4 ms·
> 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
by 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 agoCs 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 agoI 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.
- scott_s 7y agoCS conferences still have peer-reviewed papers. Authors do all of the work for making the final paper. CS does have journals, and it's much the same in that authors do almost all of the work. (I have one time seen changes to a journal article I was a co-author on come from people working for the journal. Every other time the literal pdf we provide is what got published.)
- dmitriz 7y agoThen mathematics must also be different. And physics. And many other areas. How come the journal costs are still as high there?