Perhaps they should just stop wasting money on physical journals and stick to the web format that 99% of people read?

Claiming $10k for a bunch of unnecessary work is outrageous.

The cost of prestigious journals are the curation and high standard of peer review. Except they don't actually pay their staff for those things...

Physical print costs are generally a small part of the costs of the other things I mentioned, although the specifics would probably depend on just how popular the was.

But you are right: it's still a mostly unnecessary cost these days. And regardless if the other costs, $150 to $700 per year for a journal subscription is rarely justified by the publishing costs the turn articles into more polished and high quality pieces.

The financial model for disseminating scientific knowledge is broken, but I did want to acknowledge that there is good and useful work done in-between an author writing up their research and ultimately making it available online.

Don't the journal subscribers cover the cost of their print copy?

I'm assuming journals were happy to switch subscriber to digital-only subscriptions. All the revenue without the circulation headaches.

Counter-Intuitively, the need to go digital was what led to behemoths like Elsevier and the downfall of small publishers. Similar to what happened with newspapers, though for very different reasons & economic dynamics:

In the very early 00's a small publisher might have a few dozen journals and a dozen books a year, and reasonable but not huge profit margins. At the same time a couple of things were happening:

1) Elsevier was already snatching up small publishers and offering their own digital access.

2) For a small publisher going digital was much more difficult. It wasn't in their existing tech skill set and there weren't much in the way of turn-key solutions to fill their specific needs

3) Royalty agreements weren't built for all-access subscriptions. They were based on purchases of a full issue. They couldn't be shoe-horned into all-access subscriptions so the publisher would have to go back and renegotiate contracts for digital distribution in a process that was extremely time consuming... getting agreements for 30 years of your back catalog wasn't easy.

4) For a small publisher, digitizing content was very expensive. A simple destructive scan where the content was unbound and image scanned to a PDF wasn $0.50 to $1 per page, but you need things to be searchable too. OCR wasn't good enough and OCR w/human correction was very expensive. Common practice was to go for the cheaper image-only OCR and tack on ToC, Titles, abstracts and authors as indexed metadata, which also cost more money.

Elsevier was big enough that most of the above were somewhat non-issues for them. They could throw their bulk around and dictate terms on royalties deploying an army of people to work them all out journal by journal. They had plenty of money to build a digital platform and digitize their back catalog year by year at a fairly rapid pace.

Library budgets were being cut back, so it looked like a real nice option to subscribe to Elsevier and get instant access to tons of stuff. It became a lot harder for smaller publishers to get their material into libraries. This created a downward spiral, Elsevier picked off small publishers one by one, making their product even more appealing.

In the end, we're left with what we have now: A few massive publishers that looked like reasonable options 15 and 20 years ago at those prices, but then the prices rapidly escalated, and after 7 or 10 years of digital subscriptions you almost couldn't go back because you'd have to buy that many years of back catalog.

> Proofreading, copyediting, typesetting, ... physical printing...

Uhm, I don't know if you've published a paper since the 90s but none of those are costs that modern journals incur. Or if they do, nobody asked them to.

The main thing journals do is peer review and that is all done for free by other academics. Authors do basically all of the typesetting, and although journals still insist on printing issues there's really no need for them to do so.

The only really important thing that journals do is finding and hassling reviewers.

I don't know precisely what they do--and I almost wish they wouldn't--but many journals still do some kind of layout work and copy-editing to cram it into the journal's house style.

It's often not very good: an overzealous typesetter replaced every single italic p (as in "p < 0.05") with a musical quarter-note. Still, some of that money must be going somewhere.

That said, I would actually love a journal that offered (good) copy/line editing of accepted papers so that the science is presented as clearly as possible. I suspect this would work out well for the authors and the journal. At the margin, easier to read => more cites. However, very few journals compete on "author-friendliness". It's all impact factor this and metrics that.

I am basing my opinions on work at a small/medium publisher that had well know material considered essential in a variety of fields-- they were pretty high quality. This was a while back, though I know people that publish in fairly reputable places.

