What Does It Actually Cost To Publish a Scientific Paper?

ananyo writes "Nature has published an investigation into the real costs of publishing research after delving into the secretive, murky world of science publishing. Few publishers (open access or otherwise-including Nature Publishing Group) would reveal their profit margins, but they've pieced together a picture of how much it really costs to publish a paper by talking to analysts and insiders. Quoting from the piece: '"The costs of research publishing can be much lower than people think," agrees Peter Binfield, co-founder of one of the newest open-access journals, PeerJ, and formerly a publisher at PLoS. But publishers of subscription journals insist that such views are misguided — born of a failure to appreciate the value they add to the papers they publish, and to the research community as a whole. They say that their commercial operations are in fact quite efficient, so that if a switch to open-access publishing led scientists to drive down fees by choosing cheaper journals, it would undermine important values such as editorial quality.' There's also a comment piece by three open access advocates setting out what they think needs to happen next to push forward the movement as well as a piece arguing that 'Objections to the Creative Commons attribution license are straw men raised by parties who want open access to be as closed as possible.'"

Comments

filtering

[goombah99]

What I value is a filter. There's two much to read and too much crappy research. The harder it is to publish and the more that difficulty is realted to the quality the better.

What I also appreciate are special collections that group simmilar themes. I have found over the years that the more electronic things have got the more I have lost out on the serendiptous find of the article that was next to the one I was actually looking for. When I search for things I just get what I search for and that tends to make a tight circle.

Re:filtering

[godrik]

If you have problem finding papers, I recommend you try academic search engines. At OSU, we developped theadvisor ( http://theadvisor.osu.edu/ ). It is a webservice that allows you to search paper that are similar to what you already know. You basically upload a set of papers you know are relevant and the system find what is around.

We are still working on improving the quality of the database, but I strongly believe that these approaches are the way to go.

Re:filtering

[Ambassador Kosh]

If they actually did a good job of filtering articles and made actually peer reviewed the articles in them for accuracy you would have a point. However what I have seen is that journal articles are just as full of errors and flat out fabrications as any other regular source is.

In the end the journals are not doing their jobs of filtering content and that is all they actually provide. What is worse is that professors are often given raises based on how many journal articles are published not who they are published with so there is a great incentive to make crappy journals with lots of bad articles that accept anyone in order to further the cycle.

The system we have now is massively corrupt and waste of time and money. I don't know if open journals will actually make things better I do know that it is unlikely that they can make things worse.

Re:filtering

[godrik]

No there is no charge. It is supported by the research team I am part of. We are trying to be useful :)

Re:filtering

[blind biker]

If you have problem finding papers, I recommend you try academic search engines. At OSU, we developped theadvisor ( http://theadvisor.osu.edu/ [osu.edu] ). It is a webservice that allows you to search paper that are similar to what you already know. You basically upload a set of papers you know are relevant and the system find what is around.

Google Scholar does something similar to this: based on your published papers (including conference papers), it monitors the "journalosphere" and alerts me whenever there are new published papers related to my research. And it's scarily accurate. Scarily, because it reminds me every time how many people are working on topics similar to mine, and that I have competition!

Re:filtering

[godrik]

Yes it is somewhat similar to that. I believe we are using similar algorithms tod o it. The twist in theadvisor is that you can select the "input papers". google scholar uses you publication list as inputs. In the advisor you provide the input list. It allows to perform more targetted searches.

Re:filtering

[blind biker]

The twist in theadvisor is that you can select the "input papers". google scholar uses you publication list as inputs.

I'm aware of this. You were quite clear in the original post.

Re:filtering

[Lawrence_Bird]

That was a pretty balanced article and I agree with your filtering comments. Imagine an open access journal of quantum physics taking submissions at $250 a piece. Every quack in the world will be submitting to the extent of their bank account. Unless you are going to blacklist by name, the journal has an obligation to peer review all submissions. Good luck finding reviewers with the time or patience to deal with all the bunk.

  I think there is another take on this too - there are many things which we can do for ourselves but chose not to because the use of our time, money, or other resources results in a "savings" that is illusory and rarely will we do a better job

Sometimes it really is worth paying a little bit more to have someone else do the work competently for you. I think the same applies here. The actual dollar cost savings are not all that clear but appear to be on a scale of "is this really worth the trouble to do ourself." People act as if these publishing companies are gold mines. They really aren't. And if you must whine about margins, go whine about MSFT, AAPL, ADI, LLTC, etc.

One minor point from the article, I think it is a poor metric to speak of "average" article cost. Median would be a better yard stick.

Re:filtering

[Anonymous Coward]

Gosh, I'm tired of such general bullshit comments. Average quality of research in high impact journals is impressively high these days. (I'm working like crazy and think I do some useful stuff, but some groups are publishing just incredibly awesome papers.)

I'm not sure in which academic system you get a raise by publishing tons of crappy papers, not here for sure.

Re:filtering

[PopeRatzo]

What I value is a filter.

They're called "journals" and the filter is built into the system.

And what the filter doesn't catch, science usually does, but that might take a little longer.

Plus, you got that big-ass filter between your ears.

Re:filtering

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

That was a pretty balanced article and I agree with your filtering comments. Imagine an open access journal of quantum physics taking submissions at $250 a piece. Every quack in the world will be submitting to the extent of their bank account.

Most fees I have heard came after work was accepted. So under the present system you can submit all you want.

I would suggest that you try to write up some junk paper on quantum physics and submit it to arXiv and see how easy it is.

