If that was true we would not have any physics journals and many math journals. We'd just have people peer reviewing arXiv. Peer review is a lot more complicated than people think to find the right reviewers, minimize conflicts of interest, prodding reviewers, reviewing their reports. Also having editors read submissions first to see if it is even worth sending to peer review. This costs money and is not free. And it is why we have not seen a free model of this supplant journals.
This could be done not for profit or government funded (disclosure I work for a non-profit journal publisher) almost none of the expenses of publication are taking in a PDF, archiving it and paywalling it. The expenses are in review, curation and copy editing. For us this expense is millions of dollars a year and is public information.
We already have a free tier of publication in repositories like arXiv. There is still value in curation, selection and facilitating peer review and that cost is non zero.
The PhD scientists we have reviewing your papers, dealing with correspondence and selecting referees for further review are indeed not working for free. If there were a lot of people that wanted to spend a lot of time a day doing that we would not have to pay publishers for anything.
I think the author of this piece misses a point. Let me take the example of the American Physical Society (APS). They have membership fees (required to go to their conferences) and journals which charge money for access. As with all academic publishing, you sign a copyright waiver (but you are allowed to post your article on your own homepage--also, for many of us, we initially publish things on arxiv.org in preliminary form (before peer review). So, you have two sources--the author if they choose to distribute it, and the arxiv for many papers (excepting breaking high profile papers that might appear in Science or Nature). Overall, the APS is relatively good--they provide much cheaper access rates to poorer institutions domestically (USA) and internationally.
Now, you might wonder--what is the value added that publishers provide? Governments pay for the research, government sponsored researchers do most of the initial typesetting/editing, and government sponsored researchers do the peer review. The answer is that publishers:
1) Screen the papers to send out for peer review
--there is a lot of noise in submissions. Is this paper interesting or not? Does it pass the "sniff" test on technical correctness?
To do this first pass requires editors with domain level knowledge of the field--they can skim the article if they are not experts and guess about impact/sniff/etc. They are familiar with the reputations of researchers. Essentially these are people with at least a PhD in the field and this is not cheap.
2) Again, the editors are acquainted with potential reviewers in the field. They have amassed a database of people who are good reviewers. For example, referee A always critical? Is referee B always a softee? Does referee C respond in a timely fashion? Does referee D always have his reviews overturned on appeal to an additional referee? Etc.
So, essentially, what you are paying for is screening out signal to noise. The first thing you might think of is, well, let the government step in. I think this would be very bad. Why? Because it would then be easy for the government to determine what gets published and what doesn't. Think climate change....
Next, you might think--ok, well what about open access? Again, the problem is that many open access journals (where the authors pay and the public reads for free) is that the prices to authors steadily increases and unless it is mandated, authors may seek other journals. Especially if the most prestigious journals are not open access....
Finally, you might ask, well, what about a technical solution?
Hacker News for academic publishing, complete with automated tracking of referees, calculations of reputations based on citations, commenting, etc. But, then you'll bump into problems of avoiding winner take all and that for academic publishing, you want the comments and referee process to be deliberate and considered.
What I would suggest is that for the computer science community to work harder on posting things to the arxiv before submitting to ACM journals and if that's not possible, then lobbying for journals to accept this. Then, for people who are ok with the rough version, they can access it and for people with need/resources, they can access the final, polished, piece.
In the meantime, try writing the author if you need a paper. In the physics community, many authors are happy to send you a pdf file. One time there was a paper from an expensive publication that we didn't have access to that I wrote the author to request a copy from. He actually sent a reprint--from Japan!
That's exactly the difference: the scientists don't get paid from the money you pay the journal. They do the work for free and the reviewers do the work for free. If all the journals somehow disappeared, nothing much would change. In some fields the pre-print is what counts anyways, and you don't pay to download a paper on arXiv.
>Then, the role of journals would be performed by reviewers that curate a collection of interesting papers for their readers.
You're skipping a step. The journals' editorial staff performs a quality filter on the submissions before any reviewers/referees even see it. E.g. see the process of a prestigious journal like Nature.[1]
With your proposal, the reviewers with specialized knowledge (e.g. theoretical physicist that understands the bleeding edge of string theory) would have to wade through 1000 papers about "aliens from outer space prove that flat Earth is real." Or mathematicians would waste time with endless crackpot papers that supposedly proved "P=NP".
