7 ms·

CEO of EMS Press here (publisher of the European Mathematical Society). Like most society publishers, we really care about our discipline(s) and want to support

CEO of EMS Press here (publisher of the European Mathematical Society). Like most society publishers, we really care about our discipline(s) and want to support researchers regardless of whether they or their institution can afford an astronomical APC or subscription rates. Good publishing costs money but there are alternatives to the established models. Since 2021 we use the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model where libraries subscribe to journals and at the beginning of each subscription year we check for each journal whether the collected revenues cover our projected costs: if they do we publish that year's content Open Access, otherwise only subscribers have access. So no fees for authors and if libraries put their money where their mouth is then also full OA and thus no barriers to reading. All journals full OA since 2024. Easy.

denotational 10mo ago
> Good publishing costs money Good faith question: aside from hosting costs, what costs are there, given the reviewers are unpaid?
- andrenarchy 10mo ago
  Happy to share details! Typesetting is a big item (for us becoming even more due to production of accessible publications), language editing, (meta-)data curation, technical infrastructure and software development (peer review systems, hosting, metadata and fulltext deposits, long-term preservation, maintenance, plagiarism and fraud detection), editor training/onboarding, editorial support, marketing, and of course our staff running all of this also wants a salary. Some keep repeating that Diamond OA is superior because publishing is free for authors and everything is immediately OA. And indeed it is, but only if you have someone who is indefinitely throwing money at the journal. If that's not the case then someone else pays, for example universities who pay their staff who decide to dedicate their work time to the journal. Or it's just unpaid labour so someone pays with their time. It's leading to the same sustainability issues that many Open Source projects run into.
  - mmooss 10mo ago
    Thank you for contributing your expertise and experience. > long-term preservation How is that done beyond using PDF/A? I'm interested for my own files. > Typesetting is a big item (for us becoming even more due to production of accessible publications), language editing, (meta-)data curation I'm sure you've considered this idea; how does it work out in reality?: What happens if you push one or more of those items onto the authors - e.g., 'we won't publish your submission without proper typesetting, etc.'? Or is that just not realistic for many/most authors?
    - capnrefsmmat 10mo ago
      Outside of disciplines that use LaTeX, the ability of authors to do typesetting is pretty limited. And there are other typesetting requirements that no consumer tool makes particularly easy; for instance, due to funding requirements, many journals deposit biomedical papers with PubMed Central, which wants them in JATS XML. So publishers have to prepare a structured XML version of papers. Accessibility in PDFs is also very difficult. I'm not sure any publishers are yet meeting PDF/UA-2 requirements for tagged PDFs, which include things like embedding MathML representations of all mathematics so screenreaders can parse the math. LaTeX only supports this experimentally, and few other tools support it at all.
      - adgjlsfhk1 10mo ago
        I bet if you offer to waive a $1500 fee for authors who submit a latex version, a lot of grad students will learn it pretty fast.
        DonaldPShimoda 10mo ago
        At least in my experience, grad students don't pay submission fees. It usually comes out of an institutional finances account, typically assigned to the student's advisor (who is generally the corresponding author on the submission). (Not that the waiver isn't a good idea — I just don't think the grad students are the ones who would feel relieved by that arrangement.) Also, I'm pretty sure my SIG requires LaTeX submissions anyway... I feel like I remember reading that at some point when I submitted once, but I'm not confident in that recollection.
- bubblethink 10mo ago
  This is a silly question to ask. What do you expect a rent seeker to say? Of course there are costs. Real estate brokers have costs, Apple store has costs, a publisher has costs. That's what they'll say. It does not matter what the costs are. The fees are what the market bears.
- gucci-on-fleek 10mo ago
  I help out with the production of a periodical that is journal-ish [0], and the biggest expense is printing and mailing. But it's ran by a non-profit, our editors are all volunteers, we don't do peer review, and our authors typeset the articles themselves, so this is definitely an atypical example. [0]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/ https://tug.org/TUGboat/
  - adgjlsfhk1 10mo ago
    Surely you charge printing and mailing to the people you are mailing to though.
    - gucci-on-fleek 10mo ago
      Yes, we charge $35 a year (for 3 issues) for printing and mailing, which is just a little bit more than what it costs us.
0xWTF 10mo ago
Awesome, thanks for posting your experience with an interesting model.
chris_wot 10mo ago
You say there are costs, but you don't say what the costs actually are.
- D-Machine 10mo ago
  It's bullshit, if typesetting were a serious cost, they wouldn't demand such finicky formatting and/or filetype requirements from authors (and would instead prefer minimal formats like RMarkdown or basica LaTeX so they could format and typeset themselves). Instead they clearly make submitters follow rigid templates so that their work is trivial.
  - KingMob 10mo ago
    Hmm, I'm not 100% convinced. What if there are multiple downstream formats that have to be exported to? (E.g., another commenter mentioned PubMed requires something called JATS XML.) In that case, a consistent input format assists with generation of the output formats, and without that, there'd be even more work. --- That being said, I don't doubt publisher fees exceed their actual costs for this. I always wonder why there's no universal academic interchange schema; it seems like something XML could have genuinely solved. I suppose the publishers have no incentive to build that, and reduce what they can charge for.
    - D-Machine 10mo ago
      You shouldn't be 100% convinced: obviously there are some non-trivial typesetting costs. But general typesetting is very obviously a largely solved problem in 2025, regardless of the submission format, so since academic journals have weirdly specific input format requirements that are not demanded in other similar domains, it is clear they are doing dated / junk / minimal typesetting / formatting. Also see what the costs are anywhere else, typesetting is a triviality: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/52009 https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/52009 https://www.lode.de/blog/the-cost-effective-revolution-automated-latex-typesetting-for-modern-publishers https://www.lode.de/blog/the-cost-effective-revolution-autom... https://svpow.com/2015/06/11/how-much-does-typesetting-cost/ https://svpow.com/2015/06/11/how-much-does-typesetting-cost/ https://old.reddit.com/r/publishing/comments/1cdx1jq/author_paying_for_typesetting/ https://old.reddit.com/r/publishing/comments/1cdx1jq/author_...