Re:filtering

[interkin3tic]

In my experience, those two "problems" cancel each other out somewhat. I subscribed to RSS feeds from most of the journals relevant to my field, and every few days I'm flooded with relevant, hot-off-the-press papers to read. I find they're mostly believable research. I get ideas I wouldn't have thought of otherwise, ideas I apply to my own research and hypotheses. I think this may be what you are talking about with the serendipitous finds.

What do you mean "too much crappy research" anyway? The papers are basically republishing what's known already? You think the papers are mostly wrong? Or you just think the experiments could have been done better? The first two would be problems. The last one though is a far more common sentiment I hear from other scientists. I don't understand it. If you're convinced of the conclusions, but would demand that the experiment be done better, I don't think that's healthy skepticism, I think that's just arrogance. I also hear some scientists say things like "Well I just don't believe that." That again is not healthy skepticism, that's simply being closed minded.

Sorry for veering off topic there, I don't mean to suggest you're doing either of those errors.

Re:filtering

[MurukeshM]

And that's another problem. Define "crappy". Established, "good" and therefore reputable journals are often very closed and pricey. OTOH, open journals are often new and tend to be flooded with crap, so it's difficult for profs to submit quality stuff to said articles.

A collision of two worlds

[damn_registrars]

Scientific publishing is where the worlds of scientific research and business collide. People who do scientific research are used to needing to get things done with the smallest investment of resources, time, and money possible. Business people are skilled at finding the most profitable points for selling their wares. This collision has one particular effect that does not meet standard thoughts on free markets; competition brings prices UP. Look at PLoS journals for example; they started with very low publishing costs and now for non-members it costs quite nearly as much to publish in PLoS ONE as it does to publish in Nature or Science. Even competing journals from different publication houses are increasing their prices in parallel rather than trying to compete for authors by price.

And as the summary suggests, this is muddied by the fact that the journals don't like to be upfront with their publication charges or charge structure. Many journals even bury how their charges work - do they charge by the page, by the image, some combination thereof, or something completely different? This makes it a massive pain in the ass for a researcher to decide whether or not to try a new (to them) journal for their paper, when they can't figure out how much it would cost to publish in this unfamiliar journal in comparison to one they usually publish in.

No

[errandum]

It costs them nothing. Everyone that does actual work does not get payed for it by the publication.

Only the magazines and websites get any kind of money for them, and hosting a 3mb pdf will never cost 30$ per copy, no matter how much they say it does. It's taking advantage of a system that was established when only print would do and actually printing and delivery would cost lots of money.

Right now, it's ridiculous and it will die sooner or later if someone comes forth with a good alternative (no matter how good nature is).

And the argument that no money makes things unbiased is complete bulshit. In that case, judges should not be payed either.

Re:No

[goombah99]

If you think that true then why publish in a jounral? send all your articles to Xarciv for free.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of 'Peer Review', which contributes to the reputation and the quality of the published articles. Coincidentally, the peer review process is done for free by volunteers. Essentially the modern scientific journals are clearing houses, where manuscripts that come in are distributed to reviewers and the reviews are returned back to the authors. They can drop the bullshit about graphics design and what not. Every science journal requires the authors to submit text and figures and electronic format ready for publishing. There is some spelling checking and cursory editing, mostly to ensure that you pay your color figure charges (Yes, figures in color on PDFs somehow cost more than gray scale). The Nature editor that estimates per article costs in the tens of thousands must be smoking something really strong. The $300-$1500 range, depending on the size of the journal makes more sense. The article also quite conveniently skips over the prices university libraries pay for subscriptions, or the way publishers aggregate journals in packages to make you pay for junk (just like cable companies do with with channels).

Re:No

[jklovanc]

By the way the projected Xarciv operating costs for 2013-2017 are projected to average of $826,000 per year, including indirect expenses. It is free to the users but the costs are paid for by donations. They also don't edit, peer review or produce journals. Publishing an edited, peer reviewed paper in a journal is much more that making it available on e web site.

Re:No

[blind biker]

Right now, it's ridiculous and it will die sooner or later if someone comes forth with a good alternative (no matter how good nature is).

PLoS publishes Open Access journals with high impact factors. More importantly, they publish extremely interesting scientific research and have visibility that goes way beyond the impact factor alone. A lot of people link to PLoS articles in their blogs, on Google+, Reddit etc.

Nature, in contrast, keeps articles captive. Even old articles, from the 20s and 30s (some topics are still relevant, like surface tension), can be only accessed by paying those greedy bastards. Fuck Nature.

Re:No

[Lawrence_Bird]

Really? How much is it costing you to maintain that secure hosting site? How much are you paying the administrator(s)? What are you doing about archival? Providing access to individuals and libraries? You seem to think of it as just a cost of storage on a hard drive. Its not.

Re:No

[Lawrence_Bird]

And xxx.lanl.gov - yes it goes way back - is not exactly the easiest place to separate out what is good from bad. Take a subject such as Astrophysics. In ONE day there are 68 new submissions. 298 in the past five days. Even in the "sub" group Cosmology there were 31 papers in the past day. Filterning at the journal level does serve a valuable purpose.

Re:No

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

And how much does it cost the government in money taken from grants to publish or obtain published articles, or in elevated library fees so their institutions can subscribe to various journals? Those operating cost btw are 0.015% of the NSF yearly budget. You saying they can't fund a government journal. for that? Especially when they know they can reduce the size of grants by requiring publication in government journals?

Yes epijournals would add some expense, they are after all anotheer layer of processing. The extra processing would add a tiny amount. The editing and the reviewing can be obtained from the same place that the present day journals obtain them: the science community, and at the same cost: $0.

Re:No

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

This is for me kind of funny.

