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Some 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
by jryb 5y ago
Some 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 :)
- dash2 5y agoBy contrast, another Springer journal, Scientific Reports, charges about $2000 per article… and publishes about 23,000 articles per year. So it’s not all down to high fixed costs. It’s rent-seeking.
- Fomite 5y agoThis. 11K would be a full tenth of the discretionary money I got for my startup package. The paper would be a sweet get, but this is definitely a "Rich labs get papers in Nature journals, get better grants and become richer labs..." problem.
- oefrha 5y agoYep, $11k is a term’s worth of stipend when I was a PhD student.