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Royal Astronomical Society: all journals to publish as open access from 2024
- ushakov 4y agoDoes open access mean they will still be paying taxpayers money for the privilege of being published in these journals?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- shellac 4y agoNoted above, but mostly this with some support for authors who have no funds for APC.
- fsh 4y agoSomebody has to pay for the scientific editors, copy editing, typesetting, and infrastructure. Of course the open access publishing fees of Nature & co. are completely outrageous, but even non-profit publishers have to charge something.
- lrem 4y agoHmmm. Isn't quite a lot of these publications taking in a PDF, so their cost of much of this is roughly zero? Except for the eyeballing if the header/footer overlaps anything on the page, in which case you request the author reformats their paper to respect the margins?
- fsh 4y agoMost journals completely re-do the layout in some desktop publishing software and only copy over the text and figures. It is a fair bit of work to make everything consistent, for example formulas and references. I have only seen author-submitted PDFs in very low-cost publications, for example some conference proceedings.
- a3_nm 4y agoNot all of them do: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_open_access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_open_access which charge neither readers nor authors. In TCS, see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_Methods_in_Computer_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_Methods_in_Computer_Sc...
- pmyteh 4y agoOne of the journals in my field is going through this at the moment. They were set up with an initial grant to cover editorial and typesetting, which is about to run out. Their two suggestions for carrying on are either to charge a couple of hundred dollars a paper for typesetting (which is apparently what it actually costs) or to require submissions in a standard LaTeX pipeline (which is not standard for my discipline but would enable it to be done automatically). I suppose a strict Word template would also suffice at the expense of annoying all the computational scholars (that's what another Diamond OA journal does in my field). But somebody's doing the typesetting. Giving sufficiently technically competent authors that could be the authors, but otherwise some money has to be found from somewhere. I don't mind that coming from libraries or research grants if necessary: it's cheaper than Elsevier.
- jraph 4y agoI don't know for this specific publisher, but in research, usually: - scientific editors… are researchers paid by a university - copy editing… is done by the authors - typesetting… is done by the authors - reviews… are done by the other researchers paid by their respective university Okay, the infrastructure remains. The needs are: a simple website serving PDF files and pages with the metadata. You can even let something like HAL, Arxiv or Sci-Hub do that.
- justinclift 4y agoCompetent infrastructure is very rarely that simple. At least throw in some backups. And someone to manage them / know how they work. ;)
- jraph 4y agoIndeed. But that does not require the costs paid by authors to submit a paper, and by the readers. What's more, universities already have this kind of infrastructure.
- justinclift 4y ago> What's more, universities already have this kind of infrastructure. Ha! While "technically" true, many (most?) university's (at least in Australia) have IT infrastructure that was last run competently sometime around when dinosaurs roamed. Saying that from having worked at some (as a contractor), and having non-IT friends at others... whom are constantly frustrated about this stuff. :/
- fsh 4y agoThis does not match my experience in science publishing. Scientific journals usually have at least a few paid full-time and part-time editors. They also do their own copy editing and typesetting of the manuscripts. The differences between the arXiv versions and the published versions are usually quite noticeable.
- swyx 4y agowhats the all in cost of publishing to something like Nature? couldnt find this info
- shellfishgene 4y ago"The APC to publish Gold Open Access in Nature is €9,750 / $11,690 / £8,490." https://www.nature.com/nature/for-authors/publishing-options https://www.nature.com/nature/for-authors/publishing-options Publishing closed access is still free.
- tokinonagare 4y agoYeah sure it take thousands of dollars to make a PDF. There is a bunch of small organizations and universities that manage to have journal free for reading *and* publishing. There's no reason to pay huge fees for "typesettings" in an area where most of this thing in automated. If the publishing pipeline is too complex it's time to remove bullshit and simplify things. Feeding a latex file into a pipeline or clicking on "save as PDF" in Word shouldn't cost more than a few cents.
- tokai 4y agoSo is going to be actual open access or only access to read without the freedoms afforded by open access? Not mentioning anything about licensing kindof point towards the latter.
- maxnoe 4y agoOpen access publications in RAS Journals are licensed CC By, CC By NC or CC By NC ND depending on author choice and the specific journal. But as far as I can tell it's always a CC license.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- shellac 4y agoIt looks like it's gold open access, btw, or even bronze AKA the worst one: > [...] supported by Article Processing Charges (APCs), with the infrastructure to ensure that authors continue to face no financial barrier to publishing their science in the RAS journals But they are making the entire archive available.
