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AAS Journals Will Switch to Open Access
- elefanten 5y agoThat's great news and a step in the right direction for research!
- resoluteteeth 5y agoFor a second I thought this said "AAAS" but no, I guess Science is not going Open Access.
- yawnxyz 5y agoI was so excited to see Science going Open Access as well... but one publisher is still a step in the right direction.
- xqcgrek2 5y agoPublication charges for authors and students will probably rise for a factor of 2 or more... open access journals in technical fields are approaching $500 per page. This will basically lock out people in the developing world from publishing in these journals.
- westurner 5y ago> JOSS (Journal of Open Source Software) has managed to get articles indexed by Google Scholar [rescience_gscholar]. They publish their costs [joss_costs]: $275 Crossref membership, DOIs: $1/paper: >> Assuming a publication rate of 200 papers per year this works out at ~$4.75 per paper > [joss_costs]: https://joss.theoj.org/about#costs https://joss.theoj.org/about#costs ^^ from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24517711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24517711 & this log of my non- markdown non- W3C Web Annotation threaded comments with URIs: https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-24517711 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-24517711
- xqcgrek2 5y agoA low cost of $1/page just shows how much of a scam even prestigious journals have become for all involved parties. Referees work for free. Submitting authors pay through the nose for presumably typesetting and proofs whose true cost is closer to $1/page rather than hundreds. Editors are overworked. Sci-Hub was supposed to disrupt that industry, but it seems all it's done is shift burden to authors and created pay-for publishing.
- westurner 5y agoModeration costs money, too. Additional ScholarlaryArticle "Journal" costs: moderation, BinderHub / JupyterLite white label SaaS?, hosting data and archived reproducible container images on IPFS and academictorrents and Git LFS, hosting {SQL, SPARQL, GraphQL,} queries and/or a SOLID HTTPS REST API and/or RSS feeds with dynamic content but static feed item URIs and/or ActivityStreams and/or https://schema.org/Action https://schema.org/Action & InteractAction & https://schema.org/ReviewAction https://schema.org/ReviewAction & ClaimReview fact check reviews, W3C Web Notifications, CRM + emailing list, keeping a legit cohort of impactful peer reviewers, #LinkedData for #LinkedResearch: Dokieli, parsing https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle citation styles,
- westurner 5y ago> keeping a legit cohort of impactful peer reviewers, [who are time-constrained and unpaid, as well] "Ask HN: How are online communities established?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24443965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24443965 re: building community, MCOS Marginal Cost of Service, CLV Customer Lifetime Value, etc
- westurner 5y agoFrom https://joss.theoj.org/about#costs https://joss.theoj.org/about#costs : > Income: JOSS has an experimental collaboration with AAS publishing where authors submitting to one of the AAS journals can also publish a companion software paper in JOSS, thereby receiving a review of their software. For this service, JOSS receives a small donation from AAS publishing. In 2019, JOSS received $200 as a result of this collaboration.
- corty 5y agoThat is a new round of FUD from the predatory publishing industry. On balance, open access helps the developing world far more and costs less: Because access to journal and conference articles is now possible. Before open access, article fees around $50 for reading a single article meant, that to write an article you had to spend the $500 on the roughly 10 (usually more) related articles you needed to research and reference. To even get to the stage of writing an article, you need to read quite a few, impossible with the sky-high subscription fees that even rich western institutions balk at. And as everywhere, university libraries reimburse publishing fees out of the subscription cost they saved. Open Access is cheaper, fairer and especially beneficial to education in the developing world. Of course reading articles costs nothing on SciHub, but I guess the people you are working for don't want that to be known, eh?
- xqcgrek2 5y agoNo, Sci-hub and the arxiv was always an option for people in developing countries. All that's changed for researchers now is they have to fork over a factor or two or more to publish in the same journals as a few years ago.
- corty 5y agoWell, they were always an option, but becoming less so. Increasingly financial aid from the west and trade agreements are bound to "IP protection", meaning the protection of the scientific publishing racket at the expense of scientists and SciHub (among other things). Pretending that things are fine now is dishonest imho. Business practices of the IP industry aren't suddenly a-ok just because you can pirate your way around it and pretend that therefore they aren't harming anyone.
- jrochkind1 5y agoPresumably university libraries are also forking over much less, since the increased publication fees are replacing drop in subscription fees? So part of it is the university just needs to figure out how to appropriately reallocate it's resources? I wonder how often the university employers of article authors pay these publication fees, and if those budgets are going up? (If university library subscription fees are not going down, then that's another sort of mystery to look into).
- privong 5y ago> Publication charges for authors and students will probably rise for a factor of 2 or more... open access journals in technical fields are approaching $500 per page. There's a charge comparison table[0]. Prices are going up, but they'll be lower than the previous AAS Journals Open Access premium. Their sample paper prices are $60-225 per page (because AAS journals have "quanta" charges, where a quanta is a set number of words, a figure, etc.). https://journals.aas.org/oa/#charge_comparison https://journals.aas.org/oa/#charge_comparison
- travisporter 5y agoThank you for this comment! At least they acknowledge this and offer waivers.
