4 ms·

There are no editorial costs. Editors are not paid. There are no authorial costs. Authors are not paid. There are a few copy-editing costs. Copy-editors ge

by pmb 14y ago

There are no editorial costs. Editors are not paid. There are no authorial costs. Authors are not paid. There are a few copy-editing costs. Copy-editors get paid a few hundred bucks per article. There are a few administrative costs. The administrators get paid huge amounts. There is also no risk - the journals were set up a long time ago, and are the way they are due to inertia. If you imagine for-profit academic journal publishers (especially Elsevier) as anything other than vicious monopolists defending their entrenched positions via copyright law and extortion of university libraries, then you have the wrong idea.

alttag 14y ago
> There are a few administrative costs. The administrators get paid huge amounts. I'll step over the part about these sentences contradicting each other. A colleague of mine worked as a part-time "managing editor" for the top journal in his field, meaning he was paid to coordinate the flow of submissions to the (unpaid) senior editors, managing the responsibilities/schedule of the editor-in-chief, and a host of other work I haven't quizzed him about. He worked hard, and for not much money, which is somewhat reasonable, as he was effectively an executive assistant. The EIC is expected to regularly travel to annual conferences (in one case, because that's when the journal's editorial board meets), so these costs are paid by the journal (to my understanding). He also does a great deal of evangelist work for the journal internationally. While some of these costs may be paid by honorariums (I'm not clear), they must be paid by somebody, and the journal is a likely candidate for a portion of those costs. My point is that every time we talk about costs of journals, someone mentions either a) administration is a no cost event or b) administration is an overpriced event. Yes, the reviewing and editing is typically performed by volunteers (the costs of which are borne by their respective employers) There is a substantial amount of work that goes on behind the scenes. I've had only the slightest of peeks behind the curtain, and I'm blown away by how much occurs that I wouldn't have initially guessed. I'm not saying the repository companies (and some publishers) are not money-grubbing parasites; I'm not sure the evidence is in their favor. But little though it's been, my limited view of journal administration is that it's a non-trivial set of tasks costing more than I originally suspected. Claiming otherwise without experience to the contrary is really just FUD.
- pmb 14y ago
  I was intending to imply that the massive dollar flow to these administrative costs is not proportional to the value provided. The cost for your friend to fly around was not in any way proportional to the price levied on the journal purchasers and users. I am very interested to hear more about the activities "behind the curtain", because (being a junior academic at a teaching-oriented institution) I haven't had any interaction with a journal publisher that provided actual value beyond providing a website for me to submit my work, and a branded stamp to certify that my work was correct. In every case, I have had to submit a camera-ready final copy that was typeset by me and typo-checked by either me or the unpaid reviewers, and at no point has anyone approached me or anyone else I know asking us to publish our work in journal X as opposed to journal Y. As far as I know, to the degree anything I have ever written has been read at all, it's because I put the PDFs online myself (technically in violation of the copyright agreement, but a behavior that seems to be tacitly accepted in practice). Of course, even after people read the online PDFs (to the degree those papers get read at all), people cite the paper as if they read it in the paper journal or proceedings...
ig1 14y ago
Typically the commissioning and production editors (as opposed to the academic editors) are paid, as are the copyediting staff, the design staff, the sales and marketing teams (brands don't build themselves), etc. The average academic journal has 25%-30% profit margin (higher than the rest of the publishing industry), but it can take upto 5-7 years for a new STM journal to build enough of a reputation to break even. The profits from the successful journals have to cover the failure of the others (not unlike the startup industry from an investor perspective). If you look at an open access journal like PLOS Biology the fundamental economics aren't that different. PLOS Biology charges authors $2900/paper, at about 20 papers an issue that means an issue generates just under $60,000 in revenue (excluding revenue from print sales). Overall PLOS runs at a 20% profit rate but it's not significantly different from other mid-tier closed-access journal publishers.
- pmb 14y ago
  But what do journals do? I know what they did: they were clearinghouses of current scientific knowledge. Now, in the days of the ArXiv, what do they do? The only answer I can come up with is: help academics gain tenure and promotion. Except for a few flagships (Science, Nature, Cell, etc) most journals are not current, and are not read. Issues are not received with bated breath by people rushing to find out what the cutting edge is. Instead, everyone who cares has gotten the preprints, and everyone else doesn't care. Arguing about the profitability of journals feels like arguing about the business models of buggy whip manufacturers.

