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I work for an academic publisher, so I’m deeply biased, but I’ll say this: criticism usually consists of something like “it doesn’t cost $6300 to publish one ar
by YuriNiyazov 3y ago
I work for an academic publisher, so I’m deeply biased, but I’ll say this: criticism usually consists of something like “it doesn’t cost $6300 to publish one article”, and that’s true, but, it does cost that much to receive 15 articles for submission, peer review all of them, reject 14 and then publish 1. Remember: publishers don’t charge for a rejected submission, but incurs costs with all of them.
- algoatecorn 3y agoRemind me again how much the reviewers get paid.
- YuriNiyazov 3y agoNothing. Nice gotcha, bro. I never said reviewers get paid. I mean the internal machinery that needs to get 15 articles reviewed costs money - employees that search lists of potential reviewers for people with expertise in the relevant subfield, email the potential reviewers, wait for them to accept or reject a review request, coordinate the entire thing, etc. etc.
- lozenge 3y agoYou said it costs to peer review them. But they aren't reviewing them. If that's worth $6,000, the reviewers deserve $60,000/
- anigbrowl 3y agoI don't agree with OP here but they are reviewing and rejecting some submissions.
- strangeloops85 3y agoAs an academic editor for a society journal this is ridiculous. Most of this process is automated and takes a grand total of 15 mins of time. Also, Nature charging $10k for open access while PLOS charges more like $2k should tell you what’s going on here
- YuriNiyazov 3y agoMost publishers do not have this process automated, I assure you. Even so, the theory that an automated process requires no maintenance does not hold water.
- AlexandrB 3y ago> Most publishers do not have this process automated This kind of points to rent-seeking or cartel behavior, doesn't it? If this was a competitive market a publisher could get an upper hand by automating and offering their services at a lower rate.
- glofish 3y agoFirst the argument that we failed to automate it hence it is expensive is feels specious. But let's accept it at face value. And now take it all the way. Suppose you reject 15 papers for every single one accepted. And suppose that accepted pays $3K So what costs $200 per rejection? What is that work that you need to put in that adds up to costing $200 per rejection? Or $300 or $500? In my experience at least half (if not more) of the rejections come right from the editorial desk ... someone spending 5 minutes with the paper.
- YuriNiyazov 3y agoFor a high-prestige journal, you get 50 submissions per 1 published article. Let's reject 80% of them right off the bat from the editorial desk. We now have twenty articles left to properly peer review. I had originally said 15, so let's make it 15. In order to get three peer reviews in an article, you have to email thirty people, because the conversion from "request to peer review" to "get a review" is 10%. So, to get 3 peer reviews, you have to email 30 people, and then maintain a funnel (some people dont respond, some people say maybe, some people say yes, but in a month, etc. etc. then reminders, follow-ups, etc.) until the peer review is done. $200. Let's say the total cost of an employee is $50 / hour (salary + insurance + taxes). Surely it's plausible that it takes a total of 4 hours, spread across multiple months, to maintain multiple (start at 30 and then drop) threads of communication that eventually get a review to completion. And I did not include in that calculation anything that even remotely includes any other administrative costs, or, heaven forbid, "how much the CEO makes"
- kevinventullo 3y agoYeah, emailing a handful of reviewers from a fixed list and following up via email definitely sounds like it costs $6300. What are the net profits of your employer? How much did the CEO make last year? Look, I understand that your livelihood depends on this but I encourage you to consider the possibility that the vast majority of academics who think journals like yours are leeches might have a point.
- YuriNiyazov 3y agoLike I said in the very beginning, "I am deeply biased", which means that I have deeply considered this possibility, and I have heard many, many academics. This thread is a replay of something that has happened multiple times already. In my view, the arguments are much weaker than the people making them believe they are. I don't mean to say they hold no water. I just mean that they are not made from people who stare at financial spreadsheets day in/day out trying to make a red number become black.
- chairhairair 3y ago[flagged]
- YuriNiyazov 3y agoYes, I'm sure that that @dang will be coming by shortly to tell you that you broke https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dalai 3y agoI used to be an editor in a journal from one of the big publishers (not Elsevier). We searched for reviewers, invited them, reminded them when they were late in responding, evaluated their submissions, send the approvals, etc. And I didn’t get paid a dime. All the publisher had to do was maintain the platform. And sure that costs money too, but the costs are shared between multiple journals and papers.
