higher. It's really a business dream come true. There's no way to support your reasoning on even roughly estimating their costs by bootstrap deduction, without more information. Maybe a single person could have compensation valued at 100 million dollars. Yes, it happens not to founders but to employees. Cost of sales at a large revenue company like this is usually very high. Top performing sales people are extremely well compensated. It's possible you've guessed correctly, I'm just saying there no reason to assume it's even roughly accurate from your premise. The bottom line is their very existence go against the concept of maximizing shared scientific knowledge. They also apparently consider unethical smear campaigns a standard business tactic.

whereistimbo 7y ago

> But it also means they are spending 65% of revenue on something Who knows if these money ends up in lobbying, manager salaries, etc?

segmondy 7y ago

How do you know the true margin? They can be employing Hollywood accounting. If they are not, that doesn't mean that they are spending 65% on something worth while either, perhaps a different entity could be more efficient and have a margin of 99%.

beowulfey 7y ago

I think a lot of people are confused about what it is UC is trying to accomplish here! They are not saying to Elsevier "we demand everything be open access!" They are not even saying "open access should not cost more in fees!" This is all UC is trying to request: 1) Allow any and all UC research the /option/ of being published open access (by paying the requisite >$1000 fees) --> Elsevier countered by structuring the open access ability such that only about 30% of UC's published output would be able to be open access (i.e. as before, not all journals allow for it still) 2) Allow this, without (massively) changing the total subscription fees UC pays towards the journals --> UC actually proposed a higher subscription cost to cover the transition to open access (based on the current fees associated with open access), and Elsevier countered with a much higher fee with, as stated in (1), 2/3rds of the research not given the option of open access. 3) Allow UC libraries to help cover the cost of the open access fee that researchers must pay to allow the research to be open. --> Elsevier countered with "that's not allowed" TL;DR UC wants ALL Elsevier journals to allow researchers to opt into open access (rather than a small number of them as is current) and they want that option with a reasonable increase in fees to the UC system.

jasonmorton 7y ago

There are some high-quality open access journals (e.g. https://www.emis.de/journals/SIGMA/ https://www.emis.de/journals/SIGMA/) that don't charge authors. They use arxiv overlay. It is entirely possible.

Nemo_bis 7y ago
A few hundreds more are listed here: <https://doaj.org/search?source=%7B%22query%22%3A%7B%22filtered%22%3A%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%22bool%22%3A%7B%22must%22%3A%5B%7B%22term%22%3A%7B%22_type%22%3A%22journal%22%7D%7D%2C%7B%22term%22%3A%7B%22index.has_apc.exact%22%3A%22No%22%7D%7D%2C%7B%22term%22%3A%7B%22index.has_seal.exact%22%3A%22Yes%22%7D%7D%5D%7D%7D%2C%22query%22%3A%7B%22match_all%22%3A%7B%7D%7D%7D%7D%2C%22from%22%3A0%2C%22size%22%3A10%7D> https://doaj.org/search?source=%7B%22query%22%3A%7B%22filter...
dmitriz 7y ago
In fact, as are all journals from Free Journal Network https://freejournals.org/ https://freejournals.org/, of which SIGMA is a member.

scott_s 7y ago

> Going from a final draft to a published, peer-reviewed paper involves quite a few menial tasks, and scientists will either need to fill those roles themselves, or someone needs to pay someone else. In computer science, the authors do all of this themselves already. The final pdfs me and my authors produce is what gets published.

dmitriz 7y ago

> ... the current alternative, Open Access journals: they charge authors fees in the high 3-digit range to cover their costs. Not the current alternative, just one of many and not the best one: https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/96 https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/96 Calling the APC "the OA model" and conveniently forgetting to mention other options has been precisely the common publishers' rhetoric feeding deliberate public confusion in trying to identify OA with APC, which needless to say, helps their business objectives.