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Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article
- errcorrectcode 5y agoMight I suggest a co-op, nonprofit journal publisher run for the benefit of multiple institutions that give access at near overall amortized cost and free access to individuals. Corporate greed in healthcare, utilities, government, and academia are Swords of Damocles waiting to happen.
- Nemo_bis 5y agoSee: http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/OA_journals_published_by_libraries http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/OA_journals_published_by_libr... Also: https://www.openlibhums.org/site/about/ https://www.openlibhums.org/site/about/
- frayesto 5y agoNot sure what other people do, but I always publish at a journal then put my manuscript on arxiv, or whatever field equivalent, and then on my personal website. Then I submit it to scihub. Best we can do these days
- sometimeshuman 5y agoFirst -- Thanks! But second, how do you have the right to that ? Doesn't the institution you work for or the paper's co-authors restrict distribution so to maximize the royalties and recoup research costs ?
- jryb 5y agoAuthors and institutions don't get any royalties at all - only the journal profits.
- cowsandmilk 5y agoResearch institutions don’t get royalties from papers. If they license or commercialize discoveries, they will get royalties. Papers are not a source of income for them and are typically a cost center as they pay for subscriptions to the journals full of papers written by scientists they employ.
- rsfern 5y agoTo add to the other replies, most journals allow you to post a preprint to arxiv or your personal site as long as you don’t use their final layout, typesetting, and branding
- michaelerule 5y agoHow do you submit your papers to scihub?
- op00to 5y agoSubmit manuscripts as e-mail attachment to the Editorial Office at ajmds@scihub.org, A manuscript number will be mailed to the corresponding author same day or within 72 hours
- epgui 5y agoI love Nature journals, but my goodness this is folly.
- chaps 5y agoIs there a catch here? That sounds incredible. (edit: I got it backwards. That's horrible.)
- yed 5y agoThe catch is it’s $11000
- chaps 5y agoI mean, I'm coming at this from the perspective of a freelance journalist where sometimes the best rate I can get for a story that took three months to research is $250. Not talking just interviews and finding expert sourcing, but deeply involved work with code, data analysis, data cleanup, etc etc etc, often that nobody else is doing. So, that's pretty fucking good in my book, man.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- unmole 5y agoYou seem to have misunderstood. The authors don't get paid anything for publishing. Nature typically puts papers behind a paywall. Nature will make a paper available for free if the authors pay Nature ~11k.
- CiPHPerCoder 5y agoIt's like ransomware for research
- errcorrectcode 5y agoSend 0.6875 BTC to address 188bBz5TPXNC46wVWhkA5ZDqSQBM4EqK8u to unlock this federally-funded research paper or it will be deleted in 195.4 hours.
- harles 5y ago
- sgillen 5y agoWho is the target audience here? And who exactly is paying for this? Researchers who care about open access can and do already upload their work to arxiv and/ or scihub in addition to publishing their work in formal venues.
- somenewaccount1 5y agoMaybe people whom want to have their papers referenced more often would pay expecting more exposure? Idk, just guessing.
- gumby 5y agoPoliticians who want to require open access journals for govt funded work? Researchers who need “gold plated name” journals for tenure? Just speculation.
- Fomite 5y ago"Politicians who want to require open access journals for govt funded work?" Not this one. The open access requirements tend to be a year's delay and then it's open access at no cost.
- jinto36 5y agoMost of this work is grant-funded, so the publication fees usually also come out of the grants. Primary investigators are not usually paying this out of pocket. It's entirely so that you can have an item in your publication list or CV that says "Nature Neuroscience" on it, in your fight for a tenure-track promotion, or to get the next grant, or to get a grant renewed, etc. Especially in life sciences, peer review is an essential component, and name recognition of the journal is unfortunately valuable- for Nature/Cell/Science due to the high bar they have for novelty, compared to other respectable but not-top-tier journals like PLoS.