Since no rational referee with limited time would suffer through that for free, the platform would inevitably require a filter of some sort. Since it's human nature to not want to do something for free ... voila ... you end up recreating another "Elsevier" as middleman again. If an intermediary becomes good at filtering papers for referees and sets a consistent quality bar for readers (subscribers), its human nature to want to be paid for that effort.
Some people wonder why journals exist. They exist because people want them to exist even though they don't realize it. The accumulation of prestige and reputation for curating quality is not free.
Instead of questioning the legitimacy of intermediaries, it's more productive to accept them as a natural emergence of humans' finite time that prevents both reviewers & readers from slogging through an infinite sea of worthless material.
If we acknowledge that something like Elsevier must exist in some form, this lets us concentrate on the recreating the curation platform in a more cost-efficient manner. (You can't do it for free... because charging $0 will not work for the reviewers nor the readers -- even though some in this thread think it does.
Sturgeon's Law is applicable here.[2])
Journals do have a value, but not the value that Elsevier extracts out of them to the tune of billions of dollars a year in profits. Facilitating peer-review, being selective, indexing content, archiving and copyediting does indeed cost money. If we had a world where there were a large number of people dealing with peer-review referee selection, managing correspondence for free, and copyediting for free we could easily not have any publishers at all, and no subscriptions or article processing charges.
Currently locking people out of information that is often funded with public money is not good for society. So having a small publication charge that can be covered in research is a good compromise to keep this work going on. Now the reward system of publication with impact factors and citations is indeed also entirely broken but that is another issue. But there is a lot more work that is thought of in the publication process. Yes peer reviewers are not paid, but finding the right reviewers, dealing with conflicts of interest, getting them to respond, and corresponding is not free. It takes time. And time is money. The more selective a journal is, the more they have to reject so those papers cost you time without a finished product. All of this does not cost the money that Elsevier reaps but it is not free.
I actually work as a developer for non-profit society. I agree that having paywalls around content is bad and prevents the dissemination and access to fundamental knowledge. We generate most of our operational revenue through journal subscriptions. I know from working here that it does indeed cost a fair amount of money to provide both the IT and editorial support for peer review and archiving/presenting the data forever.
We are trying to get authors to embrace an open access model where they pay a fee of $1500 or so to make their paper Creative Commons licensed and free to read for all. I do think there is a value for peer review and it is harder than commonly thought because science is so specialized these days.
An area which I think is woefully underserved is the science press. In our journals, I can barely understand anything published as it requires specialist knowledge in small areas of study. Just reading papers does not really keep someone knowledgable about anything but their very specialized sub domain. Peer review in itself is nice but it is important to provide accessibility to what is going on in science via non specialist explanations of published works.
So I agree that the model of paywalling a bunch of PDFs is horribly broken, and should be disrupted. I think scholarly publishing in general can really benefit from something like a one time fee to publish your paper and make it accessible to all not only in regards to paywalls, but in regards to the material being accessible to non specialists.
While peer review isn’t perfect - it’s helpful. Arxiv isn’t peer reviewed. Most things in ACM journals and conferences are. That process costs money because it takes people and time to do it well. Journal subscriptions are often not enough to recover those costs.
As for sci-hub? They’re just taking the finished work. It’s like saying software shouldn’t cost much because The Pirate Bay can deliver software for free.
I fully agree. The US's academic system provides a lot of insulation to researchers because generally this publishing cost will be paid for by your employing company, by your university, or by a grant. So researchers are not incentivized to spend a ton of time worrying about it. At the same time, I believe the large majority of researchers don't realize how little (or negative, arguably) value they receive from paying for publication vs doing so for free (such as on arxiv).
Specifically, online academic publishing is, at its core, indexing and hosting pdf files. It is some work to do a good job. But it's also quite achievable to re-create the same service without asking for much, if anything, from authors. Given a little funding, every field could use arxiv or their version of arxiv (which is free to publish on). The bottleneck to a large-scale change is the self-sustaining prestige of a paid journal's badge.
As a first step, we can spread awareness among authors of how crazy it is to pay so much to publish.
the author is rationalizing their choice. nonsense.