- resiros 5y agoI disagree. Most open access journals offer lower, and sometimes free pricing, for researchers from developing countries. For example PloS One (one of the main open access journals) offer free publishing to ~100 countries <https://plos.org/publish/fees/group-1-countries/ https://plos.org/publish/fees/group-1-countries/>) This does not affect the open access business model: Only a small fraction of papers is submitted by researchers in developing countries.
- OmicronCeti 5y agoPloS One is not really open access... The vast majority of journals function under a Subscription/Paid open-access model, PloS One just mandates the second option. I've forked out >$4k for a high-quality journal to make my research open-access. Or I could have paid $0 and it would be behind a paywall. Some like Nature, publish largely open-access but it can cost >$8k to be published there.
- jrochkind1 5y agoThey don't discuss how they'll be balancing the books without subscription charges? That's the interesting part!
- peter303 5y agoGenerally open-access charges the author. $1000-$2000 an article is typical. Research grant applications include modest conference and publication costs.
- gammarator 5y agoHistorically about 2/3rds of AAS journals revenue came from page charges rather than subscriptions, so the shortfall is not enormous.
- panabee 5y agowhat is the cost structure for a typical journal? if reviewers work free, where does the bulk of the money go? there is so much publicly-funded research bottled up in journals like science. how do we break this model so that taxpayer-funded research is more like wikipedia and available to all?
- corty 5y agoThe estimated cost structure is 1% webserver operation, 1% indian editing team worsening submitted papers, 1% printing stuff that still is delivered on paper, 2% office staff, 25% advertising, 30% legal cost to harass and prosecute students, researchers and universities, 20% executive compensation, 20% dividends.
- gammarator 5y agoIt's worth noting that the AAS is a nonprofit scientific society, and so has different incentives than a for-profit publisher like Springer. You can take a look at the AAS tax returns here: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/210735173 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/210... In 2019 the Journals division reported $7.3M revenue against $5.6M expenses. Direct-paid salaries appear to be a minority of expenses; the AAS journals are hosted by IOP publishing (https://iopscience.iop.org/ https://iopscience.iop.org/), so presumably IOP charges for its journal hosting platform are a significant proportion of the remaining expenses.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y agoWhy should hosting papers cost so much? Unless their fee involves paying for a granite-imprint of the paper to preserve it for centuries, the marginal cost should be near-zero.
- JBorrow 5y agoWell these are scientific articles and as such must be preserved, the cost of which must be paid for sooner rather than later. So it's not just the 'wire cost' of sending PDFs around, but the archival work too that needs to be paid for. I also think that journals are too expensive, but that's why I only publish in society journals.
- di4na 5y agoThis is great ! I hope the ACM got the memo, cause i would really like to see them follow suit...
- JuettnerDistrib 5y agoI applaud this change! In practice, however, I don't think much will change. In astronomy, and my subfield in particular, all papers are free on arXiv, and the publishing and referee process are almost more of an afterthought: the threat that you better produce a high-quality paper to get it officially published and usable in a job application. But for research, arXiv is king. (There are even reports of some people no longer bothering submitting to a journal once they got tenure...) If you can't pay the publication charges (usually paid by your grant), then there are other reputable journals in astronomy like MNRAS and Physical Review D. Physical review even let's you submit by importing from arXiv.
- yawnxyz 5y agoin biology we have bioRxiv, but there's still a lot of hesitancy to submit to it, especially by PIs. Covid certainly helped push the field in that direction, and eLife is going to only publish articles from preprints going forward: https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/e5f8f1f7/what-we-have-learned-about-preprints https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/e5f8f1f7/what-we-have...
- raincom 5y agoWhen can we expect the same from ACS (American Chemical Society)?
- istillwritecode 5y agoAs a matter of fact, I have been studying the economics of open access publishing. It's important to distinguish the price of open access publishing from the cost of open access publishing. Commercial publishers are hopeless because they are of course trying to make the most profit they can by obfuscating costs, practicing price discrimination, and shifting licensing fees through transitional models. ACM, IEEE, and others use their revenue from publishing to fund various other activities (like lobbying or outreach). There is a very interesting recent article about the _cost_ of publishing here: https://f1000research.com/articles/10-20/v2 https://f1000research.com/articles/10-20/v2 Arxiv is useful for making stuff available, but peer review and professional publishing are still necessary for academics to advance and enhance their reputation. The peer review process is what typically establishes the quality of scientific work. One thing that software people often overlook is the cost and value of human copy editing. Scholarly work often benefits from having a skilled editor correct grammar and formatting. Metadata and citations are incredibly important, and are usually mangled badly by lazy authors. If a journal accepts Microsoft Word (which is very common outside math and CS), then it has to be typeset to produce consistent PDF. All of this human effort costs money; perhaps a few hundred dollars per article.