4 ms·

I 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

I 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 ago
There do exist open access journals that are run cheaply with funding from some academic body. Maybe they don’t scale though.
shellac 4y ago
I 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 ago
  Astronomy does better than a fair few of the physics subfields at arxiv usage (optics is especially bad from what I hear).
- throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
  They 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 ago
This 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.
sega_sai 4y ago
Do you know that all the scientists referee for these journals for free ?
- ripap 4y ago
  I don't think this is true in general. Certainly, they aren't paid by the publisher, but I'd imagine most referees are in paid employment with institutions that expect them to review the occasional manuscript as part of their job.
  - sega_sai 4y ago
    Nowhere in my contract or in anyone else's contract (as far as I know) it is written that I need to referee papers. People do it as a service to the community. And I don't necessarily ask to be payed for that, I was just answering the point about "I want everything to be free all the time and never pay for anything". We pay with our work to referee the papers. Sure there are extra costs to host the papers, typeset, but they should be nowhere near 2.5k GBP per paper.
    - ripap 4y ago
      Academic jobs are weird, right? I think trying to write down contract that specifies everything involved would be pretty challenging. At any rate, the last time I was employed as astrophysics faculty, my offer letter told me that I should “engage in scholarly activities”. I certainly interpreted that as an invitation to review the odd paper on the university's dime.
chimprich 4y ago
> They all literally just come down to "I want everything to be free all the time and never pay for anything" It's not "free". We've already paid for the content in the journals through taxes. Most research is funded by government grants, carried out by scientists paid with public money. The writing and the reviewing and most of the formatting is also done by scientists. The value that a journal provides on top of that is minimal. It's rent-seeking behaviour on content where the actual value has already been paid for.
- throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
  So tell your representatives in government to stop putting government funded research into journals. (They won't stop, and the reason why is the same reason why journals have those big profits)
  - chimprich 4y ago
    > They won't stop They are already stopping: https://www.ukri.org/publications/ukri-open-access-policy https://www.ukri.org/publications/ukri-open-access-policy > the reason why is the same reason And which reason is that?
walleeee 4y ago
Some people argue we might consider abolishing (or at least ignoring) institutionalized peer review, e.g. Liam Kofi Bright. The blog post/Arxiv model seems to work reasonably well with no fees or formal referees, and was more or less how science worked in previous centuries. What's more, if formal peer review can't prevent something like the modern replication crisis, and creates publishing incentives widely acknowledged to be pathological, is it really that valuable?

dan-robertson 4y ago

There do exist open access journals that are run cheaply with funding from some academic body. Maybe they don’t scale though.

shellac 4y ago

I 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 ago
Astronomy does better than a fair few of the physics subfields at arxiv usage (optics is especially bad from what I hear).
throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
They 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 ago

This 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.

sega_sai 4y ago

Do you know that all the scientists referee for these journals for free ?

ripap 4y ago
I don't think this is true in general. Certainly, they aren't paid by the publisher, but I'd imagine most referees are in paid employment with institutions that expect them to review the occasional manuscript as part of their job.
- sega_sai 4y ago
  Nowhere in my contract or in anyone else's contract (as far as I know) it is written that I need to referee papers. People do it as a service to the community. And I don't necessarily ask to be payed for that, I was just answering the point about "I want everything to be free all the time and never pay for anything". We pay with our work to referee the papers. Sure there are extra costs to host the papers, typeset, but they should be nowhere near 2.5k GBP per paper.
  - ripap 4y ago
    Academic jobs are weird, right? I think trying to write down contract that specifies everything involved would be pretty challenging. At any rate, the last time I was employed as astrophysics faculty, my offer letter told me that I should “engage in scholarly activities”. I certainly interpreted that as an invitation to review the odd paper on the university's dime.

chimprich 4y ago

> They all literally just come down to "I want everything to be free all the time and never pay for anything" It's not "free". We've already paid for the content in the journals through taxes. Most research is funded by government grants, carried out by scientists paid with public money. The writing and the reviewing and most of the formatting is also done by scientists. The value that a journal provides on top of that is minimal. It's rent-seeking behaviour on content where the actual value has already been paid for.

throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
So tell your representatives in government to stop putting government funded research into journals. (They won't stop, and the reason why is the same reason why journals have those big profits)
- chimprich 4y ago
  > They won't stop They are already stopping: https://www.ukri.org/publications/ukri-open-access-policy https://www.ukri.org/publications/ukri-open-access-policy > the reason why is the same reason And which reason is that?

walleeee 4y ago

Some people argue we might consider abolishing (or at least ignoring) institutionalized peer review, e.g. Liam Kofi Bright. The blog post/Arxiv model seems to work reasonably well with no fees or formal referees, and was more or less how science worked in previous centuries. What's more, if formal peer review can't prevent something like the modern replication crisis, and creates publishing incentives widely acknowledged to be pathological, is it really that valuable?