6 ms·

To this day, I still do not understand what can be a reasonable cause for a paper to cost >$50 just to read it. Besides greed of course. Editors review paper fo

by _kava 3y ago

To this day, I still do not understand what can be a reasonable cause for a paper to cost >$50 just to read it. Besides greed of course. Editors review paper for free, authors pay to get paper published, taxpayers fund the research. What do the journal's staff actually do that worth that kind of money? All those "publisher" middlemen can go eat dirt and I would be happy to shovel more dirt on them until they are 6 feet under. They do no work, take all the profit, and obstruct research and the spread of knowledge. Those are some of the worst scums of capitalism.

contravariant 3y ago
Frankly I dislike the situation as well but I like to play devil's advocate for a bit. In some sense attaching a high cost to a paper is a crude way of proving the quality of the paper. Putting all of the cost with the authors is clearly not ideal, because you'd only measure how much someone is willing to pay to get it published. By placing the cost with the people reading the article you ensure that the publisher must ensure their articles are actually worth reading. The fact that getting incentives to align requires a random party to get large profits without actually doing much is a quirk of capitalism. If you ignore the concept of private property for a bit you'll see that the obvious solution is to simply burn up the excess money (capitalists would attempt to sustain the illusion that money is indelible and privately owned by viewing this as a tax).
- stefan_ 3y ago
  That's not playing devil's advocate, that is playing clueless. It's the institutions paying for paper access, and not on a "per paper" basis; no ones incentives are being aligned, no one is actually paying $50 to read a paper.
  - contravariant 3y ago
    If (as I claimed) it's just a token cost, I don't think it matters much who is paying it. In fact it is almost better if they get to claim universities find it worth an expensive subscription, it's not like they're trying to cover costs they're putting up a barrier to show it is worth the trouble.
- armchairhacker 3y ago
  Cost =/= quality on papers, almost all of the "best writings of all time" are public domain, and many of the best papers absolutely free. And most researchers want their papers to be free, to the point where you can email them and they will give you a free copy, and they post the preprints on arXiv and their personal website to get around publishing requirements.
  - contravariant 3y ago
    The journals aren't there to help spread their content they're there to give the content a seal of authenticity. As long as they can show researchers/universities are willing to pay high fees they can claim that their contents must be worth that much. Having free copies of the papers available doesn't actually hurt them much, provided they're still the source for 'authentic' copies. (sidenote: not sure what field you're talking about where the best writings of all time are public domain but I've had to pluck quite a few famous papers of scihub instead)
    - 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
      Why isn't academia a more social activity? Think of this analogy. You are interested in say a subset of research on morel mushrooms. You know who the reputed people who publish are so you "follow" them and their profile. They did a new peer review of a newcomer and you get alerted. You check their work and are impressed so you follow them too. Your favourite researcher Also curates "his" favorite researches and researchers on their blog so you are one click away from their opinions on what is good or bad. Compare that with a "reputed journal". The way the system is designed, the journals work of sorting and filtering, the reader is expected to trust their research of choosing the work so you trust their judgment and you auto assume the work is good. Why don't you democratize that work to domain experts itself and everyone helps everyone else. Isn't that the case with everything online?
cpncrunch 3y ago
[flagged]
- goosedragons 3y ago
  The academic editors. And the peer reviewers (who basically edit too).
  - cpncrunch 3y ago
    Yes, peer reviewers tend to work for free. Can you give an example of an editor who works for free? I asked in the parent comment, but nobody has provided any examples (although they have downvoted it, oddly). I'm not aware of any editors who work for free for top tier journals. https://www.glassdoor.ca/Salary/Elsevier-Editor-Salaries-E230096_D_KO9,15.htm https://www.glassdoor.ca/Salary/Elsevier-Editor-Salaries-E23...
    - goosedragons 3y ago
      Journals typically have an editor or editors in the field who is often a professor or researcher at some institution. They don't get paid.
      - cpncrunch 3y ago
        It depends on the journal, but we're talking here about the journals such as Nature and Elsevier which charge large fees, and those journals do indeed pay their editors.
        goosedragons 3y ago
        Elsevier literally has thousands of journals. They charge large fees but that goes to Elsevier for essentially hosting a website and gatekeeping. Maybe some of the really big journals like Nature pay but not those like "Journal of Algebra" or "Journal of Cleaner Production". I'm sure they have people employed called "editors" but they are not the same as academic editors who decide what gets sent to reviewers.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> They do no work, take all the profit, and obstruct research and the spread of knowledge. Those are some of the worst scums of capitalism. People like naking comparison to natural selection, hierarchies and food chains. However they mistakenly believe that Lion is at the top of the food chain. Then they start discussing irrelevant issues, like if lion is being too mean to the herbivores. Their understanding is fundamentally wrong - the lion is not at the top. The parasites that live in the lion are at the top. The punlishers are parasites. They are at the top. How does nature remove parasites, say tapeworms? It doesn't, only extenral intervention like surgery can remove them.