denotational 10mo ago

> Good publishing costs money Good faith question: aside from hosting costs, what costs are there, given the reviewers are unpaid?

andrenarchy 10mo ago
Happy to share details! Typesetting is a big item (for us becoming even more due to production of accessible publications), language editing, (meta-)data curation, technical infrastructure and software development (peer review systems, hosting, metadata and fulltext deposits, long-term preservation, maintenance, plagiarism and fraud detection), editor training/onboarding, editorial support, marketing, and of course our staff running all of this also wants a salary. Some keep repeating that Diamond OA is superior because publishing is free for authors and everything is immediately OA. And indeed it is, but only if you have someone who is indefinitely throwing money at the journal. If that's not the case then someone else pays, for example universities who pay their staff who decide to dedicate their work time to the journal. Or it's just unpaid labour so someone pays with their time. It's leading to the same sustainability issues that many Open Source projects run into.
- mmooss 10mo ago
  Thank you for contributing your expertise and experience. > long-term preservation How is that done beyond using PDF/A? I'm interested for my own files. > Typesetting is a big item (for us becoming even more due to production of accessible publications), language editing, (meta-)data curation I'm sure you've considered this idea; how does it work out in reality?: What happens if you push one or more of those items onto the authors - e.g., 'we won't publish your submission without proper typesetting, etc.'? Or is that just not realistic for many/most authors?
  - capnrefsmmat 10mo ago
    Outside of disciplines that use LaTeX, the ability of authors to do typesetting is pretty limited. And there are other typesetting requirements that no consumer tool makes particularly easy; for instance, due to funding requirements, many journals deposit biomedical papers with PubMed Central, which wants them in JATS XML. So publishers have to prepare a structured XML version of papers. Accessibility in PDFs is also very difficult. I'm not sure any publishers are yet meeting PDF/UA-2 requirements for tagged PDFs, which include things like embedding MathML representations of all mathematics so screenreaders can parse the math. LaTeX only supports this experimentally, and few other tools support it at all.
    - adgjlsfhk1 10mo ago
      I bet if you offer to waive a $1500 fee for authors who submit a latex version, a lot of grad students will learn it pretty fast.
      - DonaldPShimoda 10mo ago
        At least in my experience, grad students don't pay submission fees. It usually comes out of an institutional finances account, typically assigned to the student's advisor (who is generally the corresponding author on the submission). (Not that the waiver isn't a good idea — I just don't think the grad students are the ones who would feel relieved by that arrangement.) Also, I'm pretty sure my SIG requires LaTeX submissions anyway... I feel like I remember reading that at some point when I submitted once, but I'm not confident in that recollection.
bubblethink 10mo ago
This is a silly question to ask. What do you expect a rent seeker to say? Of course there are costs. Real estate brokers have costs, Apple store has costs, a publisher has costs. That's what they'll say. It does not matter what the costs are. The fees are what the market bears.
gucci-on-fleek 10mo ago
I help out with the production of a periodical that is journal-ish [0], and the biggest expense is printing and mailing. But it's ran by a non-profit, our editors are all volunteers, we don't do peer review, and our authors typeset the articles themselves, so this is definitely an atypical example. [0]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/ https://tug.org/TUGboat/
- adgjlsfhk1 10mo ago
  Surely you charge printing and mailing to the people you are mailing to though.
  - gucci-on-fleek 10mo ago
    Yes, we charge $35 a year (for 3 issues) for printing and mailing, which is just a little bit more than what it costs us.

0xWTF 10mo ago

Awesome, thanks for posting your experience with an interesting model.

chris_wot 10mo ago

You say there are costs, but you don't say what the costs actually are.

D-Machine 10mo ago
It's bullshit, if typesetting were a serious cost, they wouldn't demand such finicky formatting and/or filetype requirements from authors (and would instead prefer minimal formats like RMarkdown or basica LaTeX so they could format and typeset themselves). Instead they clearly make submitters follow rigid templates so that their work is trivial.
- KingMob 10mo ago
  Hmm, I'm not 100% convinced. What if there are multiple downstream formats that have to be exported to? (E.g., another commenter mentioned PubMed requires something called JATS XML.) In that case, a consistent input format assists with generation of the output formats, and without that, there'd be even more work. --- That being said, I don't doubt publisher fees exceed their actual costs for this. I always wonder why there's no universal academic interchange schema; it seems like something XML could have genuinely solved. I suppose the publishers have no incentive to build that, and reduce what they can charge for.
  - D-Machine 10mo ago
    You shouldn't be 100% convinced: obviously there are some non-trivial typesetting costs. But general typesetting is very obviously a largely solved problem in 2025, regardless of the submission format, so since academic journals have weirdly specific input format requirements that are not demanded in other similar domains, it is clear they are doing dated / junk / minimal typesetting / formatting. Also see what the costs are anywhere else, typesetting is a triviality: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/52009 https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/52009 https://www.lode.de/blog/the-cost-effective-revolution-automated-latex-typesetting-for-modern-publishers https://www.lode.de/blog/the-cost-effective-revolution-autom... https://svpow.com/2015/06/11/how-much-does-typesetting-cost/ https://svpow.com/2015/06/11/how-much-does-typesetting-cost/ https://old.reddit.com/r/publishing/comments/1cdx1jq/author_paying_for_typesetting/ https://old.reddit.com/r/publishing/comments/1cdx1jq/author_...