They did and do this sort of editing, so it may be, sometimes, a matter of journal quality. I don't anything gets into JAMA without that level of editing.

Anyway, that's what my opinions in this thread have been based on, but maybe I'm exhibiting selection bias by having experience primarily with a higher quality publisher.

I would like to think I publish pretty well for my field and access to resources (PNAS, Neuron, etc), but none of those journals have offered anything beyond word-level editing (e.g., change sec to s; replace `subjects` with `participants`) to match the house style.

I certainly didn't get any suggestions aimed at improving the readability of the text; those mostly came from coauthors and colleagues before submission, with a few more things flagged, in passing, by peer reviewers.

That's on the biology side of things. For ML, it's basically "Here's the doc class! Good luck!"

Here's a paywalled clinical journal article about the hazards of poor typesetting!

A nomogram got futzed around and, well, the ruler-only, no-calculator required, calculations were now wrong.

"A set of trial calculations indicate that the nomogram of Burton et al is accurate, but a realignment of Burton’s nomogram (for greater symmetry?) in the Clinical Nutrition text resulted in a nomogram with considerable inaccuracy."

https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/54.3.435

You're right: Journals don't do those things, publishers do. Even PloS, open access & no subscription fees, has nearly 500 employees and an editorial group for each area, which are paid. Search up their salaries, you'll fine them. (They charge about $2000 per submission to the authors. Picking at random, the most recent issue of one of them had 80 articles, or $160,000)

Or look at the editing that Elife professional editors perform in addition to other peer reviewers: detailed feedback on the manuscript for the authors, including requests for revisions and suggestions for improvement." detailed feedback on the manuscript for the authors, including requests for revisions and suggestions for improvement

Maybe poor quality journals don't do this sort of thing, I'm not familiar with them & their economic models.

>Proofreading, copy editing, typesetting, handling logistics

They (the journal owners) don’t do these anymore:

-Proofreading: you’re expected to do this before you submit, and the reviewers will reject it if it is of poor enough writing quality. They will not, however, edit the paper in any way.

-Copyediting: there shouldn’t be copy editing in research papers, if there is fluff there is wasted real estate

-Typesetting: once again, researchers are expected to submit a paper with the typesetting requirements fulfilled (or in a format which can be automatically adjusted with a template (e.g. LaTeX))

-logistics: not an issue anymore, almost all access is digital and printed by the reader as necessary (if the portal is not DRMd to prevent this)

They do edit the paper. Formatting is expected, final print-ready content is not. I know this from direct experience.

Copy editing is about a lot more than fluff. Accurately & skillfully communicating research and results does not completely overlap the Venn diagram skill set of "excellent researcher". Research skills do not equate to communication skills.

Typesetting is a little more complex than character format, but you're right, especially in these days with better tools, it's not nearly as labor intensive as it used to be, though still absolutely necessary if the journal is physically printed. Much much simpler if it's online only.

Many journals are still printed and archived especially by libraries, so those logistics are still a factor, and there is a fixed amount of labor required if it's 100 copies are 10,000. After the 100, the required work is incremental.

Digital absolutely has logistics involved as well: building and maintaining a platform isn't free, BUT:

I would wholeheartedly agree that the financial models here are broken and outrageous. Even considering the publishing work I mentioned, whether we disagree on the scope or not, better tools have made that work significantly easier. Scalable digital platforms are also much more of a known quantity and cheaper: inexpensive turn key solutions exist that could be scaled with fairly mundane tech skills. In every way I can think of, the costs associated with turning a raw article fresh from the authors into a polished publication should be much much cheaper.

There are ~15-20 articles per Nature issue (not counting all the rest). I would assume that over $150,000, or ~3 full-time postdocs yearly nets should be enough for monthly minor editorial work.

In response, review this area of my comment above:

Accurately & skillfully communicating research and results does not completely overlap the Venn diagram skill set of "excellent researcher". Research skills do not equate to communication skills.

Postdocs are no more likely to have their Venn diagrams overlap significantly.

Scientists can be excellent communicators. It seems unlikely that any serious journal would hire editors that were not able to write clearly.