- dilawar 5y agohttps://blog.joss.theoj.org/2019/06/cost-models-for-running-an-online-open-journal https://blog.joss.theoj.org/2019/06/cost-models-for-running-... "The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) is a free, open-access online journal, with no article processing charge (APC). We are committed to operating as a free service to our community, and we do so thanks to the volunteer labor of editors and reviewers, and by taking advantage of existing infrastructure. In this post, we examine the true costs of running a journal such as JOSS, and make the case that even when considering all services we don’t currently pay for, the true cost per paper would not exceed $100. Current APCs at many “gold” open-access journals exceed that by one or more orders of magnitude, (see, for example, PNAS, Nature, IEEE, etc.)"
- steppi 5y agoI published a paper in JOSS and it was by far the most pleasant and transparent journal submission and review process I’ve ever gone through. It felt like the future of academic publishing that I wish we could have distributed more widely today.
- robwwilliams 5y agoGo JOSS! Yes, the cost is excruciating and beyond excessive. Given that every submission can be preceded by multiple bioRxiv versions and followed by a definitive PubMed Central version that was reviewed (perhaps embargoed for 6-12 months), who actually pays these charges? I suspect this is a theoretical charge in most cases. The exception might be for those who are compelled to provide immediate unfettered access to their work.
- daxuak 5y agoI have seen publisher making open access mandatory, with an outrageous fee attached to it. Also,iirc the pubmed central thing only apply to works with certain funds (i.e. NIH), many articles do not get to there.
- zibzab 5y agoSome grants require open access, which unfortunately often translates to tax money being transferred to big publishers.
- tomrod 5y agoWhat in the world? I have a hard time seeing this as anything but a racket, or possibly a legal maneuver to increase standing to sue Sci-Hub or something ("Look, we've offered free access already!") How much did Nature Neuroscience pay to produce these articles? Do they pay their editors? Their reviewers? The authors? Do they pay their typesetters? Do they offer their print journal for free? Do they have expensive contracts for cloud hosting? Is the expected lifetime value of any article, let alone every article, anywhere close to $11,390? Most journals already allow authors to distribute copies by request. This is nuts.
- scottcodie 5y agoPrice has more to do with willingness to pay than with cost. Nature is a prestigious intuition so people are willing to pay to get published there. It also sets a barrier to get a paper reviewed. I hear you that it shouldn't be this way but they are a profit seeking entity so they are behaving like one.
- sometimeshuman 5y ago"Most journals already allow authors to distribute copies by request." Does anyone know how this works in practice ? I'd like to ask a few of my favorite researchers for a copy of their papers but I am a hobbyist and don't want to take their time and add to their likely overflowing inbox. BTW, "this is nuts" isn't a claim you can make if you don't know the answer to questions you posted. From their website: "an article is submitted and is assessed by our editors. If suitable it will be put through Peer Review". That peer review process could quickly exceed the $11.4k for example. [edited] added the BTW paragraphs after responses were received to the question in my first paragraph.
- Brian-Puccio 5y agoFor a sample size of one, go ahead and ask them: https://twitter.com/hwitteman/status/1015049411276300289 https://twitter.com/hwitteman/status/1015049411276300289
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- julienchastang 5y agoJust increase the number of co-authors and split the cost ;-)
- hkt 5y agoA stealth measure to encourage cooperation among researchers!
- errcorrectcode 5y agoMandatory voluntary collaboration + pass around the hat. Paper bylines will only be 3 pages long but everyone will finally get credit (except undergrad and grad students, they're free labor anyhow).
- asperous 5y agoThe article says "Our aim is to ensure that lack of funds is never a barrier to publishing with us." As in they will provide funding if someone can't afford it. Isn't this a really good thing? What is the average budget for an research project that ends up with an article published in this journal? Clinical trials are in the millions, and research grants are often 6 figures. I know people see this as rent seeking, but journals DO provide a service which costs money. The issue is before they prevented freedom of information. With this model, they are not.