In the mid 1980's I was a grad student that found out the hard way how to publish papers, including the rather non-transparent way in which some papers are published quicker than others; still meaning months or years. In the late 1980's I was working in the field of library management systems - an era when the web was waiting to happen. My first thought was how science publishing - an area where clearly all actors are both consumers and producers of information - could use the web to cut out some of the middle men that seemed to add little value, add major costs and months to the publishing process. What took this so long to happen?

The middle man doing everything he can to prevent things from changing.

Re:No

[jklovanc]

Here are some issues;
Bigger government. Conservatives would call that another service that the Government should not be involved in.
Government bias. There will be many people stating that government journals will favor government positions and would loose independence.
All papers are not government funded. How do you recover costs from publishing the non-funded papers?

The extra processing would add a tiny amount. The editing and the reviewing can be obtained from the same place that the present day journals obtain them: the science community, and at the same cost: $0.

I guess you have never dealt with getting papers reviewed and edited by several people. The papers have to be sent out, people reminded, multiple edits reconciled, and all this may take several iterations. Even if the actual editing and reviewing is free the administration costs money.

Instead of looking at one aspect and saying that sisnce it does not cost anything therefore the whole process costs nothing try finding where costs could come in. Several small costs add up into a much bigger cost

Re:No

[Sir_Sri]

Everyone that does actual work does not get payed for it by the publication.

Wait, the people who organize all of the reviews, keep the list of reviewers, store all of that information, arrange for the printing, manage the typesetting, chase after academics who don't format their work properly or who submit in a bad format are not doing 'actual work'?

Yes, the core content of the journal is paid for by someone else, but that doesn't mean all the people who exist in support of the journal itself are not doing real work. By your logic our department of 20 professors and 160 grad students are the only ones doing the real work, an the 4 administrative staff, 6 IT staff and university building staff should cost nothing since they aren't doing 'actual work'.

Re:No

[colinrichardday]

Wait, the people who organize all of the reviews, keep the list of reviewers, store all of that information, arrange for the printing, manage the typesetting, chase after academics who don't format their work properly or who submit in a bad format are not doing 'actual work'?

Perhaps the GP meant that not everyone gets paid, as opposed to nobody gets paid.

Re:No

[pantaril]

Publishing an edited, peer reviewed paper in a journal is much more that making it available on e web site.

There may be some value in editing and peer reviewing the article, but if the research was funded by public money, the results should be always also available for free even in unedited form without peer review. I'm not against research journals charging money for their work, but preventing the original submission from being shared for free under the claim of copyright is in my opinion theft. Public paid for the research, copyright should belong to them (or rather the research and all of it's results should be in public domain from the start).

Re:No

[errandum]

Spread through the thousands of articles they have the cost would be minimal. And there are other solutions like colaborative efforts between universities where one would take care of their own stuff. Planetlab is a good example on how this is possible.

And if they sell 100 articles / month you have all the costs and proffits covered. But they get way more than that since unviersities pay them for access, etc.

Re:No

[jklovanc]

The problem with unedited, non-peer reviewed papers is that research fraud is too common these days. As it stands now I don't trust any paper that has not gone through a peer review and even that only makes me less rigorous in checking similar studies.

Re:No

[Sir_Sri]

It costs them nothing. Everyone that does actual work does not get payed for it by the publication.

He's suggesting that it costs nothing to do the publishing job, and goes on about how it doesn't cost 30 dollars to host a 3mb PDF file. Which is true, if no one ever reads the PDF file and you just have an IT guy uploading thousands of PDF's to a server.

But that isn't what publishing it.

Publishing journals costs money. Publishing physical journals as well as online ones costs more money, but those are real costs. And someone will have to pay them. Certainly it is governments paying for the publishers, since journal fees are coming out of government grants mostly, and that is an inefficient system, but an open access system doesn't mean publishing doesn't cost money.

Simple rule ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Never trust the people who make the money off something when they dismiss your alternatives.

Of course the journal publishers are going to say they bring value to the game. In reality, they're just looking out for their own bottom line.

Re:Simple rule ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh. I hear what you're saying, but I'm in research, which is to say that I publish for a living. And I tell you if someone put their research on some random website, I'll read it, I don't care. I'll use it if I can. But no one puts anything of value just anywhere. An article not in a journal is like a website not indexed by Google. Not to say there aren't good unpublished papers out there, but I don't have the time to go look for them.

Also, the whole concept of an academic paper is that it builds on the earlier references. Papers that were not in other journals are generally considered very weak references, if allowed at all. If you want to turn over the idea of academic journals, great, there are some drawbacks -- but there are reasons why it has been around for centuries.

And finally, almost all articles are revised. Editors do provide some value, though nobody likes the middleman. Once had a paper with no revisions, all of my colleagues were shocked.

Re:Simple rule ...

[phantomfive]

Never trust the people who make the money off something when they dismiss your alternatives.

That's pretty near everyone who makes money off things.

Adding value isn't adding to the costs.

[Anonymous Coward]

"But publishers of subscription journals insist that such views are misguided — born of a failure to appreciate the value they add to the papers they publish"

Adding value doesn't add to the costs.

It merely makes the increase in price over the costs reasoned.

A peer review panel that works for free adds ZERO to the costs. but they do valuable work, which for free, does NOT increase the costs, but DOES increase the value.

Re:Adding value isn't adding to the costs.

[Yebyen]

Are you crazy? Ain't nobody got time for that.

(Now you're on the other side, and I'm the one insisting that you should work for free.)

Re:Adding value isn't adding to the costs.

[Em Adespoton]

Are you crazy? Ain't nobody got time for that.

(Now you're on the other side, and I'm the one insisting that you should work for free.)