Postdocs was only there to gauge what kind of peoples one can afford with that kind of money.

But in any case, journals don't do any semantic editing on articles, so the whole point is moot: anyone can be an editor as long as they can typeset and maybe spot typos there and there, and neither communication nor research skill is required for that.

> Copy editing is about a lot more than fluff.

a journal will never edit the text beyond typos. their editorials are written from other peers for free. What copy editing?

The people I know that did copy editing reviewed articles for presentation & ordering of material, clarity of expression, and a variety of other factors that make the content more readable.

Take two scientific researcher of the same discipline & scientific skill level, and one of them might be a very poor communicator. Multiple levels of the editorial process addressed those issues, copy editing included.

Changes were not made without the author's approval: They were edited, proofs sent to the author, who signed off, or declined some changes while adding others. It would then be reviewed by the publisher's editors again, and if all went well a final proof was sent out for a final sign off.

I'm not sure why you doubt this sort of thing: I lived in that world, on the tech side of a small/medium scientific publisher, and saw it all happen & built some of the systems that facilitated the process. It wasn't wasted effort: margins weren't very big and where I worked they would have been happy to get rid of a few staffers if the process didn't require them.

If you published an article through a reasonably sized publisher in a somewhat well-known, did you different experience? If so, then either the practices vary greatly among different publishers, or practices have changed a lot since the early 00's (which may very well be the case)

In my experience the edits are super-minor, the kind of stuff anyone can do on the cheap. Whenever there is doubt, the author is called to rewrite. At least in neuroscience, i dont think they make any kind of changes in the text other than typos and minor rephrasing (most major suggestions is done by the reviewers). Proofreading and minor final touches are not expensive.

It also depends on the author guidelines of each journal. Nature group e.g. has requirements about when your subscripts should be in italics. And i think sometimes they prettify images. I don't care about those things, and it doesnt change a thing about the impact of 99% of papers. Most authors submit great quality manuscripts anyway, judging from what i 've reviewed. In fact i m pretty sure i m doing more copyediting and suggestions while reviewing than any of the paid editors.

Another thing is, a ton of effort is wasted in reformatting (and sometimes rewriting) a paper to resubmit to another journal. Publishing is definitely a wasteful process.

There are always publishing costs, but it would be cheaper to set up a public utility for proofreading and uploading papers rather than the current situation

One of my co-worker told me about journals in our field "they will edit it anyway" so I guess it depends on the field and journals. I personally would be against it and I don't understand how it is acceptable that carefully written words by scientists and agreed by co-authors are modified by a random nobody.

Could depend on the publisher as well. When I did tech work for one, changes were proposed to the author. They had to sign off, possibly offer their own modifications, and if they did there would be one more proof sent for approval.

Certain things would get edited automatically without signoff, but only if they were needed to conform to the style guide: some of that was set by the publisher, some by the journal editor.

How do elife and PLoS do it? It's not like their papers are riddled with typos and nobody needs glossy paper anyway. The quality of the paper and the reviewing is done for free so it doesnt factor into the equation

Elife & PloS both charge fairly high submission fees. They employ their own teams of editors. PloS for example has close to 500 employees. Fees for most of their research areas are > $2000 per article submission. Their latest addition of Computational Biology has 80 articles, or $160,000 in revenue. I believe PloS offers fee assistance in certain circumstances, so the total amount will probably be a little less. Either way, this is more than enough to cover the sorts of activities I mentioned.

As an example from Elife, in addition to the peer review feedback process, Elife describes their editorial output as providing: "detailed feedback on the manuscript for the authors, including requests for revisions and suggestions for improvement." detailed feedback on the manuscript for the authors, including requests for revisions and suggestions for improvement"

In terms of the mechanics of publishing, it's all very little different than a traditional publisher, except for the funding model. In terms of public access, it is far superior: Publication costs are covered without exorbitant subscription fees and the public gets the benefits of the research for no cost of their own.

This is why I would like to see a move to grant models where the grant includes the cost of publication, and a requirement for the portion to be used to get knowledge into the public even if the results did not confirm the experimental hypothesis.