> Access to journals is prohibitively expensive and therefore practically unavailable to independent researchers ...
and
> Apart from the financial walls that academic publishers encourage, there are frequently de facto barriers to participation as a contributor, ...
the Cornell Arxiv approach to free publishing is already spreading into other fields like Bio Arxiv. The substack culture isn't actually free.
> Finally, the review process itself may be subject to intellectual protectionism and even unintentional gatekeeping that prevents research from reaching a broader audience that can help the ideas grow ...
Without review process the volume of papers that get produced and published freely online will be so much that people will feel the pain. This is already happening in ML community because everyone dumps a slightly different but not so diff paper on Arxiv.
elsevier isn’t paying authors a dime lmao, the authors are the ones paying here.
A publisher would never deign to pay an academic. They get “paid in exposure”, and again, actually they have to pay for that exposure in the first place. Elsevier sits in the middle and skims the authors when they publish and the readers when they read. Peer reviewers, of course, work for free. Nice work if you can get it - billions of dollars a year for running a static website and providing a latex template. You could run the whole thing off a single server and cloudflare with some http basic auth lol.
(and if you’re asking “why don’t you start your own journal then”… that’s why arxiv and others are taking off like crazy over the past 15 years.)
> Open access journals, based on authors paying $1,000-$3,000 to publish a paper, are going to be a temporary stepping stone on the way to the decline of the journal.
At least in my field, papers cost roughly $50k-$100k for just the researcher salary and overhead. Paying $2k to get a paper published is not a high hurdle (especially once the norm of closed-access publishing fades away). And this really seems like the minimum cost that needs to be incurred in order to get decent copyediting and the editorial cost of co-ordinating the referees. I love the ArXiv, but if I can get a the copyedited version from the journal I will.
Yes the referees aren't paid, which may or may not change, but paying a PhD editor $500 to figure out the best referees and engage in the back-and-forth with them and the authors is pretty minimal. So $2k for a professionally edited, polished paper which is then free to everyone forever seems like a pretty good deal, and essentially a non-issue.
Your point about the need for incentives for scientists to share non-paper scientific output like code is well-taken (and well-known). But I don't see why this can't be solved by open-access journals. I am completely unconvinced that facebook likes controlled by a for-profit organization are the way to go.
EDIT: By the way, you've mentioned in several places the 12-month time lag for publishing. This was solved for the physics community by the ArXiv; the papers get immediately released, and you can still submit to journals for the benefits of copyediting and refereeing. (Afterwards the ArXiv version is updated.) I don't know of any reason it can't work for all of academia.
The opposing argument to Open and Free is that the main argument is that they need money for journals because they are peer reviewed. Peer reviews cost money. The integrity of the journal and science cost money. Therefore we are befitting science by having a pay wall.
So they take grants and federal money put the results behind pay walls and say they are doing us a service.
arXiv.org, which does just the publishing part of publishing — without the typesetting, lawsuits, sales staff, and political lobbying against freedom of speech — spends about US$1 million per year, with a staff similar in size to the Open Library for the Humanities, but more highly paid: https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/culpublic/arXiv+Susta...
I didn't say "without peer review" because, although the arXiv doesn't pay for peer review, traditional academic publishers don't pay for peer review either. Instead, scholars do the peer review for free, often as a favor to the journal editor (who may or may not be paid).
They do have a moderator on contract for physics submissions to keep out the cranks.
Reducing these figures to SI units, arXiv spends 32 millidollars per second, accepts submissions at 3.2 millihertz, and provides downloads at 4.6 Hz. If you impute their costs to the submissions, then they spend US$10 per submission.
A couple of academic fields — notably math and physics — have switched almost entirely to arXiv. These are, perhaps not coincidentally, fields where the researchers already did most of their own typesetting.
It's probably worthwhile to cost out how much it costs on the market to buy academic editing (in the traditional sense of fixing your prose so that other people can read it) and typesetting services. That information is not as easy to find because those services are not as standardized; the US$380 per paper given in this article is probably not too far off for typesetting, but I think editing can run somewhat higher, particularly for non-native speakers who have not yet reached a high level of competency.
Full disclosure: I'm a founder of a company called Scholastica that provides software that helps journals peer-review and publish open-access content online. One of our journal clients, Discrete Analysis, is linked to in the NYT article.
