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.
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.)
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.
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."
There are several reasons why this has not happened.
1. The most important, researchers are not publishers and are already completely overloaded with other work (most academics typically work 60h+ a week). They neither have the time not expertise to get this started and make no mistake there would be a significant effort required to get this started.
2. There is a certain percentage of researchers who are quite happy with the status quo. These are typically the very successful researchers which don't lack funding so don't see a problem with this (obviously there are exceptions) . Unfortunately they are often also the ones who have a disproportionate influence so if they are not on board the effort is much harder.
3. The vast majority of researchers highly depends on publications in high impact journals for their grants, careers, jobs... (for younger researchers a publication in e.g. Nature can really set off your career). For a new journal to get a high impact takes at least several years, so this is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Before the journal has the high impact most can't afford to send their best work there, but without that work you don't get the impact.
#2 and #3 are arguments against the naive strawman version of this that I didn't say, where people just try to start a new journal and get people to publish in it. A threshold trigger agreement entirely short-circuits these problems: the journal doesn't exist at all, until enough people sign onto it; and then suddenly, after the threshold passes, the journal is immediately not just existent but pre-eminent in its field, and the old journal immediately kneecapped by a majority of the field being legally obligated to no longer publish in it, or subscribe to it. The "researchers happy with the status quo" would be left behind in a world where their comfy old journal suddenly stops publishing before the next issue comes out, due to an effective bank-run of churn; at which point they'll have to either raise their heads and look around to find out what's replaced it, or become irrelevant.
(This is a not an obscure technique — it's the bit of game-theory that Groupon is based on.)
Several governments have lists of "good" journals that "count" (tenure, grant considerations, etc), and those lists take into account things like impact factor over the past several years. Needless to say, there is a lot of inertia in the system beyond the authors themselves.
You're right, and many/most researchers want to publish in Nature, or Cell, or a handful of journals. They don't want the cheaper and well-regarded journal that's perfectly tailored to their research. Part of it is ego, part of it is funding requirements, part of it is academia's requirements. Publishers know that pay-to-read's days are counted, but it's actually a mission to convince researchers to use open access.
It's like recruiting the "best" faculty together and creating a new school. People would still not view the degree from it the same way they do one from Harvard. History and brand matter more than you would think.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
Covered by downloads? Definitely not, they're more than covered by the contracts that they have with academic libraries to sell back the published papers to the institutions
Of course most of the money comes from subscription fees, and of course both the publisher and university monitor the number of paper downloads. While the actual numbers are not public, it's reasonable to assume that the subscription fee divided by the number of paper downloads covered by it is within an order of magnitude of the price of an individual paper.
My point was that it's covered irrespective of the number of times a paper gets downloaded or read. The papers could get read 0 times but they're still making bank as long as they have those library contracts
And my point was that the average number of times a research paper gets read is low, regardless of whether it's behind a paywall or freely accessible. Given the costs of commercial publishing, the average cost of reading a paper must be high, no matter who pays for it and how.
Comments
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.
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.)
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.
eLife is most likely what you’re thinking of:
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/q-a-why-elife-is-...
Thank you for the correction. Yep it's eLife
There are several reasons why this has not happened.
1. The most important, researchers are not publishers and are already completely overloaded with other work (most academics typically work 60h+ a week). They neither have the time not expertise to get this started and make no mistake there would be a significant effort required to get this started.
2. There is a certain percentage of researchers who are quite happy with the status quo. These are typically the very successful researchers which don't lack funding so don't see a problem with this (obviously there are exceptions) . Unfortunately they are often also the ones who have a disproportionate influence so if they are not on board the effort is much harder.
3. The vast majority of researchers highly depends on publications in high impact journals for their grants, careers, jobs... (for younger researchers a publication in e.g. Nature can really set off your career). For a new journal to get a high impact takes at least several years, so this is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Before the journal has the high impact most can't afford to send their best work there, but without that work you don't get the impact.
#2 and #3 are arguments against the naive strawman version of this that I didn't say, where people just try to start a new journal and get people to publish in it. A threshold trigger agreement entirely short-circuits these problems: the journal doesn't exist at all, until enough people sign onto it; and then suddenly, after the threshold passes, the journal is immediately not just existent but pre-eminent in its field, and the old journal immediately kneecapped by a majority of the field being legally obligated to no longer publish in it, or subscribe to it. The "researchers happy with the status quo" would be left behind in a world where their comfy old journal suddenly stops publishing before the next issue comes out, due to an effective bank-run of churn; at which point they'll have to either raise their heads and look around to find out what's replaced it, or become irrelevant.
(This is a not an obscure technique — it's the bit of game-theory that Groupon is based on.)
Several governments have lists of "good" journals that "count" (tenure, grant considerations, etc), and those lists take into account things like impact factor over the past several years. Needless to say, there is a lot of inertia in the system beyond the authors themselves.
You're right, and many/most researchers want to publish in Nature, or Cell, or a handful of journals. They don't want the cheaper and well-regarded journal that's perfectly tailored to their research. Part of it is ego, part of it is funding requirements, part of it is academia's requirements. Publishers know that pay-to-read's days are counted, but it's actually a mission to convince researchers to use open access.
I am not knowledgeable, but it looks like just game theory.
Ideally, I would wish you to publish in open access while I reap the immediate career benefits of publishing in a prestige journal.
It's like recruiting the "best" faculty together and creating a new school. People would still not view the degree from it the same way they do one from Harvard. History and brand matter more than you would think.
There is arxiv, though not everything in there is peer reviewed.
Arxiv is a pre-print repository, It by definition doesn't have peer reviewed articles (at the time of submission)
this has happened, math has several such journals
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.
Amen. Pure rent seeking parasites.
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.
They have network effects.
Charging for network effects is rent seeking.
Network effects are dominant due to reach. Open access journals have even more reach than the paywall journals.
So it's not that.
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.
To make them disappear you may remove their habitat and food : the lions. Or as the author propose : the publishers.
Presumably there is an evolutionary arms race going on between host and parasite.
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).
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.
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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
Covered by downloads? Definitely not, they're more than covered by the contracts that they have with academic libraries to sell back the published papers to the institutions
Of course most of the money comes from subscription fees, and of course both the publisher and university monitor the number of paper downloads. While the actual numbers are not public, it's reasonable to assume that the subscription fee divided by the number of paper downloads covered by it is within an order of magnitude of the price of an individual paper.
My point was that it's covered irrespective of the number of times a paper gets downloaded or read. The papers could get read 0 times but they're still making bank as long as they have those library contracts
And my point was that the average number of times a research paper gets read is low, regardless of whether it's behind a paywall or freely accessible. Given the costs of commercial publishing, the average cost of reading a paper must be high, no matter who pays for it and how.
It's far too high, the publishers shouldn't be able to capitalize on publicly funded research by gate keeping it