5 ms·

> Many are the result of partial or complete university funding. The universities are not paid by the journals, — quite the opposite: they pay handsomely for

by nullc 14y ago

> Many are the result of partial or complete university funding. The universities are not paid by the journals, — quite the opposite: they pay handsomely for access the work of their own researchers.

rayiner 14y ago
The journals don't charge for the content. They charge for the task of curating and editing those articles. It's actually a lot of work to turn the incomprehensible gibberish that researchers pass off as a first draft into something consumable by human readers.
- Turing_Machine 14y ago
  Very few academic journals have professional editors. In most cases the journals are edited by the same people who write for them, for free (sometimes there'll be a pittance salary, but it's not enough to quit your day job by any means). The "incomprehensible gibberish" is, in general, fully comprehensible by their intended audience, which is other academics working in the same field. Here's how the model works: 1) Academic writes the article, supported by taxpayer funding, or a grant from a foundation, or whatever. 2) Academic submits the article to the journal, where it is peer-reviewed and edited by other academics. 3) None of these academics get paid a cent for their work (other than the aforementioned public funding). In specific, the journal publisher doesn't pay them anything. Some of them even CHARGE the author. 4) The journal publisher then sells the result for hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year. Nice gig for the publishers. Less so for the academics and the taxpayers. This model made a certain degree of sense back when journals had to be printed (short print runs are expensive, especially stuff with lots of diagrams, weird equations, foreign languages, etc. as journal articles tend to be), then physically distributed by paper mail to institutions all over the world. That's no longer the case.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Go talk to someone who edits academic journals and brace yourself for the rant that follows. Journal submissions are generally poorly organized, full of citation errors, full of grammatical and spelling errors, etc. It is not a case of researchers submitting perfect prose that the editors simply collate into a PDF and call it a day. Moreover, journals serve a valuable advertising/branding function for researchers, essentially putting their brands behind the work. The phrase "A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine" carries a very different weight than "a study posted on some professor's blog".
    - Turing_Machine 14y ago
      (rewritten to remove snideness) I know people who edit academic journals, and have published in them myself. Your claim that editorial costs are what drives journal prices is completely without merit. Few journals below the level of, say, Nature, have paid staff, and few academics would tolerate major rewrites of their work by an editor anyway.
    - politician 14y ago
      What are the factors affecting the prestige of a journal other than the credentials of the reviewers and the impact of the papers previously submitted?
    - tptacek 14y ago
      Spoiler: title is sarcastic. The importance of copyediting a scientific paper D. J. Bernstein 2005.05.04 http://cr.yp.to/bib/20050504-copyediting.txt http://cr.yp.to/bib/20050504-copyediting.txt
    - temphn 14y ago
      It is true that journals serve as advertising/branding. That was their real value add. But article-level metrics are changing that. Now you can get stats on individual articles (e.g. # of cites, # of pageviews, listed on Faculty of 1000, Most Viewed Article), and those are increasingly influencing funding decisions. As for the point re: editing, this is just not true. Academic journal submissions are by highly educated PhDs at the best universities; the editors on the other side just aren't as well trained. Post-submission copy editing is minimal; most of the effort by journal editors is on formatting. The reason is that in many cases the journals have failed to invest in a proper publication workflow so they have to spend time converting Word documents into their in-house style, rather than just (a) distributing a LaTeX template or (b) working on a common interchangeable format and simple rich text editor. Some of the more computational journals, like Bioinformatics or NAR in compbio do have LaTeX formats, but many like Science, Nature, or Cell do not. So their editorial costs for their human army arise because they didn't invest in a few engineers to build a simple rich text frontend with pdf preview functionality. They are manually doing simple asserts like checking character counts in headline text rather than doing that via client-side JS. Things like that are the cost centers here. A shame.
- sp4rki 14y ago
  I don't get why you're been downvoted. It's as if people don't realize that editing, curating, hosting, and distributing this papers/articles doesn't cost money. I'd be hard pressed to find any one in here that wouldn't complain when they get their hard earned living endangered because someone decided their "product" should be free.

by nullc 14y ago

rayiner 14y ago

The journals don't charge for the content. They charge for the task of curating and editing those articles. It's actually a lot of work to turn the incomprehensible gibberish that researchers pass off as a first draft into something consumable by human readers.

