9 ms·

Cornell Will Reveal Secret Academic Journal Pricing

129 points by Jd 16y ago

markbao 16y ago
I'm surprised and relieved to see this coming from an Ivy. Huge kudos for moving science forward while leaving the money leeches behind.
- andrewf 16y ago
  It is Cornell. They run arXiv and host its primary mirror.
  - joshes 16y ago
    Indeed. From the university behind arXiv, this is less of a surprise. Having said that, however, it is obviously a big step and should be applauded by the scientific community at large.
  - markbao 16y ago
    Point.
- dasht 16y ago
  Only "an Ivy" or similar has the buying power and (more importantly) social capital for such a move. (E.g., consider how the elite social network lights up if a particular journal of note insists that therefore they won't sell to Cornell.)
  - leoc 16y ago
    At the same time, the top-50 (or -whatever) institutions have the least incentive to rock the boat: they're usually rolling in "buying power" :) and their faculty are relatively likely to be among the winners of the game as it's currently set up (negative-sum game though it is). I think it's safe to say that if the top 50 were sufficiently motivated to make closed-access journals go away they would already be gone by now.
stevetjoa 16y ago
One of the most astounding aspects of academic research, to me, is the price of journal publication. When you author a book, you earn some money. Not a lot, perhaps, but some. When you author a journal paper, not only do you not earn any money, but you pay the publisher several thousands USD in fees! For example, Nature: http://www.nature.com/ajg/open_access_faqs.html http://www.nature.com/ajg/open_access_faqs.html. Even worse, you must sign a copyright form that transfers ownership to the publisher. I understand that there is a staff behind the scenes that puts these publications together -- editors, admin. staff, etc. -- and they need to be paid. But some journals have acquired such prestige over the years that they can name their price, and the manuscript submissions will keep coming. So perhaps these prices are not so surprising. In the debate over which makes the most impact -- journal vs. conference paper -- most academics will say the same thing: journal, journal, journal. That message has been beaten into our heads. But in my opinion, we are entering a new period of transition similar to what newspapers have been facing. I think it is possible that conferences and journals with new subscription models will slowly usurp a share of manuscript submissions away from journals with traditional models. For example, in ACM and certain IEEE disciplines, conference papers already reign as the preferred publication format among researchers. Of course, in other areas such as law and medicine, there is probably no hope. Things will remain the way they are.
- TillE 16y ago
  > we are entering a new period of transition I certainly hope so. I cannot for the life of me understand the economics of academic journals. They do a bit of editing and send out the papers for peer review. And that's about it, right? Where's all the money going? "Curators" are important, certainly. I want respected people to select articles worthy of publication. I don't want them to then lock those articles up where they're only accessible to academics and those willing to pay obscene fees for individual access.
  - impendia 16y ago
    You claim not to understand, but I strongly suspect that you have correctly figured out exactly where all the money's going.
leoc 16y ago
Since copyright only protects expression (at least in countries which haven't introduced protections for databases), couldn't important papers be liberated through a cleanroom process? Say that person A reads the original paper and produces a paraphrase that's intended to be fully accurate and as clear as possible but contains whatever circumlocutions are necessary to avoid reusing the choice of expression in the original paper. This paraphrase is then handed to person B "in the cleanroom" who hasn't seen the original paper. B produces a concise and well-written paper from A's notes. A then reviews B's work, informing him of any misunderstandings that have crept in, still without using the wording in the original paper: this is repeated until A and B are satisfied. All communications between A and B are monitored and retained to prove that the cleanroom was not contaminated. It would be a fairly slow process, so surely only a small proportion of papers could be put through it. But if the work were focussed on the most important/high-impact papers which are under restrictive copyrights, might it not have a meaningful effect?
- stevetjoa 16y ago
  In theory, perhaps. In practice, this sort of already exists. And the process can take years. For example, some IEEE journals take six months per review round! (I know; I've just been through one!) Why does it take so long? I have no idea; reviewers just wait until the last minute, anyway. Another problem is the definition of an "important" paper. That, itself, sparks debate. One more problem is corruption. When reviews are not blind, bias can sneak into the review process. It happens. And it can distort all notions of what "important" papers are.
  - leoc 16y ago
    That cleanroom process has things in common with journal peer review, but it's a different process with a very different objective. As to speed specifically, I was envisaging a relatively small group of readers who are competent to understand the papers they're targeting and who are highly motivated to upset the journals, while journal peer review relies on a (hopefully!) wider and more diffuse group of people each of whom is a highly-cited leader in the area for which he or she is asked to review, and for whom a review request is a tiresome social obligation. So the cleanroom process would obviously be relatively labour-intensive (and thus slow) but it shouldn't involve the epic delays involved in begging reviews from scientific (or engineering) eminences. As to which papers are important, for an effort like this to accomplish its objectives - bring some direct relief to the public, and bring some hurt to journal publishers - it's necessary to have a generally good sense of which papers are important or highly in demand, but not a perfect one. In particular, the objective in this case isn't to second-guess which papers ought to get published by journals or become popular with readers, but to give readers some papers they most want and take control of those papers from the journals.