Judges for journals already work like this; it's just the editor and the publishing house that actually get money. Everyone else is paid in prestige, which is the same thing you get when published in said journal. Therefore, the journals are worth as much as the reputations of those who judge and are published, plus the salary of an editor and the actual costs of publishing, indexing and archiving. Everything else is an add-on that could be provided by any lowest-bidding third party (for that matter, the actual publishing, indexing and archiving could be provided by someone like Google for a very reasonable price).

Just Another Good 'ol Boy Operation

[sycodon]

Inflated costs, connections, bias, kickbacks etc. Same story we see all the time.

Salaries for editorial staff.

[concealment]

As in many cases, their costs are mostly to hire people who are capable of making intelligent editing decisions as well as doing the bulk work of editing.

Who do you want in charge of the place where you're submitting a paper? Someone who has little education, low intelligence and low personality skills, thus is paid very little? Or a relatively highly-paid, educated, personable and intelligent editor?

If you want quality, it costs all the way. It's not limited to the scientists alone. You will need to hire a competent editorial staff and that is far from free.

Re:Salaries for editorial staff.

[Ambassador Kosh]

So when will this quality of editing staff actually manifest in better edited articles? After having to read far too many journal articles in a pretty wide range of journals the quality has been pretty universally poor.

Quality should cost more. However just because something costs more does not mean it is high quality.

Re:Salaries for editorial staff.

[CBM]

In the scientific field I work in, the primary journals are owned and run by our (non-profit) professional societies. The journal expenses are transparently reported the society management and membership. There is no incentive for profit, but rather to have an excellent quality journal that will be preserved for posterity. Refereeing is done pro-bono by professional members. After a few years from publication, the journal issues become open access.

Even though it is a non-profit enterprise, it's still expensive: ~ US$ 100-200 per page for submitters and $500-$2000 for annual subscriptions. The quality pays for editorial services, copyediting and publishing.

Re:Salaries for editorial staff.

[colinrichardday]

Costless? So there is no other use of their time?

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost

Re:Salaries for editorial staff.

[stymy]

The editorial staff selects the papers that will be published, not just edits what will be published.

Angelfire.com

[concealment]

send all your articles to Xarciv for free.

Naw, just run them through Dreamweaver and post them to Angelfire.com or livejournal.

how much does it cost to research?

[noh8rz10]

I find the argument over pay-for-placement journals kind of silly. I estimate it costs me $50,000 to write a journal article. This includes research, grad students, overhead, etc. Based on that, no big deal if it's an extra $3k to get it published!

Re:how much does it cost to research?

[dmbasso]

I find the argument over pay-for-placement journals kind of silly. I estimate it costs me $50,000 to write a journal article. This includes research, grad students, overhead, etc. Based on that, no big deal if it's an extra $3k to get it published!

Well, if that's no big deal, why not hand out more $1K to me, just like that? No? Why? Because I didn't add anything of value to justify that 1K? Well, that's exactly the point.

Re:how much does it cost to research?

[hedwards]

That's the thing, the actual paper itself is the cheapest part of the whole process. It's sort of like restaurants where the food itself is the cheapest part of the experience, but it's why people go to restaurants.

I personally find the process of charging for access to papers to be counter the spirit of research, now if one is using ones own funds or is otherwise privately funded, it is ones right to do so, but it's damaging to the community as a whole to have such papers held behind pay walls. It can be rather expensive to get them for the purposes of writing a paper, and one doesn't always know if they're going to be of any value until one has read the whole thing.

But, then again, I find the idea of owning ideas to be rather distasteful, researches can, and should, claim credit for the actual research, but people owning ideas is a rather silly idea, seeing as there are very, very few ideas that are original to the person that gets credited with them and often times nobody really knows the origin of those ideas anyways.

Re:how much does it cost to research?

[blind biker]

The most famous Open Access publisher, PLoS, only charges $1350 (and often waives all fees). What fucking journal asks for $3000? That's preposterous.

Re:how much does it cost to research?

[godrik]

That's not entirely true. If you pay a phd student and he contributes to 2 journals papers a year, half the cost of the student goes to each paper. A student can easily cost more than $50K a year. That's more $25K per paper just for the students salary. Count the professor salary (even excluding teaching) and you add up some. If it is part of a collaboration there is more than 2 authors.

In my lab, 3 or 4 authors is common. With one student as a main work force, one postdoc or junior professor as main coaching and one full prof as more distant strategic and advising. That sums up quite fast just in salary.

Re:how much does it cost to research?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm used to budgeting $50k per graduate student, where they only get paid $20k a year. The rest goes to tuitions, related fees, overhead, medical, and travel to an annual conference. Postdocs end up not costing that much more, since a lot of those costs are about the same and only a difference in salary and no tuition, so $75k per year.

Re:how much does it cost to research?

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

Actually that's not $3k out of their pocket, that's $3k out of their budget/grant.
So that last should read :OH PLEASE PLEASE THE GOVERNMENT CAN AFFORD IT.

Re:how much does it cost to research?

[TheRaven64]

Then holy crap is he good. (Field-dependent, of course.)

Contributing to two journal papers in a year doesn't mean writing them. It depends a lot on the structure of the research group. Some favour having PhD students work on something by themselves with some input from their advisor, others have them working in larger groups, or focussing on their own part of a big project but contributing to many others.

I know there's extra costs and all, but I don't earn near that as a postdoc.... Where is this that you pay that kind of money for a student?

A rule of thumb for a PhD student is that they cost about twice as much as their stipend. This includes expenses for travel, their fees, and so on. And if you don't earn near that as a postdoc, you might want to consider moving universities. It's about half way up our junior postdoc salary scale, which starts at about $42K at current exchange rates.

Re:how much does it cost to research?

