Apparently it's only open to users with university library access. Otherwise you have to pay for it.
I emailed the author directly and he sent me a PDF.
$5k though? That still seems a bit much.
PLOS for example is non-profit and charges up to $2900.
Yes, the other 95% need to be checked, but reviewers are recruited from academics and typically do this task for free. The contribution that the publisher does at the stage of manuscript evaluation is marginal.
A submitted paper does not simply turn up in reviewers inboxes, there are steps in between.
I think people pick a few elements of the whole process and then say everything else is negligible. If paid, the academic editors and reviewers may well end up costing a huge amount compared to the spend elsewhere, but that's not the same thing as saying those other costs are small. The proportion here is largely irrelevant.
The associate editor position on glassdoor is about £40k/year, which is £45k including tax costs. Let's say that's £47k including pension contributions as it works out neatly. In the UK there are 47 working weeks, roughly so that's £1k employment cost per week purely on that one employee. That's £25/hour. At an 80% rejection rate that's actually £125/hour, at 90% it's £250/hour and 95% that's £500/hour on accepted papers (not quite, but useful for the comparison). For only a single employee, and only their direct salary.
Of course now we need to add things like the HR costs, hiring costs, building rent, computer equipment, management, etc. Double? How much time of their day actually goes to the core task and not other meetings/etc. All these things multiply up and I'm really not that surprised that the costs go up to these amounts.
I have absolutely no doubt that if the other editors were paid and the reviewers were paid then this would go up dramatically, but that's a different issue.
As an example, take a look at the 34 editors of IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, all in academia or employed by a third party:
All those 95% of papers checked are done by reviewers for free. I don't see any reviewers being paid. I know because I have reviewed papers across multiple conferences and journals.
Free peer review mostly only tells us that the total cost could go up significantly if they were paid.
I am a reviewer and all papers are submitted directly to me. Even if not, the editor is a university professor who does this work.
Maybe. As someone who has done quite a bit of editing of relatively technical material and coordinated review and rework cycles, I wouldn't be surprised if you're looking at a couple of days of work for a paper. Certainly a lot more than for a quick copyedit of an online article. So you're into the more than $1K range pretty quickly.
EDIT: If I had to build a publishing system for research papers, I'd probably have something like Arxiv as a basis, i.e. a site with huge storage capacity where everyone can upload papers given that some basic quality criteria are met (formatting etc.). Then, the role of journals would be performed by reviewers that curate a collection of interesting papers for their readers. It could be integrated right into the same site, similar to how reviewers work e.g. on Steam.
You're skipping a step. The journals' editorial staff performs a quality filter on the submissions before any reviewers/referees even see it. E.g. see the process of a prestigious journal like Nature.[1]
With your proposal, the reviewers with specialized knowledge (e.g. theoretical physicist that understands the bleeding edge of string theory) would have to wade through 1000 papers about "aliens from outer space prove that flat Earth is real." Or mathematicians would waste time with endless crackpot papers that supposedly proved "P=NP".
Since no rational referee with limited time would suffer through that for free, the platform would inevitably require a filter of some sort. Since it's human nature to not want to do something for free ... voila ... you end up recreating another "Elsevier" as middleman again. If an intermediary becomes good at filtering papers for referees and sets a consistent quality bar for readers (subscribers), its human nature to want to be paid for that effort.
Some people wonder why journals exist. They exist because people want them to exist even though they don't realize it. The accumulation of prestige and reputation for curating quality is not free.
Instead of questioning the legitimacy of intermediaries, it's more productive to accept them as a natural emergence of humans' finite time that prevents both reviewers & readers from slogging through an infinite sea of worthless material.
If we acknowledge that something like Elsevier must exist in some form, this lets us concentrate on the recreating the curation platform in a more cost-efficient manner. (You can't do it for free... because charging $0 will not work for the reviewers nor the readers -- even though some in this thread think it does. Sturgeon's Law is applicable here.[2])
[1] e.g. Nature's submission and approval process: http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/get_published/index.htm...
The only task done directly by Elsevier staff is the copy-editing once the article is accepted.
Elsevier is looking to fill salaried positions for their editorial staff. This qualifications are scientists with PhDs. Examples:
https://www.glassdoor.com/partner/jobListing.htm?&jobListing...
https://www.glassdoor.com/partner/jobListing.htm?&jobListing...
Either the meme that Elsevier employees "do nothing but spell-check LaTeX markup files" is wrong ... or ... it depends on the particular journals in question. For the job listing examples above, one of the job duties is curation of content (e.g. "assessing submitted research papers") and not just copy-editing. So for that Elsevier imprint (Cell Reports), if you submit a paper about "GMO foods proves Darwin Theory of Evolution is Wrong", their unpaid reviewers won't even see it. One of Elsevier's editorial functions is to filter that crap out.
The published collection of papers from a conference are more like a anthology of the talks given (Springer is common example publisher) rather than a quality curation via rigorous peer-review. A bunch of experts wasting time with unfiltered crap is probably the norm. Virtually none of those conference papers collections have reputations to accumulate "impact".
The prestigious journals like "Cell", "Lancet", or "Journal of the American College of Cardiology" do not forward unfiltered junk papers to reviewers.
Your experience with conferences is a different situation.
Of course, no private journal wants to be just a signed tag in some broader system...
The extortion will ultimately be of the tax payer money. Authors will ask for more money during research grants citing this "open access" policy.
Eventually, authors will migrate to the not-for-profit open access journals and platforms. But that will take time. Top-ranked PIs must lead the way, given that their reputations are well established, and they have tenure.
This is the key aspect here which everyone needs to address. Just moving from a subscription model to "open access" where you still pay 2000$ per article won't solve or alleviate the problem.