5 ms·

That's where the remaining problem is. Funding agencies should really stop kneeling in front of publishers and refuse to pay for this, or at least fix themselv

by p4bl0 12y ago

That's where the remaining problem is. Funding agencies should really stop kneeling in front of publishers and refuse to pay for this, or at least fix themselves a maximum price per publication. Currently publishers ask for $1000 to $5000 in some cases, which is completely insane. I'm not denying the cost of publication. But there is that actual cost, and then there is the prices demanded by publishers, which looks more like violent theft than it looks like the actual cost.

sre_ops 12y ago
Yes, publishers should work for free. plonk
- pkaye 12y ago
  yes, tax payers should fund publishers for free. plonk.
  - sre_ops 12y ago
    Tax payers aren't funding publishers. Don't like it? Go publish it on your blog.
    - dalke 12y ago
      "publishers should work for free. plonk" We expect peer reviewers to work for free. We expect the authors of the papers to work for free. But no, we don't expect the publishers to work for free. As p4bl0 wrote, "But there is that actual cost, and then there is the prices demanded by publishers, which looks more like violent theft than it looks like the actual cost." That means p4bl0 think the prices should be reduced, not that the prices should be zero, as you somehow concluded. "Go publish it on your blog." See, I've actually done that. I can tell you what happens. A large subset of people don't believe something has been published unless it's in the scientific literature. People end up writing papers which say things like "the first comparison between X and Y". I write to them pointing out several previous blog publications which report the analysis, to be told that they knew about one of them, but didn't consider it sufficiently academic to count as a real publication. Publishers make their profits because a lot of people, including those who hire or fund academics, believe that a publisher's imprimatur is essential to being a publication. This is not completely invalid. Google's standard search engine, good as it is for search, is lousy for searching the academic literature. Google Scholar is better, but it only manages it because it only indexes the academic journals. So if you publish on your blog, it's not likely that people will know about your work. If you want to advance career in science that has a strong academic orientation, then it's very hard to do so by only publishing blog posts. Therefore, if you don't like it, change the system. Which is what this debate has been about for the last 15+ years.
      - robryk 12y ago
        > Google's standard search engine, good as it is for search, is lousy for searching the academic literature. Google Scholar is better, but it only manages it because it only indexes the academic journals. Google scholar seems to index arxiv.org (a free for readers and authors, no review paper archive). Would you consider publishing those things you've published as blog posts there too?
        dalke 12y ago
        I have considered it. However, I work in cheminformatics, which doesn't really fall under "Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics". I don't see an appropriate place for my work. For example, under Quantitative Biology you'll notice a lack of pharmaceutical chemistry, toxicology, or pesticides, which are closely related areas to the types of work I do. Searching out of curiosity, I found http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.1724 http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.1724 as an example of something in my field. It's under the catch-all "Computer Science > Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science", so that's a possibility. There is some toxicology under metabolomics, but that focused on expression data, not structure-based prediction. There's another tox paper filed under "Mathematics > Statistics Theory", again based on gene expressions. There's no history of people using arxiv.org in my field. If people don't like to cite blog publications, I don't know if they would like to cite preprints. Something to find out the hard, slow way, I guess.
      - p4bl0 12y ago
        Just a remark: actually Google Scholar indexes everything that resembles a publication. For instance it indexes PDF linked from the "research" page of my personal website: if you search for "rauzy ARMv7-M" for instance [1] you'll find a preprint paper that is publicly only available on that web page. [1] https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?q=rauzy+ARMv7-M https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?q=rauzy+ARMv7-M
        dalke 12y ago
        "resembles a publication" is an interesting concept, though point taken that it indexes more than just articles published in a journal. One paper I'm thinking of compared implementations of two different algorithms, and showed that for chemical data VF2 was several times faster than the Ullman algorithm for subgraph isomorphism. A couple of years earlier, two of the free software projects in the field did the same analysis, with the same conclusion. Both published their results on their respective blogs/wiki, and changed the internals to use VF2. These don't resemble a publication in a way that Google Scholar can discern. It's a bit annoying to me in that the scientific literature is supposed to be "self-correcting", in the sense that I could publish a followup paper highlighting some of the pre-history. But the journal I'm thinking of is an OA journal, with no letters to the editor or similar section. The only way to update the literature is to pay ~$1,000 for a full-sized paper, or convince some other journal (... or arxiv? Hmm...) to publish a correction piece. Quite annoying.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
  "plonk"??? usenet's been dead for years.
markbao 12y ago
Even more insane when you consider that peer reviewers are unpaid.
- alttag 12y ago
  So is content editing, in many disciplines. I believe copyediting and layout is paid, however.
  - alphydan 12y ago
