Much like with open-source software wasn't so much about it being free as changing the development model (you could see the source, send in patches, and have a direct discussion with the engineers who wrote that code), one of the more interesting changes is how much research progress now happens via preprints or even just blog posts. There is definitely a valuable role for journals as the gatekeepers of what research you should pay attention to and the facilitators of communication, but like account reps that insulate engineering teams from customers and help prioritize what's important, in practice they aren't working well enough any more to justify having them.
(And the implication, then, is that this work is hardly menial; you want a person actually familiar with your discipline to triage bugs or sort through preprints. And it turns out you're in a better spot to find or train up those people than the middlemen are.)
But the secret of open source is that it was the same people (or at least the same job roles) who were previously writing proprietary software. Companies just decided that it made more sense to have them collectively, collaboratively work in public on infrastructure software than to pay a single vendor for closed-source code. It's not that hobbyists are implementing core OS scheduling primitives like cgroups, it's that the professional engineers doing that are now employed directly by end users like Facebook or Google instead of by vendors like SCO or Sun.
Can they? All pieces of software that are the core part of the Linux desktop (kernel, Xorg, GNOME, Firefox, etc) are backed by big corporations.
No one is saying that we don't need talented scientists writing and reviewing papers or organizing journals. The claim is that the structure of doing this through Elsevier doesn't make sense any more.
Gee, what if open academic publishing could also work, without the likes of Elsevier?
Plus, given that when folks like Darl McBride said "He can't have written an entire OS" they were clearly not thinking about just the Linux kernel, I think there's a solid argument for counting macOS and iOS too, both of which depend on the assumption that open-source code is of comparable quality to proprietary, commercially-developed code. Everything from their core kernel to the shell to the database for storing contacts (SQLite) is code developed in ways that the McBrides of the world said was untenable. That bumps it to almost 60%.
(Don't try me, I still have my Slashdot-honed debate skills.)
Please read this in the context of the analogy: the OS is the science, the UI is typesetting/distribution/etc.
As it happens I think that's actually directly analogous to the open access fight now. Universities stick with pricy journals not because those journals provide better typesetting or distribution (or science) but because those journals are the only way to get to existing papers. If Windows had never existed until today, nobody would switch to it; similarly, if Elsevier had never existed until today, nobody would start subscribing to them.
Or servers, or mobile devices in the form of Android phones. Desktop usage is only one many use cases for Linux.
But if we look at servers, there's a ton of Linux servers out there. Might be a better metric than computers that a small subset of programmers use. Linux accounts for >30% of this share and Unix like is >60%. Those are really important.
Also a lot of embedded systems run Linux.
Either way I think we pretty much agree. Linux is everywhere. Just not big on desktops. But huge everywhere else (which has a larger share of the computing resources in the world).
The key is to get reviewers to stop reviewing articles for them. It's this that keeps them relevant. Whether the end publication is on wordpress or on medium doesn't matter much.
Also, https://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-sci...
> they [open journals] charge authors fees in the high 3-digit range to cover their costs.
Most Elsevier journals charge an ADDITIONAL ~$1500 if you want to open access, supposedly to make up for the lost profits.
EDIT: correction, I just checked the fee for the Elsevier journal JVGR, the last one I published in. It is $2750 per article!!! https://www.elsevier.com/journals/journal-of-volcanology-and...
Oh and don't be confused by "green open access" -- that's not open access. It's just typical smarmy BS marketing. How the hell do we allow these people to be the guardians of science!?
They don't accomplish anything beyond rent-seeking and rubber-stamping. They are as bad as the MPAA and RIAA. I've published papers in Elsevier journals several times, and I'll probably have to keep doing it, because they are the landlord.
They are a major contributing factor to the really serious ignorance problem we have in this country.