[leaen]

I also find misleading title where they by cost mean publishing cost.

I find the argument over pay-for-placement journals kind of silly. I estimate it costs me $50,000 to write a journal article. This includes research, grad students, overhead, etc. Based on that, no big deal if it's an extra $3k to get it published!

Also grad students heavily subsidy your journal article. Add extra $25,000 per student if they found job instead.
What concerns me most is that proofreading/editing/typography is burden of researcher.
My optimistic estimate of proofreading/editing s about $5000 including revisions. Here you again subsidy journal/university as you ineffectively do what professional editor could do better with half of time and budget.

Re:how much does it cost to research?

[noh8rz10]

I don't get your point, so you agree with me is that what your're saying? It's super expensive to write a journal article. If it costs a little bit to publish it in a good place then so what? A small fraction of the total cost and better than free posting on a website.

Re:how much does it cost to research?

[leaen]

I don't get your point, so you agree with me is that what your're saying? It's super expensive to write a journal article. If it costs a little bit to publish it in a good place then so what? A small fraction of the total cost and better than free posting on a website.

I agree that writing article is expensive.
However this makes second part contrary to what you say. Direct cost are small and payed by university so this is not big factor. However if you add editing and administrative costs they easily sum up to quarter of total cost.
And because you did not negotiate you will pay that from your pocket.
You have good to sell(article) and can move to investment banker for example. You should determine terms of contract not other way around.

Re:how much does it cost to research?

[noh8rz10]

this false dichotomy of direct vs. indirect costs have no bearing. Here's the issue: Q: is it a big deal if a journal charges $3,000 for an article? A: No, because the author has already invested > 10x in the article. The additional journal cost is small. QED.

Re:how much does it cost to research?

[przemekklosowski]

Why do you think a publication charge is unjustified and does not add value? Clearly the peer-review and editing process are useful and necessary. We're just arguing over how to collect it: the old model is distributing the costs in a not very transparent way over the journal subscribers, whereas the new one charges the publishing author. I think the new system is more transparent and fairer.

Re:how much does it cost to research?

[Jyms]

That works well for you, but my journal article only cost me (ZAR) R100000 to produce, including research, grad students, overhead, etc. That comes to about $11000. So while your publishing costs is only 6% of the cost of producing the research, for me it is 27%. That really hurts my budget.

How much news...

[PortHaven]

Breaks on blogs first than makes it to mainstream media. A lot...

And seriously, how many times have you read articles on CNN.com filled with typos and poor grammar.

***

Sorry, I believe a system akin to Wikipedia but for research would do a far better job than the commercial journals in this role.

Re:How much news...

[PortHaven]

Doesn't even have to be non-commercial. Think of all the chemical and lab equipment companies that would love o advertise. Granted, it wouldn't make millions. But probably could sustain itself.

Competition drives prices UP

[Animats]

This collision has one particular effect that does not meet standard thoughts on free markets; competition brings prices UP.

That's very common. In the antiquated "free market" view, competition inevitably drives prices down. In modern marketing, competition is by features, conveniance, marketing, and status symbol value. (Academic journals are in the status symbol category.) Pricing is driven by implicit or explicit collusion, with competitors striving to push prices upwards.

This model applies to appliances, autos, cell phones, music, movie tickets, etc. Some things still have price competition, but they're mostly commodities.

devil's advocacy...

[damn_registrars]

hosting a 3mb pdf will never cost 30$ per copy, no matter how much they say it does.

Getting to that 3mb pdf is a long process, which does cost money. Now of course whether or not it really costs $1500-2000 (USD) to do that is another matter, but it does cost money. The hosting is, of course, trivial in expense. However the files do need to be hosted in a reasonable manner so that the papers can be searched and updated (particularly updated when other papers reference them).

So there is certainly a cost incurred by the journals. The question is how well the publication charges reflect that.

Re:devil's advocacy...

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

hosting a 3mb pdf will never cost 30$ per copy, no matter how much they say it does.

Getting to that 3mb pdf is a long process, which does cost money.

How much money does it cost to type "pdflatex"?

Re:devil's advocacy...

[colinrichardday]

Which is why I prefer latex foo.tex; dvips foo.dvi -o; ps2pdf foo.ps. This results in foo.pdf, including PSTricks from the original source file.

Re:u r a moron

[Anonymous Coward]

A true moron uses "u r".

Which question?

[jklovanc]

What Does It Actually Cost To Publish a Scientific Paper?

There are several questions that may get swept up in this debate;
How much does it cost to publish an externally edited scientific paper?
How much does it cost to publish a peer reviewed scientific paper?
How much does it cost to publish a scientific journal?
How much does it cost to publish an externally edited, peer reviewed scientific paper?
How much does it cost to publish an externally edited, peer reviewed scientific paper in a scientific journal?

All of these have different costs. ArXiv is an e-print repository funded by donations with an operating costs for 2013-2017 are projected to average of $826,000 per year, including indirect expenses. They are not editors, peer reviewers or journals. In effect they are the entry level in scientific paper publishing and they have significant expenses. Even if peer reviewers and editors are not paid there are still significant support staff needed to shuffle the documents around and maintain the servers, hardware cost, bandwidth costs, insurance costs, customer service costs, etc. The cost of publishing is non-zero and adding editing, peer reviews and journals adds to the cost. Someone has to pay for it and the question is whom.

Re:Which question?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the taxpayer who does it through library subscriptions. Might as well take out the middleman and subsidize academic journals directly. It'll be cheaper and everybody will have access instead of just academics.

Re:Which question?

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

As opposed to the $10,000,000 annual operating budget of Wikipedia or the $16,000,000 annual budget of the Internet Archive?