    > I believe copyediting and layout is paid, however. I've published in Nature Physics, Physical Review Letters, PRA ... and we did 99% of the copyediting and layout (with LaTeX and unpaid, of course). The editor would correct a few typos, modify the layout slightly (1h of work tops) and that was that.
  - PeterisP 12y ago
    My discipline is conference-heavy; all the copyediting and layout generally falls to assorted grad students and other underlings at whichever institution hosts the particular conference that year. The major publishers (who need to get involved to have the proceedings indexed and "counted") get everything ready to publish online (well, they do slap a cover on the thing and get an ISBN) after the review process and technical process is done, and still try charge for access to the articles.
hackuser 12y ago
> Currently publishers ask for $1000 to $5000 in some cases, which is completely insane. How many articles do they publish per month and what are their costs?
mathattack 12y ago
Journals are an amazingly profitable business. There's a reason that Warren Buffett likes them. :-)
scott_s 12y ago
I think there is some confusion here. Some open access journals charge authors. But these open access journals are not the publishers we hear about (such as Elsevier). In some ways, it's accurate to say that the old model with publishers is "reader pays", and the open access model is "author pays". The good thing about open access journals is that they are typically not a for-profit endeavor. This means that what they will charge to the authors is, hopefully, reasonable.
- acveilleux 12y ago
  When was the last time you published in a traditional journal? Last I saw an invoice was 4 years ago and we paid to be published in journals that were pay-only.
  - scott_s 12y ago
    This year; it was IEEE, which counts as "traditional" for my field. Computer science is different from most other science and engineering though, since most of our conferences and journals are run through our professional organizations (ACM and IEEE), not a for-profit company.
- p4bl0 12y ago
  Sadly you are wrong. Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, etc. they all have (what they call) "open access" journals where you have to pay to publish, and even some "authors choses" journal where you can pay to make your article freely available on the web but also choose the "free" closed access option. And yes, this means that universities still have to pay the subscriptions to these journals because not all of their papers are open access, so you end up paying one more time… I'm insisting here on the fact that publishers attempt to melt the notion of "open access" and "gold open access" with author processing charges, but this is manipulative propaganda (and sadly it works, lobbies at EU and in the US succeed in convincing politics and funding agencies that they have to pay to publish in "open access").
  - scott_s 12y ago
    I was unaware that the old publishers had co-opted the label "open-access". But it is still true that some "true" open access journals require author fees - there's no free lunch.
akjj 12y ago
To me, $1000 per article sounds insanely low. PLoS is a non-profit founded for the purpose of publishing open-access journals. They charge between $1350 and $2900, depending on the journal, and only one journal is less than $2200. Another open-access publisher, BMC charges over $1900 for most of its journals. Do you think that PLoS and BMC are very inefficient? Are there _any_ large-scale open-access publishers that charge less than $1000? I don't count low-volume journals where the administration work is done by professors on donated time that would be valued at more than the cost of hiring a professional. Sources: http://www.plos.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/about-journals.gif http://www.plos.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/about-journal... http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/apcfaq/howmuch http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/apcfaq/howmuch
- p4bl0 12y ago
  First I would like to show the fallacy of your reasoning: we're discussing the unreasonableness of the current price of APCs for open access publications, and you are justifying its reasonableness by giving the current prices. Now I think you are thinking about this the wrong way. Nobody is denying that publication has a cost. But take all the money that universities around the world spend in subscriptions, add all the money that is paid in APCs. With that kind of money you could laaaaargely support many publishing platforms and professional librarians and technicians to manage, improve and maintains articles metadata and the platforms. The remaining amount of money (which would be most of it in my opinion) could be used to actually fund research and higher education. But let's be even wilder! Consider that, rather than being owned by a publisher who's main job is making money, each journal is owned by its editorial board (i.e., the scientific committee composed by the researchers who actually do the peer reviewing work for this journal as part of their researcher work (they're not paid for this task in addition to their salaries)). Now with relatively cheap¹ technical platforms (such as arXiv, HAL, revues.org, easychair, sciencesconf, SciELO, …), we would have everything we have now² for almost free. And publishers could act as contractor (and would be in competition against each other for quality and price) when we want professional editing and paper prints of some journal volumes. If in addition to that the papers use free content copyleft licenses such as CC-BY-SA, then when any university choose to spend a little money to get a professional edition of some papers everyone benefits. ¹ These platforms are not that cheap in fact, but they cost nothing compared to the current cumulated spending in subscriptions etc. ² Many publications todays are actually not professionally edited, publishers actually take the camera-ready version of the authors and just put the PDF online. So their job mainly consist in hosting PDFs, yet they get a freaking awful lot of money for that.