Elsevier and nature charge $5000 for full open access, and not even in their top journals. Cell reports and scientific reports have high impact factor but are considered second-tier compared to Cell and Nature (The editors of the latter will redirect you to pay to submit to those open access journals if rejected)
https://www.cell.com/rights-sharing-embargoes
And this is all paid with taxpayer money. Good thing that taxpayers don't know about this situation or we d have riots
Which stages are you referring to? In my experiences in CS, publishing a _conference_ paper required:
- Writing the paper using a publisher-provided LaTeX documentclass (potentially a significant portion of publisher costs went into developing this style)
- Submitting the paper, via third-party conference management systems
- Review, performed for free by other researchers
- Responding to reviews, performed by me
- Submitting a camera-ready version of the paper. The checks were mostly performed automatically (PDF metadata, page size, fonts, text size, balanced last page, page limits, margins, etc.)
- Checking of the camera-ready paper (this seems like an actual menial task performed by someone on the publishing side, although I think that this was also contracted out)
- Assembling the proceedings PDF (again, I assume this was automated, with the menial task of checking TOCs, headers, and footers)
- Attending the conference itself (I assume the most money goes into this, renting the venue, organising AV teams, large amounts of co-ordination)
It seems to me that most of the menial tasks are already automated. A lot of the menial tasks are even contracted out. I have colleagues who go to great lengths to organise local seminar series, run workshops, Perhaps I am missing some, or some of these are much more involved than they appear on the surface.
That means we're talking about the editors and copy editors themselves as the majority of the cost. Solve that by creating a university consortium. Instead of paying Elsevier, they pay a non-profit run at a set of universities who are responsible for a pool of editors.
Academia handles so much of this in-house already - there's nothing saying they couldn't do this as well.
There's no way to support your reasoning on even roughly estimating their costs by bootstrap deduction, without more information.
Maybe a single person could have compensation valued at 100 million dollars. Yes, it happens not to founders but to employees.
Cost of sales at a large revenue company like this is usually very high. Top performing sales people are extremely well compensated.
It's possible you've guessed correctly, I'm just saying there no reason to assume it's even roughly accurate from your premise.
The bottom line is their very existence go against the concept of maximizing shared scientific knowledge.
They also apparently consider unethical smear campaigns a standard business tactic.
Elsevier have a lot of products/services other than just publishing journals that they're trying to push. I wouldn't be surprised in most that 65% went to fund those. I suspect even Elsevier sees the writing on the wall is using the massive profits from their publishing arm to try to bootstrap other revenue sources. It's not like the journal publishing side of the business has seen any massive technical improvements over the past decade.
I understand why you would think this, but most editing is done by unpaid volunteers. They have 20,000 editors and ~8000 employees. Which means institutions are already "paying" to submit reports, with exceptions for those who can't afford it.
Proofreading -> $50 on mechanical turk (this is really just proofreading according to a list of detailed rules, they not validating the text)
Layout -> Completely useless in the internet age. In fact pasting it all in an HTML page makes it easier to read.
Submit related info to different databases -> This should not be a thing at all. It is a thing because their databases are closed-access so they submit data and metadata to paying customers. I dont even think this is covered by subscription/publication costs but from those paying customers.
So yeah, i think most ppl would be happy to pay ~$200 for their paper. It helps to weed out trolls too.
Publishers make the most of their money by publishing second/third and fourth tier journals not the first tier because in the view of academia someone having access to "Journal of the Society of Librarians" ( circulation : 320 ), and "Cell" has the same value.
Who knows if these money ends up in lobbying, manager salaries, etc?
This is all UC is trying to request:
1) Allow any and all UC research the /option/ of being published open access (by paying the requisite >$1000 fees) --> Elsevier countered by structuring the open access ability such that only about 30% of UC's published output would be able to be open access (i.e. as before, not all journals allow for it still)
2) Allow this, without (massively) changing the total subscription fees UC pays towards the journals --> UC actually proposed a higher subscription cost to cover the transition to open access (based on the current fees associated with open access), and Elsevier countered with a much higher fee with, as stated in (1), 2/3rds of the research not given the option of open access.
3) Allow UC libraries to help cover the cost of the open access fee that researchers must pay to allow the research to be open. --> Elsevier countered with "that's not allowed"
TL;DR UC wants ALL Elsevier journals to allow researchers to opt into open access (rather than a small number of them as is current) and they want that option with a reasonable increase in fees to the UC system.