- jryb 5y agoSome smaller labs at my tier 1 research institution have their grad students TA (so the university pays their salary) because they don't have the ability to pay them the $30k salary. $11k for one paper is a meaningful amount of money, and other journals can publish for an order of magnitude less. It doesn't cost $11k to read a paper, send a few emails and do some typesetting. People pay for this kind of thing because having a Nature paper on your resume makes it much easier to get a tenure-track job. It's just a prestige racket.
- asperous 5y agoI get that but also consider that people are free to publish in other journals. Although it does make me uncomfortable that its a for-profit company, they only print 7-10 articles a month, so I can understand the financials mathematics of needing to make it this amount per article if they want to continue to have a full staff maintain the journal the way they want to run it. I am just grateful these articles are now open to the public for free.
- exdsq 5y agoThey can publish in other journals but at the expense of their career. Many publications at leading journals is your only real chance of making a career in academia - it matters more than actual impact because they're much easily measurable :)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- epberry 5y agoI’ve worked on a couple NSF grants and I believe this cost could be covered by the grant. Whether the granting institution is okay with this I don’t know but if I had to guess they probably see an $11K spend to distribute the results of the research in a (the?) prestigious journal as reasonable. To me $11K seems pretty steep. But I might go for $5K to put Nature’s stamp on my work and have it open access.
- javajosh 5y agoIf the deciding factor for publication becomes money rather than quality, I wonder how long Nature's prestige will endure?
- orforforof 5y agoAgree. Academics are now going to write an extra $11k into their grants (=$15k if you count uni indirect costs), with the justification "I plan to produce Nature quality results". If your article doesn't get accepted by Nature, all the better there's now an extra $9k in your budget to play with. Let's just keep in mind, these grants are funded by taxpayers.
- Fomite 5y agoI always build one open access publication into my grant budgets - but $11K is way above what's normal.
- torbTurret 5y agoI’ll never forget getting my first paper accepted to a conference, only to learn that presenting will cost a mere $600. Work paid for it but still - what an absolute racket academia is.
- SubiculumCode 5y agoConferences cost money. You have to rent an appropriate venue, people tend to expect refreshments, etc. Why would it be free just because you are presenting there? So are most of the attendees.
- kristopolous 5y agoTwo things. The person walks away after this $600 poorer. We've found ways to do things of arguably far less social value then say, a new medical discovery, such as stand up comedy or say a club dj without them having to fork over $600 to do what they're being advertised for. In fact, they actually get paid. Second, the enterprise for expanding human knowledge shouldn't come with a door fee, full stop. If we want to progress the sciences we should find out how to collectively pay for it without charging amounts to all involved that they cannot afford. If we want, say, 1,000 Einsteins as Jeff Bezos believe we should be aiming for, we should try funding the process and not sticker shock it at every step. Stagnation is always a structural problem. This is so fixable if we actually exercise the will to do it
- lettergram 5y agoIt’s disgusting... but, the value proposition is there. As an inspiring researcher, it’s 100% worth it to spend the $11k. It’ll increase citations making it open and further peoples careers. This is a “pay to play” scheme.
- ovnz 5y agoPay once is a thing of the past. As with most software recently switched to subscription model, they should have offered it at $999 per article per year, no contracts required.
- throwaway984393 5y agoLot of people in the comments here don't understand the Open Access funding model. Please read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access
- unmole 5y agoOr people fully understand that the bulk of the work that goes into a journal is done by unpaid volunteers and are appalled at the sticker price.
- throwaway984393 5y agoAre they angry that someone volunteered?
- spoonjim 5y agoThis seems like a fair price. If there are 30 articles in an issue of Nature that’s 360,000 per issue assuming everyone eventually publishes open access and subscriptions go to zero. That seems like a very reasonable cost for editing etc.
- unmole 5y agoThis is sarcasm, right?