- techdragon 4y agoLook… the parasites got to eat… and until we wrestle control of copyright out of the hands of Disney, Warner Brothers, Elsevier, Weily, O’Reilly, etc… and get some major reforms … well we at least have to celebrate when the parasites make decisions that benefit the public and only hurt smaller money holding interests. In this case the change will be obvious, the university and/or the grant programs will wind up funding these fees… and students everywhere will benefit from this. Hooray! And opening the archives is a big win for such a prestigious journal with a long history.
- goodcanadian 4y agoI would point out that the Royal Astronomical Society is a charitable organisation. It should not be put in a class with Elsevier and the like. The page charges actually go to the cost of publishing rather than to shareholder profits.
- techdragon 4y agoYou know… it’s been so long since I thought about who actually owned a journal other than Elsevier, et, al … and your right, I had completely forgotten the Proceedings of The Royal Astronomical Society aren’t owned by one of the the big fat asshole publishers! So this is just all around a good thing!
- joshvm 4y agoYes this is important to note: while the RAS is a charitable organisation, the publication process is facilitated by publishing companies (primarily OUP). Though exactly how the fees are distributed and what the arrangement is with OUP with regards to publication fees is, I'm not sure. OUP provides the administrative side, platforms for submission/review, hosting and other editorial services. It doesn't make much sense for RAS to reimplement all of this from scratch.
- poulpy123 4y agoMNRAS is a good astronomy journal. That's a good new
- just_a_quack 4y agoNothing pisses me off more than journals charging thousands for access. None of the money reaches the actual researchers and it only serves to reinforce public distrust in research
- tokinonagare 4y ago> Nothing pisses me off more than journals charging thousands for access. Wait until you hear about the last publisher fuckery: APC (article processing charges). For those outside the publishing loop, a lot of journals are now publishing papers under an open licence BUT authors have to paid a huge (often in the thousand or more) sum to get the article published. Since whole journals are now "open", this isn't negotiable. In the end it means journals are still taking a lot of institutions money, just in another way, and blocking access to people like me who are trying to publish papers on their own.
- swyx 4y agopardon if this is ignorant but i mean now that arxiv is well established, what is the barrior to “publish papers on your own” if you dont particularly care about the journal reputation (and those that do probably dont pull this kind of scummy stunt)
- tokinonagare 4y agoI would be as happy so just share a PDF on my website and send it to people who care but if I want to go back in academia somedays I need "real" publications and those are count by universities administration only when done in existing journals and conferences count (also arxiv et al. are not used in the fields I could publish in).
- shellfishgene 4y agoI've come to think this is actually a large problem. In the subscription model the prices were paid for longer time periods, like yearly, and publishing was free. The bills went to librarians who managed everything professionally and had a good overview. This showed clearly in the conflict between 'Project DEAL' and Elsevier the last few years, where a bunch of German Universities and Institutes started collective bargaining to get prices down, and even stopped subscribing for a while. Now the bills go to individual researchers who often don't even publish with a specific journal more than once every couple of years. I doubt anyone will keep track how much publishing fees increase. Also it's not really the case that there is much competition, if you can get your paper into a high-ranked journal you don't send it elsewhere to save 500$ or something. Also it used to be that the library subscription budget was clearly defined to the University or institute, now the APCs often come out of one of the many research grants. My bet is that the APCs will increase much faster than the subscription fees did.
- jshaqaw 4y agoThree cheers to this. Let all the world’s knowledge be open and free. There is much to bemoan about the state of the world today but on the other hand for someone outside academia who loves to learn this is the golden age. Curious dilettantes of the world join me in cheer!
- sega_sai 4y agoThis is bad news masquerading as good news. Now they force you to pay 2.3k GBP to publish an article. Previously it was free, unless you wanted it to make it immediately accessible on the website. People in astrophysics always did put articles on arxiv.org anyway, so papers were already accessible to everyone (in a non-typeset/not-proofread form), but now it will be the same, but everyone will have to pay 2.3 kGBP per paper. Also a useful comparison. The subscription to MNRAS for the institution was 6.5 kGBP. So any institution that publishes more than 2 papers a year will pay way more then before. Also none of the referees are payed. Also, some funding agencies (like UK's UKRI) prohibit to put page charges in overheads for grants, so I wonder how people are supposed to get the money... To be honest, the natural consequence of this will be that people will stop publishing in MNRAS. There is simply not enough value added in the publication process to justify 2.3k GBP, given that the referees are not payed, the journal is published online only, and the arxiv already provide hosting. Also, this is the case of Royal Astronomical Society (which does a lot of good things: provides grants, fellowships, organizes meetings, gives prizes) of trying to preserve the income stream to fund that. This is wrong, and we should not accept that in my opinion.
