People like naking comparison to natural selection, hierarchies and food chains.
However they mistakenly believe that Lion is at the top of the food chain. Then they start discussing irrelevant issues, like if lion is being too mean to the herbivores.
Their understanding is fundamentally wrong - the lion is not at the top. The parasites that live in the lion are at the top.
The punlishers are parasites. They are at the top.
How does nature remove parasites, say tapeworms? It doesn't, only extenral intervention like surgery can remove them.
Presumably there is an evolutionary arms race going on between host and parasite.
In some sense attaching a high cost to a paper is a crude way of proving the quality of the paper. Putting all of the cost with the authors is clearly not ideal, because you'd only measure how much someone is willing to pay to get it published. By placing the cost with the people reading the article you ensure that the publisher must ensure their articles are actually worth reading.
The fact that getting incentives to align requires a random party to get large profits without actually doing much is a quirk of capitalism. If you ignore the concept of private property for a bit you'll see that the obvious solution is to simply burn up the excess money (capitalists would attempt to sustain the illusion that money is indelible and privately owned by viewing this as a tax).
And most researchers want their papers to be free, to the point where you can email them and they will give you a free copy, and they post the preprints on arXiv and their personal website to get around publishing requirements.
Having free copies of the papers available doesn't actually hurt them much, provided they're still the source for 'authentic' copies.
(sidenote: not sure what field you're talking about where the best writings of all time are public domain but I've had to pluck quite a few famous papers of scihub instead)
Think of this analogy.
You are interested in say a subset of research on morel mushrooms.
You know who the reputed people who publish are so you "follow" them and their profile. They did a new peer review of a newcomer and you get alerted. You check their work and are impressed so you follow them too.
Your favourite researcher Also curates "his" favorite researches and researchers on their blog so you are one click away from their opinions on what is good or bad.
Compare that with a "reputed journal". The way the system is designed, the journals work of sorting and filtering, the reader is expected to trust their research of choosing the work so you trust their judgment and you auto assume the work is good.
Why don't you democratize that work to domain experts itself and everyone helps everyone else. Isn't that the case with everything online?
Elsevier's margin is 19%, which doesn't sound like "the worst scums of capitalism".
If you believe you can do it cheaper, with better quality (because peer review kinda sucks even for top journals), by all means go ahead. I would love that to happen. But, as you can probably guess, I'm kinda skeptical.
"Net profit margin: 19.04"
Look under the Scientific, Technical & Medical financial review. That is their scientific publishing arm.
https://www.glassdoor.ca/Salary/Elsevier-Editor-Salaries-E23...
I'm sure they have people employed called "editors" but they are not the same as academic editors who decide what gets sent to reviewers.
Ref? Elsevier (publisher of "Journal of Algebra") does pay their academic editors:
https://medium.com/@SiccodeKnecht/so-what-about-editor-compe...
For example, I'm on the editorial boards of three journals: Epidemiology, PLoS Computational Biology, and Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology. I am compensated for none of them as an academic editor.
https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/pr...
Most journal reviewers and editors are academics who do the work as public service, i.e. free. Even top spots like editor in chief only get an honorarium of maybe 10k a year. Considering these people are the top of their field and can easily command 6-7 figures salary at minimum, that amount is nothing. Only very few journals have full time editors and even those end up relying on the volunteers to vet and review articles.
A full time professor is expected to be an editor for some journals. And these academics make up the bulk of "journal editors". But they would not list it as their jobs. I suspect that is why if you look for "editor jobs" you will get lobsided salary ranges that doesn't reflect reality.
You are confusing the parent company with the publishing part for that 19%, which is the main subject here. You are uninformed.
The www was quite literally designed for sharing scientific papers. Hosting them is a 1990s problem. The real cost is in building a paywall and enforcing it
The activity we need to fund is the research itself. If we don’t allow profiteering from publishers, let’s not pretend would ever see the papers or that the research wouldn’t happen.
I'm not sure where you get this idea that they are doing any significant typesetting, or that their administrative costs are anything remotely reasonable - even the journal editors are also largely unpaid (because being the editor of a journal can be helpful when trying to get a job in academia).
My least favorite part of publishing a CS journal paper is checking the proofs (in typesetting sense). I have already typeset the paper using LaTeX with the journal's template, but the journal almost always wants to typeset it again using another system. That apparently involves a lot of manual work by their staff. In the process, they introduce many errors into the paper, some of which are random and others which are consistently wrong. I have to compare my PDF to the publisher's version visually to spot the errors. And there is usually only 48 hours allocated for that part, despite the publication process taking 1-2 years.
(We see particular fields switching over to focusing on paper distribution through preprint archives rather than journals; but just using preprints for distribution doesn't solve the problem that journals solve — which is having a sports-like "hierarchy of prestigious competitions" where a paper can either "make it" to being published in the journal that's that field's equivalent to the Olympics, or it can "get stuck" publishing in some "bush league" journal; where this informs, as a first-gloss heuristic, how much attention you should pay to trying to understand the point the paper is making.)
A big issue is funding bodies/grant reviewers are mostly old guard who are happy with the status quo. Recently, a big journal was changing in a way that upset a large swath of such people. Unfortunately i can't remember what journal. But it was obvious they benefited substantially as they're more established.
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/q-a-why-elife-is-...
I am not knowledgeable, but it looks like just game theory.
Ideally, I would wish you to publish in open access while I reap the immediate career benefits of publishing in a prestige journal.
There are several reasons why this has not happened.
1. The most important, researchers are not publishers and are already completely overloaded with other work (most academics typically work 60h+ a week). They neither have the time not expertise to get this started and make no mistake there would be a significant effort required to get this started.
2. There is a certain percentage of researchers who are quite happy with the status quo. These are typically the very successful researchers which don't lack funding so don't see a problem with this (obviously there are exceptions) . Unfortunately they are often also the ones who have a disproportionate influence so if they are not on board the effort is much harder.
3. The vast majority of researchers highly depends on publications in high impact journals for their grants, careers, jobs... (for younger researchers a publication in e.g. Nature can really set off your career). For a new journal to get a high impact takes at least several years, so this is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Before the journal has the high impact most can't afford to send their best work there, but without that work you don't get the impact.
(This is a not an obscure technique — it's the bit of game-theory that Groupon is based on.)
Amen. Pure rent seeking parasites.
Journals without fees (or lower fees) are available. Why don’t researchers publish in those?
Presumably because the journals that charge high fees offer something the lower cost ones don’t.
Charging for network effects is rent seeking.
All those "publisher" middlemen can go eat dirt and I would be happy to shovel more dirt on them until they are 6 feet under. They do no work, take all the profit, and obstruct research and the spread of knowledge. Those are some of the worst scums of capitalism.