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Nature pays their editors, unlike most society journals. But they are a for-profit business, and are clearly just looking for more profit. The expected lifeti
by cossatot 5y ago
Nature pays their editors, unlike most society journals. But they are a for-profit business, and are clearly just looking for more profit.
The expected lifetime value of any article in Nature Neuroscience for the authors is well above $11,390, as that is probably 1% of the typical grant that will produce the article, and getting published in this venue makes it much easier to continue to get grants funded, to get top PhD students and postdocs, and to get promoted.
To be clear, though, the authors are not paying for this out of pocket. The funding agencies (i.e. the national government that supports the authors' research) is paying for it. Because many funding agencies now require authors to publish open-acess, Nature can more or less ask whatever price they want.
- namlem 5y agoIs the typical grant for a Nature Neuroscience study really over $1.1 million?
- Fomite 5y agoIf we assume that most studies that get into Nature Neuroscience are NIH R01s, which have a cap before you need to start fleshing out the budget in exacting detail of $125,000 in direct costs per year, and we assume a 50% overhead rate... We get $937,500. That's not far off, and center grants, large cooperative agreements, etc. probably give the distribution a decently long tail.
- oceliker 5y agoGraduate student in a neuroscience lab at a tier 1 institution in the US here. $1.1 million for a grant is very normal. I cost my advisor over $100k per year in tuition and stipend, not including the costs of any equipment and reagents that I use.
- tomrod 5y agoTier 1 - dedicated channel for funding, right? Is ground-breaking neuroscience research only performed at tier 1 universities?
- oceliker 5y ago> Is ground-breaking neuroscience research only performed at tier 1 universities? Absolutely not. I'm just sharing my perspective. People don't seem to realize the sheer amount of money that circulates in these institutions. A decent confocal microscope costs $500k, and core facilities aren't cheap either.
- bubblethink 5y agoThere's a lot of funny maths with grants. It's a lot like taking money from one pocket and putting it in another. So a $1M grant is actually a fraction of that when it comes to actual money that a prof gets to use.
- robwwilliams 5y agoNote: Are we sure this is a mandatory charge or just the charge if the authors must publish an immediate open access article. I just published in Nature Metabolism and there was no charge at all. The quality of the review and editing was EXTRAORDINARY! I wanted to thank all of the reviewers for doing a superb job. Had I required immediate open access then it would have cost! But with both full versions in bioRxiv and Pubmed Central, I felt access was essentially complete.
- kragen 5y agoWere the reviewers paid?
- rvnx 5y agoTo me it sounds absurd to have to pay reviewers, when you have nothing guaranteed in return. If the publication would give insurance "we pay back 10'000 USD to the buyer of the paper in case we did a mistake because that's our guarantee of quality", then yes, but here, nothing guarantees you the quality / result, only that they tried to do reasonable efforts to somehow review and exfiltrate some of the most obviouses scams.
- kragen 5y agoI'm just thinking that if Nature didn't pay the reviewers (and I agree it is very unlikely that they did) then the quality of the reviewing probably is not a result of money flowing into Nature, whether from the authors or from the readers.
- diffeomorphism 5y agoReviewers are selected not picked out of a hat.... > ... we pay 10000 in case of a mistake ... Now please apply the same standard to software. > reasonable effort for many hours/days/weeks. Otherwise known as "work". Why is it absurd to pay for work?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cblconfederate 5y agoTo be clear: they pay their own editors, the ones who do the coordination, not the authors (who actually edit the paper) or the reviewers. 11000 is the annual pay of a Phd student in southern europe, it's incredibly high amount. the $5000 that elsevier asks is already enough. prestigious EU grants run for > $1m. National grants may be $100000. As an EU citizen i hate the fact that even more EU money is siphoned to enrich the NPG. We ve had enough and this must stop. I hope both them and elsevier get outright banned, because clearly open access is another revenue stream for them
- einpoklum 5y ago> 11000 is the paycheck of a Phd student in southern europe, A Ph.D. candidate (don't call them students please, they're researchers more than students) in southern Europe does _not_ get 11,000 USD / month. Something between 2,000 and 4,500 AFAICT.
- dariosalvi78 5y agohe meant per year...
- einpoklum 5y agoWhat, less than 1000 USD per month? But that's a joke. In the Netherlands it's something like... 2800 EUR or 3000 EUR per month, so let's say 3000 - 3300 USD / month. I know the Netherlands PhD candidates have it relatively well (in relative, not absolute, terms), but I find it hard to believe people are expected to live off of 900 EUR / month. Is it really that bad these days?
- tomrod 5y agoNot a joke. Stipends for US PhD students tend to be low, unless you're in a STEM or business school.
- cblconfederate 5y agoIs that without social contribution? Minimum wage in greece is 730 usd. Many if not most phds earn less than $1000, if they are lucky to have stable funding. Hence brain drain
- lultimouomo 5y ago> The expected lifetime value of any article in Nature Neuroscience for the authors is well above $11,390 This. Authors are the customers of the journals; the service they are buying is a push towards tenure and more funding. This has been true for a long time; open access only makes it more explicit. When readers are the ones paying, you can argue that they are paying the journal so that it makes sure that they are reading serious, properly reviewed articles. When authors are the ones paying, how do incentives align? I think journals are now in a situation similar to the one of rating agencies and accounting firms. I don't think it will work out very well.
- cheonic8492 5y ago> I think journals are now in a situation similar to the one of rating agencies and accounting firms. I don't think it will work out very well. Students aren’t paying for college, the government is. The researchers aren’t paying Nature, the government is.
- dash2 5y agoThis is absolutely true in many cases. If I had myself to pay £2000 for journal submission, no way. But it comes out of research funds. And that in turn comes from whoever funds the University – government, or student fees.
- matthewdgreen 5y agoUniversities often limit what you can spend on OA, and even if there isn’t a hard limit, that money comes at the expense of other research items like student salaries and equipment. Funding agencies don’t write a blank check for publication costs.
- ta988 5y agoNot sure why you are downvoted, most colleges, at least in US, have more money coming from research, industrial partners and clinics than tuition.
- 5y ago
- ta988 5y agoThis is not true most grants do not allow for OA money or you have to take it from other lines (salaries, equipment...) and deal with that internally. But in the end it is taken from your research fund, the university is also taking a portion of the grants as indirect costs and a part of those pay for the yearly increasing secret library contracts (they are confidential you can't even get them with a FOIA). So in the end paying OA to large publishers, you are paying them twice.
- cossatot 5y agoI've never had anyone at NSF question OA fees in grant proposals. This might vary program by program.