by p4bl0 12y ago

sre_ops 12y ago

Yes, publishers should work for free. plonk

pkaye 12y ago
yes, tax payers should fund publishers for free. plonk.
- sre_ops 12y ago
  Tax payers aren't funding publishers. Don't like it? Go publish it on your blog.
  - dalke 12y ago
    "publishers should work for free. plonk" We expect peer reviewers to work for free. We expect the authors of the papers to work for free. But no, we don't expect the publishers to work for free. As p4bl0 wrote, "But there is that actual cost, and then there is the prices demanded by publishers, which looks more like violent theft than it looks like the actual cost." That means p4bl0 think the prices should be reduced, not that the prices should be zero, as you somehow concluded. "Go publish it on your blog." See, I've actually done that. I can tell you what happens. A large subset of people don't believe something has been published unless it's in the scientific literature. People end up writing papers which say things like "the first comparison between X and Y". I write to them pointing out several previous blog publications which report the analysis, to be told that they knew about one of them, but didn't consider it sufficiently academic to count as a real publication. Publishers make their profits because a lot of people, including those who hire or fund academics, believe that a publisher's imprimatur is essential to being a publication. This is not completely invalid. Google's standard search engine, good as it is for search, is lousy for searching the academic literature. Google Scholar is better, but it only manages it because it only indexes the academic journals. So if you publish on your blog, it's not likely that people will know about your work. If you want to advance career in science that has a strong academic orientation, then it's very hard to do so by only publishing blog posts. Therefore, if you don't like it, change the system. Which is what this debate has been about for the last 15+ years.
    - robryk 12y ago
      > Google's standard search engine, good as it is for search, is lousy for searching the academic literature. Google Scholar is better, but it only manages it because it only indexes the academic journals. Google scholar seems to index arxiv.org (a free for readers and authors, no review paper archive). Would you consider publishing those things you've published as blog posts there too?
      - dalke 12y ago
        I have considered it. However, I work in cheminformatics, which doesn't really fall under "Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics". I don't see an appropriate place for my work. For example, under Quantitative Biology you'll notice a lack of pharmaceutical chemistry, toxicology, or pesticides, which are closely related areas to the types of work I do. Searching out of curiosity, I found http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.1724 http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.1724 as an example of something in my field. It's under the catch-all "Computer Science > Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science", so that's a possibility. There is some toxicology under metabolomics, but that focused on expression data, not structure-based prediction. There's another tox paper filed under "Mathematics > Statistics Theory", again based on gene expressions. There's no history of people using arxiv.org in my field. If people don't like to cite blog publications, I don't know if they would like to cite preprints. Something to find out the hard, slow way, I guess.
    - p4bl0 12y ago
      Just a remark: actually Google Scholar indexes everything that resembles a publication. For instance it indexes PDF linked from the "research" page of my personal website: if you search for "rauzy ARMv7-M" for instance [1] you'll find a preprint paper that is publicly only available on that web page. [1] https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?q=rauzy+ARMv7-M https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?q=rauzy+ARMv7-M
      - dalke 12y ago
        "resembles a publication" is an interesting concept, though point taken that it indexes more than just articles published in a journal. One paper I'm thinking of compared implementations of two different algorithms, and showed that for chemical data VF2 was several times faster than the Ullman algorithm for subgraph isomorphism. A couple of years earlier, two of the free software projects in the field did the same analysis, with the same conclusion. Both published their results on their respective blogs/wiki, and changed the internals to use VF2. These don't resemble a publication in a way that Google Scholar can discern. It's a bit annoying to me in that the scientific literature is supposed to be "self-correcting", in the sense that I could publish a followup paper highlighting some of the pre-history. But the journal I'm thinking of is an OA journal, with no letters to the editor or similar section. The only way to update the literature is to pay ~$1,000 for a full-sized paper, or convince some other journal (... or arxiv? Hmm...) to publish a correction piece. Quite annoying.
GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
"plonk"??? usenet's been dead for years.

markbao 12y ago

Even more insane when you consider that peer reviewers are unpaid.

