> And remember that PLoS is now making a profit at that rate — no longer living off the grants that helped to get it started. At a rate of $1350 per article, it’s not just surviving but flourishing, so we know that that’s a reasonable commercial rate to charge for handling an open-access academic article with no limits on length or on number of high-resolution colour figures [...] So, yes, open access is cheaper. Stupidly cheaper. Absurdly, ridiculously, appallingly cheaper.
Open-access is still absurdly expensive. $1350 to publish an article in an online journal, seriously? Unlimited length and colour figures in an online journal? No shit. The cost should be exactly $0, since all the actual work like reviewing articles is done by volunteers. I'm sure that many universities and companies would be glad to provide free hosting for papers.
Let me take a stab at the answer: You can publish unedited, dubiously archived, difficult-to-cite, poorly advertised articles without anonymous peer review for the cost of hosting, right now.
Are the peer reviewer getting paid you think and how well? Or could one imagine a situation where you could get them to do it for free for ideological reasons?
It is pretty much unheard of for peer-reviewers to be paid for their work, and PLoS certainly doesn't do it. In the case of an open-access journal such as PLoS ONE, reviewers are contributing to the world's body of science. In the case of paywalled journals owned by the likes of Elsevier and Springer, they are contributing to shareholder profits. That's why I wrote this piece on the Times Higher Education advocating that we refuse to peer-review for non-open journals: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=41...
I fear it will not be that easy to reproduce the current practice of peer reviewed papers in blogs.
Despite its flaws, the reviewing process is quite a bit more thorough than your avarage blog. On average, reviewers take their job quite seriously because, having been on the other side, they realize their power comes with responsibility. Moreover, the anonymity and randomness of the reviewing process --you don't choose what papers you review-- force interaction between people who, given the choice, wouldn't.
The sciences already suffer from splintering, with the freedom of the web it would be even more tempting to remain in your own bubble.
> You can publish unedited, dubiously archived, difficult-to-cite, poorly advertised articles without anonymous peer review for the cost of hosting, right now.
There are a couple thousand accredited universities in the US alone. Thousands of philanthropists who donate to academic causes. Hundreds of corporations looking for good PR.
If the academic community were to rally around open access, and then fail to find (even a lot more than) $500k/year, I'd have to say good riddance. That would take a very special kind of incompetence.
The problem with that grant-based model is that you're making the publisher dependent of that precise source of income (rather than of its own activity), and the publisher will have to gear its fund-raisin activity towards getting more grants and donations rather than getting publications.
I'd say the latter is far more desirable than the former.
"getting publications"? What does that even mean? You think academia has to be convinced to pump out papers?
If the standard is an open-access site similar to arXiv, that's where the papers would go. No effort needs to be spent there, and there would be plenty of motivation for people and institutions to meet its modest funding requirements without a massive drive.
The primary costs are support/technical staff and equipment, that would not change.
Yes I'm not saying arXiv has no costs, I'm saying mechanical_fish pretty much described arXiv. As you pointed out, arXiv still does not run on unicorn farts and rainbow tears (although a budget of $420k is a tad lower than PLoS's 2010 budget of $12m)
> Unlimited length and colour figures in an online journal? No shit.
You'd be surprised.
> The cost should be exactly $0, since all the actual work like reviewing articles is done by volunteers.
Peer reviewers are not the only ones working on PLOS, it has a pretty big editorial board[0] of 1300~1400 members and a pretty extensive editorial process. I do not claim to know if (let alone that) it is worth $1350/article, but they do apparently waive publication fees for authors who can't provide them, so the idea is that granted authors pay for insufficiently funded authors.
There are costs to a scientific journal, which have to be covered one way or an other. In an open-access journal, they clearly can't be covered by the one who accesses the information, so they have to be covered either by the one who publishes it (the author) or a third party (via grants).
> I'm sure that many universities and companies would be glad to provide free hosting for papers.
As far as I know PLOS editors are unpaid just like reviewers. People keep saying that there are costs to a scientific journal, but don't say what those costs are exactly. Sure, the costs are nonzero like hosting, but what costs more than say $1 per article?
Hosting costs, software dev, and maybe non-volunteer admin costs are factors off the top of my head.
Maybe it's excessive, and would either reduce over time, or the organisation would find some way to grow into the budget (now, which is more likely?), but the important part would be organising it as a non-profit.
Putting the cost onto the submitter to pay for free access to everyone thereafter is a nice model - academics need those publications to justify their grants, and can allocate money towards it. The problem is, "in perpetuity"[1] is a long time, so you're gonna end up front-loading the cost a bit.
[1] Or maybe just a standard copyright term. Someone still needs to host it though, and preferably keep as much metadata as possible attached.
As other commenters have pointed out, PLoS do have costs. What's easy to overlook here is not just the editorial work and infrastructure costs associated with the articles that are published, but also the costs of assessing the articles that are _not_ published -- that don't make it through review.
I'm not necessarily defending the specific price-point they've set, but I do think it's important that they (and other academic publishers) are free to set a price that works economically: then they can compete with each other on price and features, and, presto, we have an actual _market_. Whereas what we have now in academic publishing is largely a cartel.
The great thing about PLoS is that they have shown, and are showing year on year, that you don't in fact need charity to be a successful open-access publisher. All the whining in the world from Elsevier and Springer about how they need to charge absurd access fees -- all that whining is shown to be nonsense by the example of PLoS.
Finally, it's important to note that PLoS offer no-questions-asked full waivers of the publication fee, so that researchers without institutional funding are not discriminated against. They're a non-profit: their basic goal is not to "increase shareholder value" but to help disseminate science.
By the way, since PLoS is a non-profit, do they publish their cost structure anywhere? Is it possible to say where the money from a publication goes, for instance?
Unfortunately, it doesn't break down the operating expenses of $12.21M (2010) with any more granularity than $6.68M on direct publishing expenses, $5.465M on operational expenses and $65K on advertising & marketing.
I heard back from the PLoS people. (Aside: they are WAY more helpful to random inquiries than any of the for-profit publishers). The best information on this can be found in their tax returns, which are available at http://www.plos.org/about/what-is-plos/progress-updates/
$0 would mean PLoS would be like reddit. It's good to have a price point, although i do think it's high.
I would argue the cost of having walled-garden publications is much higher than anyone thinks, considering that currently we can't build any data mining tool to facilitate research. It's such a bad situation that, if i was a creationist, that's the argument i would use against science. Incidentally, i was just trying to download an article. The journal said my chrome browser wasn't supported , then when i tried Firefox, it insisted that i needed to update my version of java (??) to use their freaking downloader to download the paper. Result: paper ignored. [Edit: here it is http://www.scopus.com/record/display.url?eid=2-s2.0-00339652... ]
Things would be more expensive without a profit motive driving efficiency, but maybe a change be a net gain. Pointing at the profit someone makes and saying "we could be keeping all that money!" is oversimplifying.
An, axusgrad, that isn't it AT ALL. The point is "Look at all the profit WE are giving these people. If we spent it differently we could make massive savings AND give the world free access to our research."
Open-access is still absurdly expensive. $1350 to publish an article in an online journal, seriously? Unlimited length and colour figures in an online journal? No shit. The cost should be exactly $0, since all the actual work like reviewing articles is done by volunteers. I'm sure that many universities and companies would be glad to provide free hosting for papers.
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