west1737 16y ago
I'm a big fan of this move by Cornell, but not, I think for the same reasons as most. First, I can't fault journals for charging fees. After all, they need to make money, and as long as it's a good value, people will pay it. I like it because it will add some much needed competition into the journal pricing. Most likely, Nature is not going to change their pricing. If you have an article worthy of being published there, most people are going to pay a few grand and be happy to do so just to have their paper published. Assuming publishing prices do become transparent, I don't think it will drastically change the pricing system, but it will allow people to evaluate the value of such a publication. The best analog I can think of are colleges themselves (and not just because of the academic connection). The value of both colleges and journals are significantly affected by their reputation. The price of the colleges have not leveled out, nor have they gone to zero (closer the opposite of both), but the prices do reflect the perceived "value" of that education. Hopefully the same will happen for journals.
- lazylland 16y ago
  I wonder if the assumption "they need to make money" is necessary. If we agree that the actual value of a journal (or its 'profit') is the voluntary participation of renowned scholars, then the journal is at best an administrative function, or a 'cost center' that has to actually be minimized !!
keane 16y ago
This reminds me of the Overprice Tags project by Benjamin Mako Hill of the MIT Media Lab/Sloan. See http://mako.cc/fun/overpricetags/ http://mako.cc/fun/overpricetags/ Students at MIT, Brown, and other schools labelled the journals in their libraries with pricetags showing the cost the university was paying for each journal. Nuclear Physics A&B <//elsevier.com/locate/nuclphysa> cost $25,888 in 2005. Similarly, Students for Free Culture have been working on both the Open University Project and the Open Access Project, pressing universities to reform their use of journals. See http://freeculture.org/ http://freeculture.org/ Lastly, public universities have been known to disclose the cost of journals they subscribe to -regardless of NDA status- at the issuing of FOIA or CPRA type requests. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Public_Records_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Public_Records_Act
impendia 16y ago
"Topology" was the most prestigious journal in its field (i.e., mathematical topology). It and lots of other journals got bought up by Elsevier, who then proceeded to raise the prices to stratospheric levels. The editors decided they didn't feel like playing along: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/topology-letter.pdf http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/topology-letter.pdf
- light3 16y ago
  Thats awesome, the editors left and started the Journal of Topology, run at significantly lower cost: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topology_(journal) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topology_(journal) http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/jtopol/editorial_board.html http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/jtopol/editorial_...
patio11 16y ago
Forgive me for being a cynic, but with tuition bills at about $40k per year, ground getting broken on $X0 ~ $Y00 million construction projects yearly, and endowments which rival hedge funds (Cornell's is relatively modest at a mere $4.3 billion dollars), I have to wonder why $4,000 a year for a journal sparks moral outrage and why the solution isn't "Alright, screw it, this is so easy we'll just do it ourselves." It's like California getting worked up about the number of free donuts they give state employees. I mean, OK, I get it: high symbolism, makes for a good headline. But come on, one look at salaries, pensions, or health care shows where the actual problems are. Similarly, if one wanted to look at the influence of money on the scientific community, it is highly nonobvious to me that academic journals are where the money is uniquely concentrating.
- anghyflawn 16y ago
  OK, I'll bite. Assuming an average figure of $4,000 per journal per year, how much does will a university like Cornell spend per year on all journals? I work at a smallish European university, and even in my smallish field of the humanities we have access to about a hundred journals (give or take); I dread to think how many journals the university library subscribes to in total, plus dissertation databases such as ProQuest, non-academic periodicals archives, yadda yadda. For something like Cornell, I suspect the figure has to be much higher (more journals, more subscribers). Plus, it's fine to think that Cornell can afford it; but can a second-rank public university? It probably doesn't, it has neither the money nor the bargaining power. Which means that its academics have limited access to advances in their fields. How can that be fine?
  - justincormack 16y ago
    It is not about second rank universities. It is about universities in the third world and people who cannot afford to go to universities at all, and it is about the support of universities for open access to learning.
    - anghyflawn 16y ago
      Certainly. Everything that applies to second-rank universities in this respect applies to even less advantaged institutions and scholars, magnified.
danbmil99 16y ago
It's about time, these idiot troll publishers are on the level of thugs charging store owners for "protection" against same thugs. Who needs a paper journal anymore?