- spoonjim 5y agoWhy? I hope this isn't a critique of the form "Why does Dropbox have 3,000 employees, I could build it in a weekend." There are a lot of costs to producing an issue of Nature.
- unmole 5y agoThe bulk of the heavy lifting for any scholarly journal is done by unpaid volunteers. JOSS calculates their cost of publishing a paper at around $100. What additional expenses does Nature incur that justify charging two orders of magnitude more? https://blog.joss.theoj.org/2019/06/cost-models-for-running-an-online-open-journal https://blog.joss.theoj.org/2019/06/cost-models-for-running-...
- schleck8 5y agoNot every journal has the same selective standards
- unmole 5y agoAgain, the vetting of papers is done by unpaid volunteers.
- schleck8 5y ago> All submitted manuscripts are read by the editorial staff > Editorial decisions are not a matter of counting votes or numerical rank assessments, and we do not always follow the majority recommendation https://www.nature.com/nature-portfolio/editorial-policies/peer-review https://www.nature.com/nature-portfolio/editorial-policies/p...
- Mathnerd314 5y agohttps://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/11/24/nature-add-open-access-publishing-option-2021 https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/11/24/nature-add-op... gives some background: > Someone must read and evaluate submissions regardless of whether they are accepted or rejected. That means under an open-access model where revenue is only collected from authors whose work is published, costs per published article are much higher at very selective journals than they are at less selective journals. But mostly it seems that this is the price that Nature and Max Planck Digital Library negotiated, and Nature decided it was high enough that they could offer it to everyone.
- unmole 5y ago> Someone must read and evaluate submissions regardless of whether they are accepted or rejected. That's done by academics in the field who won't be paid for their time and effort.
- ieee8023 5y agoLet’s stop reviewing for publishers that profit from research! Join the strike! https://josephpcohen.com/w/reviewerstrike/ https://josephpcohen.com/w/reviewerstrike/
- errcorrectcode 5y agoThere needs to be nonprofit co-op publisher(s) for the scalable benefit of many institutions. Pack-up and form equivalent new journals.
- a3_nm 5y agoI also have an initiative to boycott reviewing for closed-access journals with currently >350 signers. If you agree, consider signing it :) https://nofreeviewnoreview.org/ https://nofreeviewnoreview.org/ Indeed, for-profit publishing only works because researchers are willing to do free reviewing work for such publishers.
- ramraj07 5y agoI wish this would work but it won’t. They’ll just get shittier reviewers who’re willing to do it. ImmigrNt researchers use reviews as evidence of expertise so there’s at least one group of folk who are incentivized to review for anyone.
- a3_nm 5y agoYes, there is a career incentive to review, but it's much weaker than the one to publish, and comes later in career, so hopefully more people can afford it. And yes, there will probably always be people willing to do reviews for free. But if the quality/delay/expertise of reviews from commercial publishers starts to degrade, it encourages authors to look for alternatives.
- ramraj07 5y agoThe issue is as a semi disingenuous researcher (which honestly most are) you actually want reviewers who are not experts because they won’t ask the hard questions and do a thorough review. So if you can get your nat neur submission reviewed by a bunch of desperate postdocs aiming to please then you’re hitting jackpot.
- omgwtfbyobbq 5y ago"Academic Journals Doing Crime" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F9gzQz1Pms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F9gzQz1Pms
- gujak 5y agoBack in 2010 or 2011 I was offered a job typesetting similar articles (in the field of physics of chemistry), involving e.g. converting a Word draft into a final Latex document and communicating with the article's authors. The pay was... 40 PLN or 10 USD per article before tax.
- ElDji 5y ago"offers" !? Not the onion.
- cma 5y agoElsivier alone siphons more money per year out of public funded science than ITER, the most expensive experiment ever.