- nordsieck 3y ago
  > How does nature remove parasites, say tapeworms? It doesn't, only extenral intervention like surgery can remove them. Presumably there is an evolutionary arms race going on between host and parasite.
- aziaziazi 3y ago
  To make them disappear you may remove their habitat and food : the lions. Or as the author propose : the publishers.
bandika 3y ago
It's not just that. I had only two articles published in well known journals, but in both cases the reviewers main criticism was that I didn't cite the reviewer's own article. It's an utterly corrupt system, something you learn to live with it when you decide to choose academic life.
jltsiren 3y ago
Scientific publishers have high profit margins, but the prices are still within the right order of magnitude. Most research papers have a very narrow target audience. Publishers do a nontrivial amount of typesetting and administrative work for each paper, and that must be covered by a small number of downloads.
- barnabee 3y ago
  Publishing scientific papers should not be profitable or even financially sustainable on its own. The activity we need to fund is the research itself. If we don’t allow profiteering from publishers, let’s not pretend would ever see the papers or that the research wouldn’t happen.
- olliej 3y ago
  Uh, they don't fund the research, they don't pay the reviewers, and they charge money to publish. They provide exact formatting rules and documents for all submissions, and reject if improperly formatted. I'm not sure where you get this idea that they are doing any significant typesetting, or that their administrative costs are anything remotely reasonable - even the journal editors are also largely unpaid (because being the editor of a journal can be helpful when trying to get a job in academia).
- hedora 3y ago
  I think it depends on the field. In Computer Science, all of the points you make are hilariously wrong. They are true in older fields (though those are slowly catching up with technology).
  - jltsiren 3y ago
    If anything, CS journals are more old-fashioned than those in natural sciences. My least favorite part of publishing a CS journal paper is checking the proofs (in typesetting sense). I have already typeset the paper using LaTeX with the journal's template, but the journal almost always wants to typeset it again using another system. That apparently involves a lot of manual work by their staff. In the process, they introduce many errors into the paper, some of which are random and others which are consistently wrong. I have to compare my PDF to the publisher's version visually to spot the errors. And there is usually only 48 hours allocated for that part, despite the publication process taking 1-2 years.
derefr 3y ago
I'm honestly confused why researchers in one or a few fields haven't already gotten together and said e.g. "okay, instead of considering publishing in 'Cell' to be the most prestigious for biology, let start an open-source co-op journal called 'Flagella' that by design has exactly the same level of publication pickiness, and works with exactly the same peer-reviewers, as 'Cell'; and then let's all walk around getting signatures on these threshold trigger agreements at our field's conventions, where those agreements would say that that once we have enough people behind this, we'll all switch over to publishing in 'Flagella' at once, considering it to be just as prestigious as 'Cell'; and after that point, we will all be contractually bound to never publish in 'Cell' again." (We see particular fields switching over to focusing on paper distribution through preprint archives rather than journals; but just using preprints for distribution doesn't solve the problem that journals solve — which is having a sports-like "hierarchy of prestigious competitions" where a paper can either "make it" to being published in the journal that's that field's equivalent to the Olympics, or it can "get stuck" publishing in some "bush league" journal; where this informs, as a first-gloss heuristic, how much attention you should pay to trying to understand the point the paper is making.)
- dmoy 3y ago
  There is arxiv, though not everything in there is peer reviewed.
  - elashri 3y ago
    Arxiv is a pre-print repository, It by definition doesn't have peer reviewed articles (at the time of submission)
- greazy 3y ago
  This has happened. F1000 is an example. A big issue is funding bodies/grant reviewers are mostly old guard who are happy with the status quo. Recently, a big journal was changing in a way that upset a large swath of such people. Unfortunately i can't remember what journal. But it was obvious they benefited substantially as they're more established.
archermarks 3y ago
> They do no work, take all the profit, and obstruct research and the spread of knowledge. Those are some of the worst scums of capitalism. Amen. Pure rent seeking parasites.
- refurb 3y ago
  This is a terrible take. Journals without fees (or lower fees) are available. Why don’t researchers publish in those? Presumably because the journals that charge high fees offer something the lower cost ones don’t.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    They have network effects. Charging for network effects is rent seeking.
    - refurb 3y ago
      Network effects are dominant due to reach. Open access journals have even more reach than the paywall journals. So it's not that.