Not the current alternative, just one of many and not the best one: https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/96
Calling the APC "the OA model" and conveniently forgetting to mention other options has been precisely the common publishers' rhetoric feeding deliberate public confusion in trying to identify OA with APC, which needless to say, helps their business objectives.
Surely the authors do all the hard parts, make the graphs, section, maths markup, footnotes. What's left that can't be automated in almost every situation?
Things that I have seen : ( wife was a production editor, I briefly helped an EIC of a society journal that was sold to a publisher )
1. Graphs do not fit the page or space allotment - journal is uses two column format, author decided it did not apply to them. Graphs do not fit the color scheme - the author decided that the graph will be blue and the legend would be green. This is a black and white journal. Graph is a photograph of a graph, not a graph. Photo was taken on an iphone.
2. Sections went out of order. Author did not use the numbering system and numbered them by hand. Author cross referenced sections by hand, changed the ordering and did not update all of them, referring to non-existent sections.
3. Footnotes referred to non-existent papers.
4. Author included someone else's figures. Author did not obtain a permission to use them.
5. Accepted paper is written in a monospace font in WordPerfect for DOS. In 2014.
2 Is something that I have seen caught in peer review twice, and missed once. Again, it would usually go in a batch email to the authors of issues that need to be fixed before publication.
3 is definitely something that reviewers should be catching. I don't know of any journals (especially not open access) that check references for existence. Is the problem the use of footnotes? If so, I could see this legitimately requiring some manual labor / typesetting... But most journals forbid footnotes in their submission guidelines.
4 is quite rare in research articles, and again, would be handled by requesting the authors deal with it.
5. Would be grounds for paper rejection, as it breaks the submission guidelines for most journals. In addition, it seems like an exceptionally rare case.
Overall, I don't think one can justify an average of 10 hours per paper in manual labor (open access fees are always more than 1000 usd) based on these formatting issues...which issues are mostly handled by requesting fixes from the authors.
Then again, maybe your wife worked in the 1 percent of journals which actually print on paper, and carefully proofread for authors.
My background is mostly in medical engineering with journals up to IF10, though.
P.S. Average STEM paper takes about 30 hours to "produce".
Which is not to say, societies don't benefit from the system -- they actually get a lot of $$ from it. The sad part is, they only get a small part from the much bigger $$$ going to publishers.
The bottom line is: if what technies claim publishing is could be was the case then the EIC/Societies would be publishing journals themselves.
Publishers are the AWS/GC/Azures of the world. They get to collect money from those that publish papers and need papers because they provide service that the paper writers can't seem to figure out how to do themselves ( it is not very surprising - quite a few of even the well known authors of well known papers even today insist on proofs being sent to them via fax, correct those with a pen and fax back corrections ).
Sure, how can we credit someone who did the research and prepared the paper in its publish-ready form :)
> The vast majority of the journal papers require enormous amount of production editing
Absolutely! Such as introducing new errors by people with no subject understanding. :)
> that's exactly why the EICs and societies sold those journals to publishers.
They are sold to them for the very simple reason: $$$ they get from it :)
> Graphs do not fit the page ...
If any of these are not acceptable, the journal is perfectly correct to request changes from the author. Which I as author would prefer over introducing damages by people with no idea what my papers are about.
Are you a scientist hating the publishers? I have a great solution for you. Publish it on your blog. Give the journal a limited reproduction right and make them put your blog url in the abstract.
In computer science, the authors do all of this themselves already. The final pdfs me and my authors produce is what gets published.
Elsevier currently has a margin of about 35%. That's a lot, and probably too much. But it also means they are spending 65% of revenue on something. Even assuming a decent chunk is marketing and sales, there are a few billion in that industry being spent on editing and coordination tasks.
Going from a final draft to a published, peer-reviewed paper involves quite a few menial tasks, and scientists will either need to fill those roles themselves, or someone needs to pay someone else.
This is well proven by the current alternative, Open Access journals: they charge authors fees in the high 3-digit range to cover their costs.
So, for authors, Open Access means going from providing your work for free to actually paying to publish your work. Of course the institutions will usually cover those fees, and they have exceptions for people who can't afford it (payed by those who can).
The research will then be freely available, which is great. But the changeover isn't done with setting up some CMS on some virtual server somewhere.