I think the solution isn't to change the publishers it's to let them go bankrupt. In my experience in Computer Science most papers are at conferences and if those simply focused on the conference itself and maybe a website linking to the arxiv versions of the accepted papers there simply wouldn't be a need for any other publishing. As it stands 99% of the burden is on the scientific community anyway, that leaves publishers with abysmal editing and extortion.

I agree but to be fair the editing done by journals does provide some value: Most researchers, in most fields outside of mathematics, physics and computer science, have rudimentary editing skills at best. Many very good biologists I know outright refuse to learn LaTeX, decrying it as a waste of time. Of course this isn’t an insurmountable problem but at least for now there’s a clear demand that journals fill; take a look at manuscripts submitted to bioRxiv. The average quality is a lot worse than CS conference papers or arxiv submissions — not just in terms of text layout and formatting but also for rudimentary language editing etc.

Perhaps editing could then be a product sold to the researcher, rather than a reason to yield publishing rights to a single journal.

> Perhaps editing could then be a product sold to the researcher, rather than a reason to yield publishing rights to a single journal.

That's exactly what's happening with Open Access Journals: they charge the authors to finance editing and other editorial processes, and distribute papers for free and with liberal licenses.

by yielding publishing rights to a journal the journal gets to collect small bits of money from lots of people, the bearable cost of editing for any researcher would be quite a bit smaller, effectively for these publishers selling editing as a service is a no-go.

Many researchers at the moment happily pay APCs (=Open Access article processing charges) in the several thousands of dollars — this is way more than is required as a minimal cost of editing. In fact, you can easily hire a freelance editor to work on your paper for less. If the process becomes minimally streamlined it could be made very affordable: at the moment, a lot of the work of a journal editor is (intentionally, as well as due to inertia) due to the utter lack of streamlining.

I'm not surprised if their actual costs are in the range of thousands of dollars, because they typically have horrible typesetting workflows that take your nice LaTeX, mangle it into QuarkXPress and give you a PDF for proofreading with tens or hundreds of annoying small errors. Which you have to find and point out, and then they fix every single one manually in their horrible software.

It's not the cost of a value-adding service, but the cost of having a huge technical debt that nobody has bothered paying down on.

thanks, didn't know that.

It would solve the "i'm not going to learn latex because I consider it a waste of time" argument as it would save you tons of money.

I never understand this argument. I wish I could have all of the hours back I spent trying to fix inscrutable things in word processing documents.

what they are saying is that it would be a personal decision, like choosing what to drink, some home-made tea or a coke from the vending machine. you choose if you edit yourself, or spend part of your paycheck to delegate the task

Word processors take a long time to learn to use well, with the time invested paying back much lower dividends than learning to use (La)TeX well. That is what I meant.

I fully agree learning (La)TeX is superior of "word processors" which is a bit of a glorified name for invisible markup, it is seldom a good idea to dumb down on the user.

I misread your "I never understand this argument." as not understanding what consp wrote, "this" was a bit ambiguous, and I originally thought you meant "I'm the scientist, let me do science instead of communicating clearly what I did and observed" but now I see "this" referred to the argument consp quoted. So we are both agreeing with him. Add to that that I was confusing a sibling comment with what consp wrote. :)

That's not my experience.

At least one publisher, despite claiming to 'accept LaTeX', appears to just copy-and-paste from the pdf output into Adobe InDesign and manages to introduce tonnes of new errors, which then I have to have substantial time to fix (for free, again). [And usually I don't manage to catch everything.]

> Most researchers, in most fields outside of mathematics, physics and computer science, have rudimentary editing skills at best.

Why exclude those fields? I would argue that poor editing skills are fairly widespread, regardless of domain.

Those fields are excluded because authors in those fields are quick to use LaTeX which encourages good editing, or at least makes papers look professional, not because they are better at copyediting or at writing English.

Copyediting is still badly needed, but that's typically foisted upon a grad student; the journals don't contribute much as far as I can tell.

> In my experience in Computer Science most papers are at conferences and if those simply focused on the conference itself and maybe a website linking to the arxiv versions of the accepted papers there simply wouldn't be a need for any other publishing.

Actually some conferences come with "publishing fees" in the form of "if you want to publish at our conf of course you'll have to present here, which means you'll buy a ticket, which is veeeeery expensive".