alttag 12y ago
So is content editing, in many disciplines. I believe copyediting and layout is paid, however.
- alphydan 12y ago
  > I believe copyediting and layout is paid, however. I've published in Nature Physics, Physical Review Letters, PRA ... and we did 99% of the copyediting and layout (with LaTeX and unpaid, of course). The editor would correct a few typos, modify the layout slightly (1h of work tops) and that was that.
- PeterisP 12y ago
  My discipline is conference-heavy; all the copyediting and layout generally falls to assorted grad students and other underlings at whichever institution hosts the particular conference that year. The major publishers (who need to get involved to have the proceedings indexed and "counted") get everything ready to publish online (well, they do slap a cover on the thing and get an ISBN) after the review process and technical process is done, and still try charge for access to the articles.

hackuser 12y ago

> Currently publishers ask for $1000 to $5000 in some cases, which is completely insane. How many articles do they publish per month and what are their costs?

mathattack 12y ago

Journals are an amazingly profitable business. There's a reason that Warren Buffett likes them. :-)

scott_s 12y ago

I think there is some confusion here. Some open access journals charge authors. But these open access journals are not the publishers we hear about (such as Elsevier). In some ways, it's accurate to say that the old model with publishers is "reader pays", and the open access model is "author pays". The good thing about open access journals is that they are typically not a for-profit endeavor. This means that what they will charge to the authors is, hopefully, reasonable.

acveilleux 12y ago
When was the last time you published in a traditional journal? Last I saw an invoice was 4 years ago and we paid to be published in journals that were pay-only.
- scott_s 12y ago
  This year; it was IEEE, which counts as "traditional" for my field. Computer science is different from most other science and engineering though, since most of our conferences and journals are run through our professional organizations (ACM and IEEE), not a for-profit company.
p4bl0 12y ago
Sadly you are wrong. Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, etc. they all have (what they call) "open access" journals where you have to pay to publish, and even some "authors choses" journal where you can pay to make your article freely available on the web but also choose the "free" closed access option. And yes, this means that universities still have to pay the subscriptions to these journals because not all of their papers are open access, so you end up paying one more time… I'm insisting here on the fact that publishers attempt to melt the notion of "open access" and "gold open access" with author processing charges, but this is manipulative propaganda (and sadly it works, lobbies at EU and in the US succeed in convincing politics and funding agencies that they have to pay to publish in "open access").
- scott_s 12y ago
  I was unaware that the old publishers had co-opted the label "open-access". But it is still true that some "true" open access journals require author fees - there's no free lunch.

akjj 12y ago

To me, $1000 per article sounds insanely low. PLoS is a non-profit founded for the purpose of publishing open-access journals. They charge between $1350 and $2900, depending on the journal, and only one journal is less than $2200. Another open-access publisher, BMC charges over $1900 for most of its journals. Do you think that PLoS and BMC are very inefficient? Are there _any_ large-scale open-access publishers that charge less than $1000? I don't count low-volume journals where the administration work is done by professors on donated time that would be valued at more than the cost of hiring a professional. Sources: http://www.plos.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/about-journals.gif http://www.plos.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/about-journal... http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/apcfaq/howmuch http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/apcfaq/howmuch

p4bl0 12y ago
First I would like to show the fallacy of your reasoning: we're discussing the unreasonableness of the current price of APCs for open access publications, and you are justifying its reasonableness by giving the current prices. Now I think you are thinking about this the wrong way. Nobody is denying that publication has a cost. But take all the money that universities around the world spend in subscriptions, add all the money that is paid in APCs. With that kind of money you could laaaaargely support many publishing platforms and professional librarians and technicians to manage, improve and maintains articles metadata and the platforms. The remaining amount of money (which would be most of it in my opinion) could be used to actually fund research and higher education. But let's be even wilder! Consider that, rather than being owned by a publisher who's main job is making money, each journal is owned by its editorial board (i.e., the scientific committee composed by the researchers who actually do the peer reviewing work for this journal as part of their researcher work (they're not paid for this task in addition to their salaries)). Now with relatively cheap¹ technical platforms (such as arXiv, HAL, revues.org, easychair, sciencesconf, SciELO, …), we would have everything we have now² for almost free. And publishers could act as contractor (and would be in competition against each other for quality and price) when we want professional editing and paper prints of some journal volumes. If in addition to that the papers use free content copyleft licenses such as CC-BY-SA, then when any university choose to spend a little money to get a professional edition of some papers everyone benefits. ¹ These platforms are not that cheap in fact, but they cost nothing compared to the current cumulated spending in subscriptions etc. ² Many publications todays are actually not professionally edited, publishers actually take the camera-ready version of the authors and just put the PDF online. So their job mainly consist in hosting PDFs, yet they get a freaking awful lot of money for that.