Re:Which question?

[jklovanc]

Both are funded by donations and grants. Both have a much bigger audience than scientific journals and therefore a much bigger pool of possible donors to draw from. Going to a donation model would in effect be a voluntary subscription fee that may or may not cover costs. .

Re:Which question?

[BlackPignouf]

"Whom" sounds cool, let's use it everywhere! :D

Re:Which question?

[martin-boundary]

publishing and they have significant expenses. Even if peer reviewers and editors are not paid there are still significant support staff needed to shuffle the documents around and maintain the servers, hardware cost, bandwidth costs, insurance costs, customer service costs, etc. The cost of publishing is non-zero and adding editing, peer reviews and journals adds to the cost. Someone has to pay for it and the question is whom.

And once again we go round the usual arguments: The root cause of high costs is centralization, which is a symptom of the need for control by the publishers. The solution is decentralization, which means mirroring (technically) and free copying (legally).

The world is full of computers, and people and organizations willing to host for free small repositories of documents. Let everybody copy and republish scientific articles for free, and 1) there won't be a single point of access which requires beefy hardware, beefy bandwidth, beefy customer service, etc , 2) there won't be a problem with insurance due to high redundancy. This is the USENET model, and it is ideal for scientific resarch.

Re:Which question?

[jklovanc]

I think the thing you missed is that publishing is not the same as hosting. Who decides which document goes on which computer? What happens if one or more of the small repositories goes down? Who get the editing and peer reviews done? These small repositories are not going to provide any customer support.

Who uses USENET now? There might be a reason. If is is so simple and easy, why hasn't it been done by now? Perhaps it is not as simple as you think.

Re:Which question?

[martin-boundary]

I think the thing you missed is that publishing is not the same as hosting.

Indeed, "publishing" is *not needed*, only hosting is. "Publishing" is the dubious service that "publishers" offer, after the papers have already been written, selected, peer reviewed, re-edited by the authors, and accepted, all for free by the academic community as part of their job.

Who decides which document goes on which computer?

Anyone who wants to copy the documents and host them. Imagine thousands of university librarians talking to local academics, then downloading the journals of interest into a local archive, accessible to everyone on campus, and even the wider public.

What happens if one or more of the small repositories goes down?

Nothing. You pick another repository somewhere else in the world which has a copy of the paper you want. Once your local repo is up again, you can use them again.

Who get the editing and peer reviews done?

The same academics who are doing it now. It's part of their job.

These small repositories are not going to provide any customer support.

On the contrary. If the local university library has a journal archive, and you want support, you can just pick up the phone and call someone, and if you really want to you can walk down the street and get someone to help you *in person*.

Who uses USENET now? There might be a reason.

USENET encompasses a protocol and distribution model to share messages and documents in a decentralized and redundant way. It is used for everything, including discussions (moderated and not), trolling, and swapping pirated media of arbitrary size, by the general public. That's who uses USENET now, and I'm not suggesting dumping science journals on there as is.

What I am suggesting is setting up a parallel, USENET like, distribution system where newsgroups ("journals") are read only and carry papers, while the equivalent of posting a new article is completely moderated, via the usual anonymous peer review. Anyone could "subscribe" to those journals for free without posting privileges, which simply means that they would find an existing repository that carries the "journal" feed and they would download it, making it available as an identical local feed. Well, I'm not going to explain in detail how USENET works, look it up. The point is that replacing "publishers" with this system is the right thing to do.

If is is so simple and easy, why hasn't it been done by now?

Copyrights. The copyrights on papers accepted by the for profit publishers are relinquished by their academic authors as part of the deal, and the publishers do not allow free copying and redistribution by anyone after that.

Perhaps it is not as simple as you think.

No, it is not. The only two solutions currently are 1) to create open journals which do not prevent copying and redistribution - this takes time for the journals to flourish, and 2) to "steal" back the journal articles by force and distribute them - the pirates are making good progress on this front.

Re:Which question?

[jklovanc]

Publishing" is the dubious service that "publishers" offer, after the papers have already been written, selected, peer reviewed, re-edited by the authors, and accepted, all for free by the academic community as part of their job.

Wrong, or did you miss the whole start of this discussion where the editing staff for a journal resigned from the publisher? The publisher does much of the selection, editing and peer reviews.

Imagine thousands of university librarians talking to local academics, then downloading the journals of interest into a local archive, accessible to everyone on campus, and even the wider public.

Imagine a local academic talking to thousands of librarians trying to convince them to host their paper. That may be a full time job.

You pick another repository somewhere else in the world which has a copy of the paper you want.

Remember you are talking about small repositories that will not impact a host's storage or bandwidth. What is a paper is only hosted on a few sites?

If the local university library has a journal archive, and you want support, you can just pick up the phone and call someone, and if you really want to you can walk down the street and get someone to help you *in person*.

If it is not hosted locally one would call the support desk where it is hosted. What happens when thousands of people from all over the world start relying on the local repository and it goes down causing the local support desk to have to deal with thousands of calls and emails? The repository will not last long.

Copyrights.

Why are there not free open journals that do not require copyright transfers right now? No one is holding a gun to author's heads and forcing them to use a paid publisher. Why haven't institutes done the publishing themselves if all it entails is hosting? Oh wait, there is one institute who does hosting and it costs them over $880K per year.

Re:Which question?

[martin-boundary]

Wrong, or did you miss the whole start of this discussion where the editing staff for a journal resigned from the publisher? The publisher does much of the selection, editing and peer reviews.