129 points by Jd 16y ago

I'm surprised and relieved to see this coming from an Ivy. Huge kudos for moving science forward while leaving the money leeches behind.

andrewf 16y ago
It is Cornell. They run arXiv and host its primary mirror.
- joshes 16y ago
  Indeed. From the university behind arXiv, this is less of a surprise. Having said that, however, it is obviously a big step and should be applauded by the scientific community at large.
- markbao 16y ago
  Point.
dasht 16y ago
Only "an Ivy" or similar has the buying power and (more importantly) social capital for such a move. (E.g., consider how the elite social network lights up if a particular journal of note insists that therefore they won't sell to Cornell.)
- leoc 16y ago
  At the same time, the top-50 (or -whatever) institutions have the least incentive to rock the boat: they're usually rolling in "buying power" :) and their faculty are relatively likely to be among the winners of the game as it's currently set up (negative-sum game though it is). I think it's safe to say that if the top 50 were sufficiently motivated to make closed-access journals go away they would already be gone by now.

stevetjoa 16y ago

One of the most astounding aspects of academic research, to me, is the price of journal publication. When you author a book, you earn some money. Not a lot, perhaps, but some. When you author a journal paper, not only do you not earn any money, but you pay the publisher several thousands USD in fees! For example, Nature: http://www.nature.com/ajg/open_access_faqs.html http://www.nature.com/ajg/open_access_faqs.html. Even worse, you must sign a copyright form that transfers ownership to the publisher. I understand that there is a staff behind the scenes that puts these publications together -- editors, admin. staff, etc. -- and they need to be paid. But some journals have acquired such prestige over the years that they can name their price, and the manuscript submissions will keep coming. So perhaps these prices are not so surprising. In the debate over which makes the most impact -- journal vs. conference paper -- most academics will say the same thing: journal, journal, journal. That message has been beaten into our heads. But in my opinion, we are entering a new period of transition similar to what newspapers have been facing. I think it is possible that conferences and journals with new subscription models will slowly usurp a share of manuscript submissions away from journals with traditional models. For example, in ACM and certain IEEE disciplines, conference papers already reign as the preferred publication format among researchers. Of course, in other areas such as law and medicine, there is probably no hope. Things will remain the way they are.

TillE 16y ago
> we are entering a new period of transition I certainly hope so. I cannot for the life of me understand the economics of academic journals. They do a bit of editing and send out the papers for peer review. And that's about it, right? Where's all the money going? "Curators" are important, certainly. I want respected people to select articles worthy of publication. I don't want them to then lock those articles up where they're only accessible to academics and those willing to pay obscene fees for individual access.
- impendia 16y ago
  You claim not to understand, but I strongly suspect that you have correctly figured out exactly where all the money's going.

leoc 16y ago

Since copyright only protects expression (at least in countries which haven't introduced protections for databases), couldn't important papers be liberated through a cleanroom process? Say that person A reads the original paper and produces a paraphrase that's intended to be fully accurate and as clear as possible but contains whatever circumlocutions are necessary to avoid reusing the choice of expression in the original paper. This paraphrase is then handed to person B "in the cleanroom" who hasn't seen the original paper. B produces a concise and well-written paper from A's notes. A then reviews B's work, informing him of any misunderstandings that have crept in, still without using the wording in the original paper: this is repeated until A and B are satisfied. All communications between A and B are monitored and retained to prove that the cleanroom was not contaminated. It would be a fairly slow process, so surely only a small proportion of papers could be put through it. But if the work were focussed on the most important/high-impact papers which are under restrictive copyrights, might it not have a meaningful effect?

stevetjoa 16y ago
In theory, perhaps. In practice, this sort of already exists. And the process can take years. For example, some IEEE journals take six months per review round! (I know; I've just been through one!) Why does it take so long? I have no idea; reviewers just wait until the last minute, anyway. Another problem is the definition of an "important" paper. That, itself, sparks debate. One more problem is corruption. When reviews are not blind, bias can sneak into the review process. It happens. And it can distort all notions of what "important" papers are.
- leoc 16y ago
  That cleanroom process has things in common with journal peer review, but it's a different process with a very different objective. As to speed specifically, I was envisaging a relatively small group of readers who are competent to understand the papers they're targeting and who are highly motivated to upset the journals, while journal peer review relies on a (hopefully!) wider and more diffuse group of people each of whom is a highly-cited leader in the area for which he or she is asked to review, and for whom a review request is a tiresome social obligation. So the cleanroom process would obviously be relatively labour-intensive (and thus slow) but it shouldn't involve the epic delays involved in begging reviews from scientific (or engineering) eminences. As to which papers are important, for an effort like this to accomplish its objectives - bring some direct relief to the public, and bring some hurt to journal publishers - it's necessary to have a generally good sense of which papers are important or highly in demand, but not a perfect one. In particular, the objective in this case isn't to second-guess which papers ought to get published by journals or become popular with readers, but to give readers some papers they most want and take control of those papers from the journals.