by _kava 3y ago

contravariant 3y ago

Frankly I dislike the situation as well but I like to play devil's advocate for a bit. In some sense attaching a high cost to a paper is a crude way of proving the quality of the paper. Putting all of the cost with the authors is clearly not ideal, because you'd only measure how much someone is willing to pay to get it published. By placing the cost with the people reading the article you ensure that the publisher must ensure their articles are actually worth reading. The fact that getting incentives to align requires a random party to get large profits without actually doing much is a quirk of capitalism. If you ignore the concept of private property for a bit you'll see that the obvious solution is to simply burn up the excess money (capitalists would attempt to sustain the illusion that money is indelible and privately owned by viewing this as a tax).

stefan_ 3y ago
That's not playing devil's advocate, that is playing clueless. It's the institutions paying for paper access, and not on a "per paper" basis; no ones incentives are being aligned, no one is actually paying $50 to read a paper.
- contravariant 3y ago
  If (as I claimed) it's just a token cost, I don't think it matters much who is paying it. In fact it is almost better if they get to claim universities find it worth an expensive subscription, it's not like they're trying to cover costs they're putting up a barrier to show it is worth the trouble.
armchairhacker 3y ago
Cost =/= quality on papers, almost all of the "best writings of all time" are public domain, and many of the best papers absolutely free. And most researchers want their papers to be free, to the point where you can email them and they will give you a free copy, and they post the preprints on arXiv and their personal website to get around publishing requirements.
- contravariant 3y ago
  The journals aren't there to help spread their content they're there to give the content a seal of authenticity. As long as they can show researchers/universities are willing to pay high fees they can claim that their contents must be worth that much. Having free copies of the papers available doesn't actually hurt them much, provided they're still the source for 'authentic' copies. (sidenote: not sure what field you're talking about where the best writings of all time are public domain but I've had to pluck quite a few famous papers of scihub instead)
  - 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
    Why isn't academia a more social activity? Think of this analogy. You are interested in say a subset of research on morel mushrooms. You know who the reputed people who publish are so you "follow" them and their profile. They did a new peer review of a newcomer and you get alerted. You check their work and are impressed so you follow them too. Your favourite researcher Also curates "his" favorite researches and researchers on their blog so you are one click away from their opinions on what is good or bad. Compare that with a "reputed journal". The way the system is designed, the journals work of sorting and filtering, the reader is expected to trust their research of choosing the work so you trust their judgment and you auto assume the work is good. Why don't you democratize that work to domain experts itself and everyone helps everyone else. Isn't that the case with everything online?

cpncrunch 3y ago

[flagged]

goosedragons 3y ago
The academic editors. And the peer reviewers (who basically edit too).
- cpncrunch 3y ago
  Yes, peer reviewers tend to work for free. Can you give an example of an editor who works for free? I asked in the parent comment, but nobody has provided any examples (although they have downvoted it, oddly). I'm not aware of any editors who work for free for top tier journals. https://www.glassdoor.ca/Salary/Elsevier-Editor-Salaries-E230096_D_KO9,15.htm https://www.glassdoor.ca/Salary/Elsevier-Editor-Salaries-E23...
  - goosedragons 3y ago
    Journals typically have an editor or editors in the field who is often a professor or researcher at some institution. They don't get paid.
    - cpncrunch 3y ago
      It depends on the journal, but we're talking here about the journals such as Nature and Elsevier which charge large fees, and those journals do indeed pay their editors.
      - goosedragons 3y ago
        Elsevier literally has thousands of journals. They charge large fees but that goes to Elsevier for essentially hosting a website and gatekeeping. Maybe some of the really big journals like Nature pay but not those like "Journal of Algebra" or "Journal of Cleaner Production". I'm sure they have people employed called "editors" but they are not the same as academic editors who decide what gets sent to reviewers.

