UC secures landmark open access deal with world’s largest scientific publisher

Re:UC secures landmark open access deal with world’s largest... by osamagirl69 on Tuesday March 16, 2021 @04:08PM (#26482142)

I am genuinely surprised that the UC was able to get Elsevier to agree to this much, even if it does come up well short of their original list of demands [1].

I do wonder what this means for researchers, in particular there was no mention of publishing fees. Generally in hybrid journals there is a hefty price tag for open access (basically -- you are paying for the expected revenue generated by your paper...) so I could see that this means the publishing fees for a top Elsevier journal upwards of 5 figures--a price that research groups will now need to cover. I was at a talk by Nature about their Nature Photonics journal, and when asked if they would ever consider doing open access for Nature Photonics they said they have thought about it, but that it would cost them about $40,000 per paper for it to be commercially viable. Even though the peer review is free, they have a team of editors that need to get paid and they only publish 10-20 papers a month.

Also -- see the previous discussion with more focus on Elsevier's side of the story at [2]

[1] https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/reports/rm-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26379954

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Re:UC secures landmark open access deal with world’s largest... by eganp on Tuesday March 16, 2021 @09:44PM (#26485540)

Clearly open access has costs, but how does Nature Photonics get to $40k/paper?? Is that how much revenue they expect to derive from the lifetime of the paper?

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Re:UC secures landmark open access deal with world’s largest... by Google234 on Tuesday March 16, 2021 @10:29PM (#26485808)

Only a few percent of papers submitted actually get published. There is some amount of work involved. Also, these top journals hire full time editors (former scientists in ther field).

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Re:UC secures landmark open access deal with world’s largest... by jahewson on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @01:08AM (#26486799)

Let’s say it’s 15 papers per month, so $40k * 15 * 12 = $7.2m for four editors. I’m not at all convinced. 40k per issue would be plausible.

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Re:UC secures landmark open access deal with world’s largest... by Google234 on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @01:22AM (#26486880)

I’m guessing that they were exaggerating a bit. I think nature now charges like 12k for open access with makes that number more reasonable.

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