west1737 16y ago

I'm a big fan of this move by Cornell, but not, I think for the same reasons as most. First, I can't fault journals for charging fees. After all, they need to make money, and as long as it's a good value, people will pay it. I like it because it will add some much needed competition into the journal pricing. Most likely, Nature is not going to change their pricing. If you have an article worthy of being published there, most people are going to pay a few grand and be happy to do so just to have their paper published. Assuming publishing prices do become transparent, I don't think it will drastically change the pricing system, but it will allow people to evaluate the value of such a publication. The best analog I can think of are colleges themselves (and not just because of the academic connection). The value of both colleges and journals are significantly affected by their reputation. The price of the colleges have not leveled out, nor have they gone to zero (closer the opposite of both), but the prices do reflect the perceived "value" of that education. Hopefully the same will happen for journals.

lazylland 16y ago
I wonder if the assumption "they need to make money" is necessary. If we agree that the actual value of a journal (or its 'profit') is the voluntary participation of renowned scholars, then the journal is at best an administrative function, or a 'cost center' that has to actually be minimized !!

keane 16y ago

This reminds me of the Overprice Tags project by Benjamin Mako Hill of the MIT Media Lab/Sloan. See http://mako.cc/fun/overpricetags/ http://mako.cc/fun/overpricetags/ Students at MIT, Brown, and other schools labelled the journals in their libraries with pricetags showing the cost the university was paying for each journal. Nuclear Physics A&B <//elsevier.com/locate/nuclphysa> cost $25,888 in 2005. Similarly, Students for Free Culture have been working on both the Open University Project and the Open Access Project, pressing universities to reform their use of journals. See http://freeculture.org/ http://freeculture.org/ Lastly, public universities have been known to disclose the cost of journals they subscribe to -regardless of NDA status- at the issuing of FOIA or CPRA type requests. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Public_Records_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Public_Records_Act

impendia 16y ago

"Topology" was the most prestigious journal in its field (i.e., mathematical topology). It and lots of other journals got bought up by Elsevier, who then proceeded to raise the prices to stratospheric levels. The editors decided they didn't feel like playing along: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/topology-letter.pdf http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/topology-letter.pdf

light3 16y ago
Thats awesome, the editors left and started the Journal of Topology, run at significantly lower cost: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topology_(journal) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topology_(journal) http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/jtopol/editorial_board.html http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/jtopol/editorial_...

patio11 16y ago

Forgive me for being a cynic, but with tuition bills at about $40k per year, ground getting broken on $X0 ~ $Y00 million construction projects yearly, and endowments which rival hedge funds (Cornell's is relatively modest at a mere $4.3 billion dollars), I have to wonder why $4,000 a year for a journal sparks moral outrage and why the solution isn't "Alright, screw it, this is so easy we'll just do it ourselves." It's like California getting worked up about the number of free donuts they give state employees. I mean, OK, I get it: high symbolism, makes for a good headline. But come on, one look at salaries, pensions, or health care shows where the actual problems are. Similarly, if one wanted to look at the influence of money on the scientific community, it is highly nonobvious to me that academic journals are where the money is uniquely concentrating.

anghyflawn 16y ago
OK, I'll bite. Assuming an average figure of $4,000 per journal per year, how much does will a university like Cornell spend per year on all journals? I work at a smallish European university, and even in my smallish field of the humanities we have access to about a hundred journals (give or take); I dread to think how many journals the university library subscribes to in total, plus dissertation databases such as ProQuest, non-academic periodicals archives, yadda yadda. For something like Cornell, I suspect the figure has to be much higher (more journals, more subscribers). Plus, it's fine to think that Cornell can afford it; but can a second-rank public university? It probably doesn't, it has neither the money nor the bargaining power. Which means that its academics have limited access to advances in their fields. How can that be fine?
- justincormack 16y ago
  It is not about second rank universities. It is about universities in the third world and people who cannot afford to go to universities at all, and it is about the support of universities for open access to learning.
  - anghyflawn 16y ago
    Certainly. Everything that applies to second-rank universities in this respect applies to even less advantaged institutions and scholars, magnified.

danbmil99 16y ago

It's about time, these idiot troll publishers are on the level of thugs charging store owners for "protection" against same thugs. Who needs a paper journal anymore?