ClumsyPilot 3y ago

> They do no work, take all the profit, and obstruct research and the spread of knowledge. Those are some of the worst scums of capitalism. People like naking comparison to natural selection, hierarchies and food chains. However they mistakenly believe that Lion is at the top of the food chain. Then they start discussing irrelevant issues, like if lion is being too mean to the herbivores. Their understanding is fundamentally wrong - the lion is not at the top. The parasites that live in the lion are at the top. The punlishers are parasites. They are at the top. How does nature remove parasites, say tapeworms? It doesn't, only extenral intervention like surgery can remove them.

nordsieck 3y ago
> How does nature remove parasites, say tapeworms? It doesn't, only extenral intervention like surgery can remove them. Presumably there is an evolutionary arms race going on between host and parasite.
aziaziazi 3y ago
To make them disappear you may remove their habitat and food : the lions. Or as the author propose : the publishers.

bandika 3y ago

It's not just that. I had only two articles published in well known journals, but in both cases the reviewers main criticism was that I didn't cite the reviewer's own article. It's an utterly corrupt system, something you learn to live with it when you decide to choose academic life.

jltsiren 3y ago

Scientific publishers have high profit margins, but the prices are still within the right order of magnitude. Most research papers have a very narrow target audience. Publishers do a nontrivial amount of typesetting and administrative work for each paper, and that must be covered by a small number of downloads.

barnabee 3y ago
Publishing scientific papers should not be profitable or even financially sustainable on its own. The activity we need to fund is the research itself. If we don’t allow profiteering from publishers, let’s not pretend would ever see the papers or that the research wouldn’t happen.
olliej 3y ago
Uh, they don't fund the research, they don't pay the reviewers, and they charge money to publish. They provide exact formatting rules and documents for all submissions, and reject if improperly formatted. I'm not sure where you get this idea that they are doing any significant typesetting, or that their administrative costs are anything remotely reasonable - even the journal editors are also largely unpaid (because being the editor of a journal can be helpful when trying to get a job in academia).
hedora 3y ago
I think it depends on the field. In Computer Science, all of the points you make are hilariously wrong. They are true in older fields (though those are slowly catching up with technology).
- jltsiren 3y ago
  If anything, CS journals are more old-fashioned than those in natural sciences. My least favorite part of publishing a CS journal paper is checking the proofs (in typesetting sense). I have already typeset the paper using LaTeX with the journal's template, but the journal almost always wants to typeset it again using another system. That apparently involves a lot of manual work by their staff. In the process, they introduce many errors into the paper, some of which are random and others which are consistently wrong. I have to compare my PDF to the publisher's version visually to spot the errors. And there is usually only 48 hours allocated for that part, despite the publication process taking 1-2 years.

derefr 3y ago

I'm honestly confused why researchers in one or a few fields haven't already gotten together and said e.g. "okay, instead of considering publishing in 'Cell' to be the most prestigious for biology, let start an open-source co-op journal called 'Flagella' that by design has exactly the same level of publication pickiness, and works with exactly the same peer-reviewers, as 'Cell'; and then let's all walk around getting signatures on these threshold trigger agreements at our field's conventions, where those agreements would say that that once we have enough people behind this, we'll all switch over to publishing in 'Flagella' at once, considering it to be just as prestigious as 'Cell'; and after that point, we will all be contractually bound to never publish in 'Cell' again." (We see particular fields switching over to focusing on paper distribution through preprint archives rather than journals; but just using preprints for distribution doesn't solve the problem that journals solve — which is having a sports-like "hierarchy of prestigious competitions" where a paper can either "make it" to being published in the journal that's that field's equivalent to the Olympics, or it can "get stuck" publishing in some "bush league" journal; where this informs, as a first-gloss heuristic, how much attention you should pay to trying to understand the point the paper is making.)

dmoy 3y ago
There is arxiv, though not everything in there is peer reviewed.
- elashri 3y ago
  Arxiv is a pre-print repository, It by definition doesn't have peer reviewed articles (at the time of submission)
greazy 3y ago
This has happened. F1000 is an example. A big issue is funding bodies/grant reviewers are mostly old guard who are happy with the status quo. Recently, a big journal was changing in a way that upset a large swath of such people. Unfortunately i can't remember what journal. But it was obvious they benefited substantially as they're more established.

archermarks 3y ago

> They do no work, take all the profit, and obstruct research and the spread of knowledge. Those are some of the worst scums of capitalism. Amen. Pure rent seeking parasites.

refurb 3y ago
This is a terrible take. Journals without fees (or lower fees) are available. Why don’t researchers publish in those? Presumably because the journals that charge high fees offer something the lower cost ones don’t.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  They have network effects. Charging for network effects is rent seeking.
  - refurb 3y ago
    Network effects are dominant due to reach. Open access journals have even more reach than the paywall journals. So it's not that.