- d--b 5y agoThe University world is so insanely broken. There is so much money flowing in, and yet, all we hear about is students who are poor, and teachers who can't live off their salaries. The whole thing seems to be setup so that young academics are constantly at war with each other, so that they have to write papers after papers for free and send them to these prestigious journals, which they actually pay for reading through their universities. Honestly, from the outside it looks like a weird servitude system.
- refurb 5y agoI’ve never quite understood the hate against journals. Sure, they might be charging too much for subscriptions based on the effort, but plenty of products do that. My understanding of positions are: Researcher: I want to publish in your journal because it’s prestigious. Academia: You better publish in prestigious journals or you won’t get tenure. Journal: My journal is expensive, but very prestigious. Researcher: I want what you offer (prestige) but don’t want to pay your price. Seems like the researcher should be pissed at academia not the journals? If researchers just published elsewhere, these journals would have no choice but to change.
- MagnumOpus 5y agoThe current shareholders and editors of the prestigious journals contribute nothing to it being prestigious. It is historical accident and network effects that now let some journals charge $10k for $100 of work, which many rightly perceive as unjust profiteering. Moving away from Elsevier and Springer Nature is a coordination problem just as difficult and just as desireable as moving everyone in your school off WhatsApp or iMessage or Facebook towards some less odious alternative...
- leemailll 5y agoIt's a bit naive to think the editors of these journal don't contribute.
- krull10 5y agoI actually think these fees are an easy problem to solve, but they can’t be solved by academics themselves due to the incentives (i.e. publishing in these journals plays a big role in promotions and possible future grants being awarded). If funding agencies capped grant publishing fees at say $250 per article, while still requiring open access, that would be the end of these insane page charges. The journals would have to adapt. No one is paying $11,000 out of pocket to publish in these journals…
- refurb 5y agoI’m not sure shareholders contribute anything to companies other than capital, so your point doesn’t make sense. The editors most certainly contribute to prestige. You don’t get big name editors unless you matter. And the prestige isn’t guaranteed. Several journals that were prestigious when I was a grad student no longer are. So I reiterate my point, the journals provide something of value, people just don’t like the price.
- piyushpr134 5y agoHolding humanity and progress at ransom
- j7ake 5y agoThe price is inelastic. They can set the fee to almost any amount and people will pay it as long as publishing there results in promotions and grants.
- iandanforth 5y agoYou may be interested in this article: "The Money Behind Academic Publishing" https://tidsskriftet.no/en/2020/08/kronikk/money-behind-academic-publishing https://tidsskriftet.no/en/2020/08/kronikk/money-behind-acad... The margin on these businesses is substantial. (e.g. This article says 40%)
- complex_pi 5y agoThis short video explains the system very well. https://twitter.com/DGlaucomflecken/status/1484679759829209090 https://twitter.com/DGlaucomflecken/status/14846797598292090...
- evancoop 5y agoThe easy response is to dunk on Nature for rent-seeking. (And it most definitely IS just that). However, the best target for ire is not necessarily the journals (even if they charge a lot and provide nothing more than unpaid editors whose value-add is dubious). The proper target of anger is those who allocate grant money and use the number of publications in a few top-tier journals as the primary credential. Not only does this exclude early-career researchers implicitly (hard to have 50 publications before age 30), but it then forces the payments to a cartel of elite journals. It ends when grant-writing allows for ANY other assessment of worthiness.
- bell-cot 5y agoThis +10 (if I could). Also target (for anger) those who rank universities by how many "top tier" journal articles their professors have published.
- Agingcoder 5y agoCould it be simply a way for nature of saying 'no, for real, we don't do open access, even if in theory we do'? Basically they don't expect anyone to actually pay for this?
- JCM9 5y agoThe pricing is like medical billing. There’s no logic to it. A number is just made up and the insurers (in this case the finding agencies) are willing to foot the bill. Once the insurers (funding agencies) decide they no longer like that number the billers will try a new made up number and the cycle continues.
- ineedasername 5y agoI wonder how easily they will allow open-access articles to be searched, found, and filtered from those that require a subscription.