- planede 4y agoEven if it eventually gets covered by funding, this is still kind of bad. Who gets to publish is basically decided at funding time, not on merits of a paper.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoIt makes more sence for taxpayer to pay for publishing of research, than for each of individually to pay for accessing it. As a general view, I am not sure on the merits of this spesific event. But also, why are commercial entities reviweing scientific papers and deciding merit? Are their interests aligned with mine as a tax payer?
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- bluenose69 4y agoThis is not my field so I didn't take the time to read the small print. But, in my field, lots of journals have an "open" option available to authors. The thing is, you have to pay more in page charges, and so not everyone does this. The money for those page charges come from the same hard-earned grants that pay for computing time, graduate student stipends, etc. Institutions do not pay these charges (in my field, anyway); the funds come from grants. And, although granting agencies increasingly dictate that "open" models be used, they do not supply extra funds. As a reader, I love the idea of journals being open. As an author, the additional cost of publishing is discouraging. Another discouraging thing: having to pay to see even the papers I've written. I never pay for a paper. Many times, I just want to take a quick look to see if the paper merits further study, and that is not worth $35 to me.
- throwawaaarrgh 4y agoI love the complaints here. They all literally just come down to "I want everything to be free all the time and never pay for anything". As if journals just pay for themselves out of a magical pot of gold. Wanna publish for free? There's plenty of free blog hosting sites out there.
- dan-robertson 4y agoThere do exist open access journals that are run cheaply with funding from some academic body. Maybe they don’t scale though.
- shellac 4y agoI don't know about this publisher, but it must be noted that academic publishing is notorious for having some of the highest margins on the planet. As a business they are as close to a magical pot of gold as you could hope for. Breaking their peculiar hold on research is taking decades. arXiv has existed for over 30 years, but physics journals still thrive.
- aragilar 4y agoAstronomy does better than a fair few of the physics subfields at arxiv usage (optics is especially bad from what I hear).
- throwawaaarrgh 4y agoThey only have "a hold on research" because academia wants it that way. There's no legal obligation for any research org to publish in journals. They do it voluntarily, for reasons that have nothing to do with furthering science. And despite this, instead of demanding an end to journal dominated academic research, we just complain about the cost. Nobody wants to deal with the big pink elephant, so instead we argue about who's gonna pick up the turd it left in the living room.
- eldaisfish 4y agoThis is a terrible comment at every level. First, it attacks a strawman argument. No one is clamouring for free "everything". Most rational people would agree that thousands of dollars/pounds/euros PER article is an insane markup when literally none of the value add is provided by journals. The role of a journal is essentially administrative, webhosting and some database management. Almost none of their work is technical or specialised. Second, what would a fair processing charge be? Certainly not thousands of dollars. Here is just one journal that manages to provide the same level of service for the princely sum of EUR 75 if you submit an MS Word manuscript: https://www.wind-energy-science.net/about/article_processing_charges.html https://www.wind-energy-science.net/about/article_processing... Third, in no way are a blog and a scientific journal equivalent.
- lemursage 4y agoI wonder if this is in response to Sci-Hub/Arxiv proliferation or what else. Anyhow, I find it beyond rich -- the authors usually do all the typesetting, spell/grammar checks, formatting etc. themselves and now they get to pay for that (or their respective funding institutions). I presume that is what would land under a "processing fee". Beyond atrocious -- some journals have their custom LaTex templates only to discard formatting they put in them at the pre-publish stage. Also, reviewers are probably still not getting paid. I'm not sure if that's an accurate sentiment, but I feel like there's an academic research winter with grants and funding are being slowly squeezed out of academia and moved to external consortia with loose academic affiliations (at least this is what I _think_ I see happening in Europe). If that's true, this trend of moving the paywall from readership to authorship is just sad.
- aragilar 4y agoNo, it's related to grant requirements around Plan S (https://telescoper.wordpress.com/2023/03/02/article-processing-charges-at-the-royal-astronomical-society/ https://telescoper.wordpress.com/2023/03/02/article-processi...).
- autocorr 4y agoThis is a little surprising since MNRAS's niche has been that it had no page charges. So if one was short on grant money then you went with monthly notices. That's pretty nice if (a) you have zero grant funding available or (b) want to prioritize conference travel for students/postdocs. MNRAS is one of the three "main" journals for astronomy along with Astronomy and Astrophysics (A&A) and the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ and AJ). A&A is mainly Europe and ApJ is more mixed but with more North America. Along with Nature and Science for high-impact things and regional journals for Japan, Australia, and the US (PASP).
- aragilar 4y agoI think it's due to Plan S, see https://telescoper.wordpress.com/?s=plan+s https://telescoper.wordpress.com/?s=plan+s.