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Journal Offers Flat Fee For 'All You Can Publish'
ananyo writes "In what publishing experts say is a radical experiment, a new open-access venture is asking its authors for only a one-off fee to secure a lifetime membership that will allow them to publish free, peer-reviewed research papers. The venture, called PeerJ, formally announced its launch on 12 June. The model represents a big departure for science publishing, which has traditionally been dominated by two basic business models: either subscribers pay for access, or authors pay for each publication — often thousands of dollars — with access being free."
Just saying, oh and trust me, peers have reviewed what I wrote....
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Sure, it sounds like a good deal, but you always end up gorging yourself on abstracts and citations right off the bat. By the time you're ready for methods or supplementary figures, you can barely lift your fingers off the keyboard.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
I still haven't seen a good solution to the catch 22 that a journal cannot gain a reputation without first being reputable. No one with any concern about their academic career will publish in a no-name, no-eyes journal. As it is, it's hard enough to get people to read and care about your work by publishing in top tier journals. How do you expect academics to justify to themselves that the work they've spent months to years on doesn't deserve a better venue for dissemination?
The Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques is free to read, free to publish in, has all-open source code, and is backed by some of the top names in computer graphics from places like Pixar, NVIDIA, and Harvard University. That sounds like a lot better model to me than having authors pay money.
They should put in a clause that copyrights revert back to the original authors in case of a substantial change in ownership. If this fails you don't want a Copyright Maximist outfit to take over and immediately put everything behind a paywall.
I think this scheme only works as long as you keep on getting a stream of new people submitting the fees. Otherwise, there's a decent chance that the journal will fold, well before its submitters have written the last paper of their lifetimes.
is a tautology, you idiot.
Into the neighbor chick. No Trojan used – full impregnation. Population+=1.
The reality is that there are more people who want to be published than there are articles worth reading. Idealistically I would like to see a free to publish and free to access environment, but in an over-saturated market pay to publish can honestly improve the quality of submissions.
i took a look at advanced materials and it looks good. lots of pretty pictures and world-renowned experts. it's looking like prl of the 1950s man...
i don't know about jjap... seems like stereotypically japanese journal paper quality -- boring and overly verbose
Certainly some researchers works are worth more than others, so is this a set fee the publisher is paying or does it vary?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
If they don't get a constant source of new authors, they can not sustain the model...
It's a good initiative though! They would succeed if (more) reputed people and universities support them.
If these scientists were smarter, they'd realize "lifetime memberships" are a scam business model. Where does the money to run the business a few years or a decade down the road come from?
I assure you they are not saving and investing it. Their business model spends it immediately as a joyous flood of income, and then relies on continuing to get more buy-in over the years, which, of course, cannot happen indefinitely.
In the early 1980s, the number of "lifetime membership" fitness clubs exploded, and a few years later most were gone.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Business really does need to make money somehow, or really on the work of volunteers. Since this is a business they need a sustainable model. I would be more excited to see $100 per submission, knowing that they have a chance of being around in 5 years.
Normally any-kind of author gets paid to write, not the other way around. I though scientific papers just published in journals (magazines basically) and the readers paid to read them.
Is this for authors who no one wants to read? Or authors who want to go it alone and try and sell individual papers themself's?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
If a paper is published in a forest, and no one is around to read it, does anyone give a flying fuck?
If the organizations or names behind an upstart journal are highly reputable, then the new journal is much more likely to be taken seriously.
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