by pmb 14y ago

alttag 14y ago

> There are a few administrative costs. The administrators get paid huge amounts. I'll step over the part about these sentences contradicting each other. A colleague of mine worked as a part-time "managing editor" for the top journal in his field, meaning he was paid to coordinate the flow of submissions to the (unpaid) senior editors, managing the responsibilities/schedule of the editor-in-chief, and a host of other work I haven't quizzed him about. He worked hard, and for not much money, which is somewhat reasonable, as he was effectively an executive assistant. The EIC is expected to regularly travel to annual conferences (in one case, because that's when the journal's editorial board meets), so these costs are paid by the journal (to my understanding). He also does a great deal of evangelist work for the journal internationally. While some of these costs may be paid by honorariums (I'm not clear), they must be paid by somebody, and the journal is a likely candidate for a portion of those costs. My point is that every time we talk about costs of journals, someone mentions either a) administration is a no cost event or b) administration is an overpriced event. Yes, the reviewing and editing is typically performed by volunteers (the costs of which are borne by their respective employers) There is a substantial amount of work that goes on behind the scenes. I've had only the slightest of peeks behind the curtain, and I'm blown away by how much occurs that I wouldn't have initially guessed. I'm not saying the repository companies (and some publishers) are not money-grubbing parasites; I'm not sure the evidence is in their favor. But little though it's been, my limited view of journal administration is that it's a non-trivial set of tasks costing more than I originally suspected. Claiming otherwise without experience to the contrary is really just FUD.

pmb 14y ago
I was intending to imply that the massive dollar flow to these administrative costs is not proportional to the value provided. The cost for your friend to fly around was not in any way proportional to the price levied on the journal purchasers and users. I am very interested to hear more about the activities "behind the curtain", because (being a junior academic at a teaching-oriented institution) I haven't had any interaction with a journal publisher that provided actual value beyond providing a website for me to submit my work, and a branded stamp to certify that my work was correct. In every case, I have had to submit a camera-ready final copy that was typeset by me and typo-checked by either me or the unpaid reviewers, and at no point has anyone approached me or anyone else I know asking us to publish our work in journal X as opposed to journal Y. As far as I know, to the degree anything I have ever written has been read at all, it's because I put the PDFs online myself (technically in violation of the copyright agreement, but a behavior that seems to be tacitly accepted in practice). Of course, even after people read the online PDFs (to the degree those papers get read at all), people cite the paper as if they read it in the paper journal or proceedings...

ig1 14y ago

Typically the commissioning and production editors (as opposed to the academic editors) are paid, as are the copyediting staff, the design staff, the sales and marketing teams (brands don't build themselves), etc. The average academic journal has 25%-30% profit margin (higher than the rest of the publishing industry), but it can take upto 5-7 years for a new STM journal to build enough of a reputation to break even. The profits from the successful journals have to cover the failure of the others (not unlike the startup industry from an investor perspective). If you look at an open access journal like PLOS Biology the fundamental economics aren't that different. PLOS Biology charges authors $2900/paper, at about 20 papers an issue that means an issue generates just under $60,000 in revenue (excluding revenue from print sales). Overall PLOS runs at a 20% profit rate but it's not significantly different from other mid-tier closed-access journal publishers.

pmb 14y ago
But what do journals do? I know what they did: they were clearinghouses of current scientific knowledge. Now, in the days of the ArXiv, what do they do? The only answer I can come up with is: help academics gain tenure and promotion. Except for a few flagships (Science, Nature, Cell, etc) most journals are not current, and are not read. Issues are not received with bated breath by people rushing to find out what the cutting edge is. Instead, everyone who cares has gotten the preprints, and everyone else doesn't care. Arguing about the profitability of journals feels like arguing about the business models of buggy whip manufacturers.