From my limited experience math/comp-sci paper drafts tend to be available for free. Totally not the case for e.g. neurology sadly.

Yes, the papers themselves are usually easy to find for free. The code and data, though, not so much.

This seems orthogonal to the topic under discussion though. I don't believe GP was saying the publications are perfect.

No, but codifying access requirements might be the right opportunity to require code/data sharing. After all, some research is next to useless without it and the public paid for the code as much as the paper.

The value from journals isn't so much in editing as it is curating.

Nature (so I expect Nature Communications as well) has paid editors AFAIK, but more importantly the charge is only paid by successful papers. I can't find the NC acceptance rate but for Nature it's in the region of 4-5% IIRC.

That means all successful papers are paying for any costs incurred for the review (editor or peer) of 20.

You can look at non-profit journals like the PLOS journals, they still have charges in the region of $1600-3000.

disclaimer - work in the field for Digital Science, which is part of Holtzbrinck

...but the reviewers don't see a penny. It is all just to organize the reviews. All that activity the journals do prior to publication can probably be streamlined and solved a lot more efficiently by some computer program/social platform.

If reviewers were paid you would have a better point IMO.

There is a cost to doing this though, that's the point. Who gets the money is in many ways not relevant to the central point. You are not paying for a single paper to be reviewed. You're paying for all of the rejected ones too. The high APCs of even non-profit publishers is a key point to show that costs end up being quite high.

> All that activity the journals do prior to publication can probably be streamlined and solved a lot more efficiently

It's a huge industry though, and so saving money can translate to huge profit increases. While not competitive like other marketplaces are, I'm sure these places like money and so have their own drive to cut costs. You can't just throw technology or "social platform" at a problem and hope costs go down.

Well, I feel pretty convinced that in 10 years the world has thrown technology at this problem and that costs has gone down and that the publishing industry is dead; whether or not you say you "can" do so or not.

Although reviewers don't get paid editions don't just organize reviews. They select high impact papers, copy edit papers, typeset and also have some writers for summary stuff at the front of the magazine. Probably more I'm not thinking of. Is it worth it, who knows.

Source: published in Nature and Science.

The context of my comment was specifically that it was said that the one accepted paper had to pay for the cost of all the rejected ones. Is all the things you say (editing, typesetting) done prior to review? It wasn't done on the papers I have reviewed...

Their point isn't really diminished by you claiming easy efficiency gains using "some computer program/social platform".

What does "rationalized" mean? Highly respected open access publishers like PLoS charge similar fees https://www.plos.org/publication-fees - maybe that's just what it costs to run a journal? If not, PLoS must be some ridiculously profitable scam.

Why a scam? And why only PLOS but none of the other commercial publishers?

But yes, the (well known) profit margins of some of these publishers are quite simply obscene.

PLoS is a non-profit with publishing fees up to $3000, so I think their point is that high costs are not simply profit but that there is a large cost involved.

This is a misunderstanding: “non-profit” does not mean that an organisation can’t earn money. It means the company cannot be sold, and all profits have to be reinvested (rather than e.g. paid out to shareholders). And PLOS, like for-profit publishers, has in the past had very large profit margins (and has been criticised for this, e.g. [1]).

[1]: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/09/29/plosone-hikes...

> It means the company cannot be sold, and all profits have to be reinvested

Right, so the incoming money is spent on the company itself - so should represent the long term running costs, surely.

> And PLOS, like for-profit publishers, has in the past had very large profit margins (and has been criticised for this, e.g. [1]).

I'm not sure I'd say those are extreme, $5M on $50M in revenue. Even if you removed that you would still have APCs of ~$1450-2700 which I don't think would change the original point.

> PLoS is a non-profit with publishing fees up to $3000, so I think their point is that high costs are not simply profit

“Non-profit” does not mean an organization does not earn profits. It means that it is not a vehicle for returning profits to particular stakeholders (owners, shareholders, LLC members, etc.)

And I'd add that it's also not particular proof of efficiency. Non-profits can be amazingly effective at using money to further their missions. They can also be enormous boondoggles.

I think it's disingenuous to say the cost is just hosting a PDF, but even that can be challenging for those without any IT background.

I think these science funders should make some grants available to build some high quality digital tools for fields outside of CS to make journal creation and maintenance easier.