Do you mean the editors of the Journal Of Library Administration? Do you actually know why they resigned? Because they believe that the publisher of the journal, Taylor & Francis, doesn't deserve the free copyrights that they collect from the authors who actually do the work. And by the way, the editors and staff who resigned aren't Taylor & Francis employees, they are academics employed by universities. Taylor & Francis staff aren't involved in academic aspects, for the simple reason that non-academics aren't normally qualified to judge the merits of papers, nor are they qualified to edit papers without strong supervision, as even a single incorrect comma can change the meaning of a sentence or an equation.

Imagine a local academic talking to thousands of librarians trying to convince them to host their paper. That may be a full time job.

Luckily, academics don't need to convince librarians to host their paper, they just need to convince a journal to accept their paper, and convince their own librarian to host a list of journals that they would like to read. This is a lot of work for the former, and about 5 minutes for the latter.

Remember you are talking about small repositories that will not impact a host's storage or bandwidth. What is a paper is only hosted on a few sites?

Let's do a quick calculation. A small repository of papers might be 1 gigabyte. A disk with that capacity is less than $100 today. A typical electronic journal article is about 300kb on average. So you can put about 3000 papers on a 1 gig drive, which is several years worth of articles for one journal, probably its complete archive since the year it was founded. So it's almost trivial to host a complete journal archive, and what you're asking is what if some obscure journal is only hosted in a handful of places? The answer is, find someone with a spare 1 gigabyte on their drive to host a copy of it. I could probably do it from home, or you. For an obscure journal, I'd expect about 1 or 2 downloads per month or less.

If it is not hosted locally one would call the support desk where it is hosted. What happens when thousands of people from all over the world start relying on the local repository and it goes down causing the local support desk to have to deal with thousands of calls and emails? The repository will not last long.

You're thinking of something like a slashdotting? If you look at how this problem is solved on slashdot, there's always one guy who posts a cached/mirrored copy of the slashdotted site. Same thing will happen there.

In case you're actually thinking that this one repo will become the single point of regular access for everyone, that's nonsense. That's only what happens for commercial publishers _because_ they don't permit free redistribution. The whole point of a distributed system is to solve that problem. So what would actually happen is that the initial journal archive would implement HTTP 302 redirects to a mirror site which would receive half the load, and in turn it would redirect to reduce its load. In the end, you would have N mirror sites each with about 1/N of the initial load.

Why are there not free open journals that do not require copyright transfers right now? No one is holding a gun to author's heads and forcing them to use a paid publisher.

In some sense they are. The funding agencies have a list of preferred journals that they want to see academics publish in. These journals could be anything, but nearly all are owned by commercial publishers right now. Free/Open journals need to stick around for another 10/20 years to gain a

Re:Which question?

[hweimer]

The root cause of high costs is centralization, which is a symptom of the need for control by the publishers. The solution is decentralization, which means mirroring (technically) and free copying (legally).

Not wanting to spoil your argument, but basic economic theory says exactly the opposite.

Re:Which question?

[pantaril]

there are still significant support staff needed to shuffle the documents around and maintain the servers, hardware cost, bandwidth costs, insurance costs, customer service costs, etc.

ArXiv is great but i wonder how much of these costs are waranted?

Servers maintance, hardware costs, insurance costs could be almost zero if they used p2p plattform like piratebay to distribute the papers.

Generaly Library.nu proved that repository of scientific papers could be made and run pretty cheaply. According to wikipedia, they even made a profit probably on online ads on their website.

Re:Which question?

[martin-boundary]

You're not spoiling my argument. There are no economies of scale in publishing many journals from a single website. The reason is that handling an order of magnitude more traffic requires much more expensive hardware, more performant software, and more maintenance at the same level of service.

Economies of scale on the web are based on decentralization ideas, distributed server farms, crowdsourcing, etc. A publisher wanting to serve many journals from a single website faces the need for server farms, complex administration, bespoke software, maintenance, etc. It is cheaper to have several independent micropublishers, who each can handle reduced traffic on lower end hardware and software. The overall traffic will be the same, while the individual capital expenditures for each micropublisher will be much less than the single publisher's.

If you are talking about economies of scale associated with printing and binding journals, I agree with you. But this seems to be on its way out, to be replaced with printing on demand.

Re:Which question?

[jklovanc]

As I was trying to point out hosting is only part of the story there are other aspects to the cost of a journal.

Re:UNBElIEABLE BS

[KramberryKoncerto]

Learn to separate the following three things: 1) What the CEO says 2) What the accounting department shows you 3) How people in the company actually do stuff

Re:Do you want to try that with some sanity?

[Yebyen]

If you don't want them to get paid then don't publish in their journals? Seems they want to make that a condition of continued episodic publication of their journals, under the trade name they've established. So, go take your business elsewhere.

Re:u r a moron

[Anonymous Coward]

What journal do you use that actually has proofreaders, let alone paid ones?

And the editors and reviewers are all doing it for free.

Other than the publisher, nobody gets paid.

Re:English Skills

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. The technical English I see in engineering papers I review is atrocious, but thankfully we review and comment on it so it gets fixed (or at least greatly improved) prior to publication. Some of the papers I've found from "open" sources are more akin to the drafts I've reviewed than the final papers I've seen when it comes to this problem.

Re:I was right: you're an idiot.

[Yebyen]

Who said I'm not getting paid?

Well, not to write this post. But you seem to think I'm saying the authors should be paid. I'm not.

Re:OSU Advisor

[godrik]

Indeed, our database comes from citeseer, DBLP, PubMed Central and Arxiv. If you know where to find appropriate data in other fields, please contact us!!

Re:UNBElIEABLE BS

[gl4ss]

as far as I understood this was a study published in nature - not published by nature(except that it was published by nature in nature but not made by nature for nature). IF I got it right.

but of course they know their profit margin. it's on their board meeting agenda. just giving it away would have everyone asking why the fuck are we paying 40% too much for this service for these goons that happened to get in control of this credibility selling scheme?