It is incredibly obvious that journal content shouldn't cost as much as it does.
- Scholars write the content for free
- Scholars do the peer-review for free
- All the legacy publishers do is take the content and paywall PDF files
Can you believe it? Paywalling. PDFs. For billions.
Of course the publishers say they create immense value by typesetting said PDFs, but as technologists, we can clearly see that this is bunk.
There's a comment in this thread that mentions the manual work involved in taking Word files and getting them into PDFs, XML, etc. While that is an issue, which you could consider a technology problem, it definitely doesn't justify the incredible cost of journal content that has been created and peer-reviewed at no cost. Keep in mind that journal prices have risen much faster than the consumer price index since the 80s (1).
The future is very clear, academics do the work as they've always done and share the content with the public at a very low cost via the internet.
Lots of fields primarily use LaTeX to typeset papers, e.g. physics and computational biology. Typesetting and hosting a PDF never justifies a $1500 publishing fee given that reviewers, editors and of course authors are all working for free. Hence even the good-guy (non-profit) publisher PLOS took about 20% excess revenue in 2012, primarily by charging $1300 odd dollars for publication in PLOS ONE.
Why do we even need the dated journal model? Push everything to a central arXiv, biorXiv like repo (funded as they are by small donations from institutions). Couple this with open post-publication peer review and endorsements. Millions of tax dollars saved around the world, research open to everyone.
The counter argument is the rubber stamp that accompanies a prestigious journal (and filtering the crazies) but if the repo was accompanied with a suitable array of article-level metrics and thorough categorisation the good science can continue to filter to the top, much like how HN and reddit work.
> Facilitating peer-review, being selective, indexing content, archiving and copyediting does indeed cost money.
Sci-Hub and arXiv both manage to be useful without peer-review (not everything these sites host is a pirate copy of a paywalled work), without being selective, and without copy editing. They archive and index, and each seems to do it much more cheaply than Elsevier.
I think publishers provide the valuable services like proofreading, aid the peer-review process and content filtering. They SUCK at distribution though and should not be in the distribution business.
Now who is good at distribution? arXiv is.
Their costs are less than 7$ per publication, they are seriously lean and efficient.
<quote>
How much does arXiv cost to operate?
The annual budget for arXiv is $400,000. With over 60,000 new submissions per year one may think of this as an effective cost of <$7 per submission. Alternatively, with over 30,000,000 full-text downloads per year this is an effective cost of <1.4 cents per download. We believe that arXiv is an extremely cost-effective service.
</quote> http://arxiv.org/help/support/faq
Now the question is how to keep the useful aspects of publishing and not have to pay for them. An army secretaries, a bunch of typesetting gurus and some method for peer-review... tall order i know.
This isn't really true. I work for a non profit scholarly society publisher, and we pay millions of dollars a year for copy-editing/formatting and also the work to find referees that do not have conflicts of interest/are not busy/actually respond and are qualified to assess the paper is indeed costly. If it were zero or negative sum there'd be loads of open platforms out there for peer-review and publishing.
I am also a big fan of open-access and hate paywalls myself. I also don't like big, for profit, predatory journals. There is value in curated and managed journals. Just not the value that these big corporations are reaping from them.
Publishing used to cost money when it required physical printing/distrubution/storage of journals. Now all of this is basically free, but they still charge. Most theoretical physicists for example only care about "publishing" in the ArXiv (all free, open source). The traditional publishing is ridiculous.
What reason is there that these paid journals need to exist?
Apparently there are tons of BS papers in them anyway, so what exactly is it that the scientist is paying the journal for if not for good peer review? It seems to me that the journals provide very little that a free online version wouldn't do better.
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/6143539/fig-increases.0.png){kind=link}
This could be done not for profit or government funded (disclosure I work for a non-profit journal publisher) almost none of the expenses of publication are taking in a PDF, archiving it and paywalling it. The expenses are in review, curation and copy editing. For us this expense is millions of dollars a year and is public information.
We already have a free tier of publication in repositories like arXiv. There is still value in curation, selection and facilitating peer review and that cost is non zero.
The PhD scientists we have reviewing your papers, dealing with correspondence and selecting referees for further review are indeed not working for free. If there were a lot of people that wanted to spend a lot of time a day doing that we would not have to pay publishers for anything.
reply