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A comment on Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article. Parent comment

Re:Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11... by jryb on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @11:04PM (#30081552)
Some smaller labs at my tier 1 research institution have their grad students TA (so the university pays their salary) because they don't have the ability to pay them the $30k salary. $11k for one paper is a meaningful amount of money, and other journals can publish for an order of magnitude less.

It doesn't cost $11k to read a paper, send a few emails and do some typesetting. People pay for this kind of thing because having a Nature paper on your resume makes it much easier to get a tenure-track job. It's just a prestige racket.

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Re:Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11... by oefrha on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @01:19AM (#30082395)
Yep, $11k is a term’s worth of stipend when I was a PhD student.
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Re:Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11... by asperous on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @11:19PM (#30081648)
I get that but also consider that people are free to publish in other journals.

Although it does make me uncomfortable that its a for-profit company, they only print 7-10 articles a month, so I can understand the financials mathematics of needing to make it this amount per article if they want to continue to have a full staff maintain the journal the way they want to run it. I am just grateful these articles are now open to the public for free.

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Re:Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11... by exdsq on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @11:28PM (#30081715)
They can publish in other journals but at the expense of their career. Many publications at leading journals is your only real chance of making a career in academia - it matters more than actual impact because they're much easily measurable :)
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Re:Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11... by hkt on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @01:04AM (#30082325)
A prime example of "what can be measured can be managed". Grim news for science.
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Re:Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11... by exdsq on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @01:29AM (#30082449)
Yep! My wife is a postdoc at Stanford and has become completely disillusioned by the whole thing, pretty sad to see after so many years of loving it!
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Re:Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11... by dash2 on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @06:20AM (#30084175)
By contrast, another Springer journal, Scientific Reports, charges about $2000 per article… and publishes about 23,000 articles per year. So it’s not all down to high fixed costs. It’s rent-seeking.
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Re:Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11... by Fomite on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @12:31AM (#30082133)
This. 11K would be a full tenth of the discretionary money I got for my startup package. The paper would be a sweet get, but this is definitely a "Rich labs get papers in Nature journals, get better grants and become richer labs..." problem.
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