- YuriNiyazov 3y agoYea, that's not a good model. Better publishers have publishing managers, internal employees assigned to work with editors to get this done. From https://www.mdpi.com/editors https://www.mdpi.com/editors "MDPI is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. The in-house staff consists of Managing Editors, Assistant Editors, Production Editors, English Editors, Copyeditors, Data Specialists, Software Engineers and Administrative Specialists. Except for most English Editors, all are employed by MDPI and its subsidiaries and work at the MDPI offices. Our collaborating editors on our Editorial Boards are typically employed at academic institutions or corporate research facilities located all over the world. ... Assistant Editors process manuscripts through the peer-review and production procedures..."
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- justeleblanc 3y agoThey're just people running the peer review and production systems (think the online submission system, solving technical issues, writing emails, etc). It's in the name: assistant. They're not the people looking for peer reviewers or doing anything scientific.
- YuriNiyazov 3y agoAs I point out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35657036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35657036 the costs of having employees that "write emails" scales linearly with the number of submissions that are eligible for peer review, not with the number of papers that are successfully published.
- refurb 3y agoPretty typical HN. People pontificate about why something is the way it is, then someone with actual experience steps in and explains, then they get attacked, downvoted and told "no that's no true". LOL
- YuriNiyazov 3y agoWe passed the point of rational debate a long time ago. Now it's just a part of people's identities that "I believe that academic publishers are leeches"
- Pet_Ant 3y agoMaybe that's the problem? The cost should be for submission not for publishing? Dropping the cost by a factor of 15 sounds game changing.
- tgv 3y agoI did my share of peer reviews. Mostly conferences, but that doesn't make a difference in this case: peer review doesn't pay. Those $6300 do not end up in the pockets of academics or institutes. Many journals even have a board of unpaid editors.
- YuriNiyazov 3y agoNowhere here do I claim that editors or reviewers get paid.
- tgv 3y agoBy Grice's maxims, you do.
- YuriNiyazov 3y agoThanks! I've now read https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle and am curious how exactly I've claimed that; I am sure you are correct but it's not obvious to me.
- Qem 3y agoMaxim of relevance: "Be relevant — i.e., one should ensure that all the information they provide is relevant to the current exchange; therefore omitting any irrelevant information." You talked about the act of peer review as if it were a relevant source of cost, when in practice the work done by the peers is unpaid.
- YuriNiyazov 3y agoThe act of peer review is a relevant source of cost because at least at some publishers, the cost of shepherding a paper through peer review (not the actual peer review, but the process of peer review management - the costs of which I've already broken down elsewhere in the thread, and they are measured in hundreds of dollars of employee time) is borne by the publisher, not by the unpaid editors or the unpaid reviewers.
- speedgoose 3y agoI would be curious to see the cost breakdown.
- YuriNiyazov 3y agoI posted one in a different comment in this same discussion tree
- strangeloops85 3y agoThe costs are minimal to handle rejected submissions. Most of the work is done by reviewers. And no it doesn’t cost that much.. that’s the rate with a fat 50% margin, corresponding to the massive profits Elsevier rakes in. It’s just a tax on the system
- _yb2s 3y agoI just don't see how this is possible. Most journals have volunteer editors, that need to find and send the article to volunteer peer reviewers all by themselves. I don't see how that would cost anything at all. At most, there is software that handles all of this, but there are numerous competing companies that offer complete off the shelf already hosted solutions for this, so I really doubt this software costs more than $10 per paper. Most journals seem to use Aries Editorial Manager, which doesn't list prices online. It's hard for me to see what journals are actually doing or offering other than web hosting, the $6300 seems like just rent seeking with the journals name.
- YuriNiyazov 3y agohttps://www.mdpi.com/editors https://www.mdpi.com/editors "MDPI is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. The in-house staff consists of Managing Editors, Assistant Editors, Production Editors, English Editors, Copyeditors, Data Specialists, Software Engineers and Administrative Specialists. Except for most English Editors, all are employed by MDPI and its subsidiaries and work at the MDPI offices. Our collaborating editors on our Editorial Boards are typically employed at academic institutions or corporate research facilities located all over the world... Assistant Editors process manuscripts through the peer-review and production procedures..."
- _yb2s 3y agoThere is a lot of diversity in journals, but MDPI has a very atypical model. More famous/prestigious journals, as well as more niche society journals are able to get PIs to work as editors for free just for the prestige of being affiliated with them. MDPI seems to have a very hard time finding volunteer editors and reviewers, to the point that they are aggressive and annoying- I was getting so many review requests from them (many per week) that I blocked e-mails from their domain, when polite requests to stop were ignored. That said, I did publish a paper with them once, and it was a positive experience.