Turing_Machine 14y ago
Very few academic journals have professional editors. In most cases the journals are edited by the same people who write for them, for free (sometimes there'll be a pittance salary, but it's not enough to quit your day job by any means). The "incomprehensible gibberish" is, in general, fully comprehensible by their intended audience, which is other academics working in the same field. Here's how the model works: 1) Academic writes the article, supported by taxpayer funding, or a grant from a foundation, or whatever. 2) Academic submits the article to the journal, where it is peer-reviewed and edited by other academics. 3) None of these academics get paid a cent for their work (other than the aforementioned public funding). In specific, the journal publisher doesn't pay them anything. Some of them even CHARGE the author. 4) The journal publisher then sells the result for hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year. Nice gig for the publishers. Less so for the academics and the taxpayers. This model made a certain degree of sense back when journals had to be printed (short print runs are expensive, especially stuff with lots of diagrams, weird equations, foreign languages, etc. as journal articles tend to be), then physically distributed by paper mail to institutions all over the world. That's no longer the case.
- rayiner 14y ago
  Go talk to someone who edits academic journals and brace yourself for the rant that follows. Journal submissions are generally poorly organized, full of citation errors, full of grammatical and spelling errors, etc. It is not a case of researchers submitting perfect prose that the editors simply collate into a PDF and call it a day. Moreover, journals serve a valuable advertising/branding function for researchers, essentially putting their brands behind the work. The phrase "A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine" carries a very different weight than "a study posted on some professor's blog".
  - Turing_Machine 14y ago
    (rewritten to remove snideness) I know people who edit academic journals, and have published in them myself. Your claim that editorial costs are what drives journal prices is completely without merit. Few journals below the level of, say, Nature, have paid staff, and few academics would tolerate major rewrites of their work by an editor anyway.
  - politician 14y ago
    What are the factors affecting the prestige of a journal other than the credentials of the reviewers and the impact of the papers previously submitted?
  - tptacek 14y ago
    Spoiler: title is sarcastic. The importance of copyediting a scientific paper D. J. Bernstein 2005.05.04 http://cr.yp.to/bib/20050504-copyediting.txt http://cr.yp.to/bib/20050504-copyediting.txt
  - temphn 14y ago
    It is true that journals serve as advertising/branding. That was their real value add. But article-level metrics are changing that. Now you can get stats on individual articles (e.g. # of cites, # of pageviews, listed on Faculty of 1000, Most Viewed Article), and those are increasingly influencing funding decisions. As for the point re: editing, this is just not true. Academic journal submissions are by highly educated PhDs at the best universities; the editors on the other side just aren't as well trained. Post-submission copy editing is minimal; most of the effort by journal editors is on formatting. The reason is that in many cases the journals have failed to invest in a proper publication workflow so they have to spend time converting Word documents into their in-house style, rather than just (a) distributing a LaTeX template or (b) working on a common interchangeable format and simple rich text editor. Some of the more computational journals, like Bioinformatics or NAR in compbio do have LaTeX formats, but many like Science, Nature, or Cell do not. So their editorial costs for their human army arise because they didn't invest in a few engineers to build a simple rich text frontend with pdf preview functionality. They are manually doing simple asserts like checking character counts in headline text rather than doing that via client-side JS. Things like that are the cost centers here. A shame.
sp4rki 14y ago
I don't get why you're been downvoted. It's as if people don't realize that editing, curating, hosting, and distributing this papers/articles doesn't cost money. I'd be hard pressed to find any one in here that wouldn't complain when they get their hard earned living endangered because someone decided their "product" should be free.