Hollywood accounting?

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

And how much of this is due to Hollywood accounting?
The kind where Christopher Baen is paid 5% of the profit of his move "Light Ninja Naps" by Galactic Studios and despite a box office of $100 billion,
is only paid $100,000 because much of the reveneue went to Galactic Sudio parking, Galactive Movie Equipment Rental, Galatic Set Rental ....?

Same with universities, but...

[slew]

Many moons ago when I was at univeristy I attended, they kicked off a student/faculty committee to study how Cooper Union was able to provide full-tuition scholarships to all registered undergrad students (kindof free as in beer) and how it worked out. As it turned out, CU used a combination of fundraising and endowment income to make this happen.

After a bit of research, the student/faculty committee found that it was possible for the endowment of my university was sufficient to make a similar offer. The trustees came back with the point that if we didn't charge the same as other prestigious universities, people would think that our univerity was somehow inferior. Thus, the every-rising spiral of tuition was to continue.

However, more recently, though, prestigious universities have been offering massive discounts on a "need" basis. For example, Harvard and Stanford offer essentially free tuition for families earning under $60K, although my alma matter hasn't followed suit (it doesn't have an endowment as big as Harvard or Stanford), I imagine that trend will eventually force all universities down this path, if not discounting for all students. This may eventually force another metric (other than tuition or selectiveness) for obtaining status symbol labeling. Not sure how the free courseware will eventually affect them.

I suspect that journals will face the same problem as universities. Eventually, they will discount based on some criteria unrelated to their mission, then they will just discount randomly to fight open access journals. Actually, I think the fates of universities and the academic publishing communities are quite tied together (more than either would care to admit).

Re:Same with universities, but...

[slew]

Although schools have been very good at scrounging up grants for low-income students for a long time, they have stuck firm to the "list-price" until recently***.

Harvard announced their free-tuition for low-income students program in March, 2006.
Stanford announced their free-tuition for low-income students program in February, 2008.

So although the effective price has been low for most lower-income students, the instituions have only officially started discounting. The old fear that discounting would somehow reduce their prestige had been removed.

*** yes I graduated many moons ago relative to 2006/2008

That's $1350 too much.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I love open access, but paying to publish, even with waivers, is a recipe for corruption. It used to be (and may still be) that journals operating that way had a disclaimer on all their articles with something to the extent of "This work must be marked as an advertisement in accordance with US statute blah blah blah..."

There's a reason for that.

Academic communication is in need of a fundamental revolution, but I don't think pay-to-publish is the way to go. It creates too many incentives for someone to publish something in exchange for money. Journals need to either suck it up and act as a charity, or be honest and charge the recipients of their goods (i.e., the readers) and then supply a quality product.

The readers in turn, need to be prepared to stop paying for a subpar product.

The fact that pay-to-publish is getting so much traction anywhere scares the hell out of me and should be taken as a sign to everyone of how broken academics is.

Re:That's $1350 too much.

[15Bit]

Paying to publish is not inherently a bad idea, but needs to come with a corresponding discount on purchase/subscription costs. By moving some of the burden of journal costs from library budgets to research projects you would discourage publishing of every bit of crap that people produce. The system is currently swamped with both journals and papers, many of them awful or of very limited scientific value and this is a major problem. The current system of free publishing encourages this as researchers can just blitz the system in the hope that some gets through, with no built-in limiter to stop them. Making them pay should encourage folk to at least publish less, and hopefully of better quality.

Re:OSU Advisor

[xclr8r]

Hmm.

(Reposting link just for ease of reading) (At OSU, we developped theadvisor ( http://theadvisor.osu.edu/ [osu.edu] )

I went there and the Topic Search doesn't work for me. For example I typed in Psychology and got no papers back for the "use the following papers" step. Drop me a note at music65536@yahoo.com so we can bug-shoot a little.

Thanks.

Try search term genetic just to get a feel of it.

Cost vs. price

[colinrichardday]

A peer review panel that works for free adds ZERO to the costs. but they do valuable work, which for free, does NOT increase the costs, but DOES increase the value.

They are adding to the costs; they just eat the costs themselves. They're not adding to the price.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines?

[colinrichardday]

How is "no" an answer to the question?

Careful words

[sjames]

I could sell gumballs for $1000 a piece and still be quite efficient, I just wouldn't be passing my savings to the customer.

Your complaints about my price would be born of a failure to appreciate the value I provide.

Re:u r a moron

[TheRaven64]

I don't think I've ever published in a journal that didn't have proofreaders. They're about the only service of value that they offer - the peer reviews are all done by volunteers (and I've been on both sides of that), but the proof reading has to be done by paid staff. On the other hand, I know several freelance proofreaders and they're really not very expensive, in comparison with the claimed publication costs.

Re:u r a moron

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

What journal do you use that actually has proofreaders, let alone paid ones?

Actually ll my experiences with journals tells me they do have proofreaders. They are called "peer reviewers".
( Including a couple of funny stories from peer reviewers. )

cost to archive for a century too

[peter303]

In the era of paper, storing copies of papers was not a trivial cost. First the journal's publisher and professional society should keep copies. And hopefully copies are distributed among libraries and scientists around the world. Publishers areborn and die. So are scientists. Then their collections are often lost. Libraries usually fare better.

If you think the web will fare better, look at all the garbage web pages from the 1990s that have been lost. The huge turnover in dot.com businesses and changing electronic standards. And the extreme danger of jurnal publishers hoarding their copies on just a few servers and streaming them to users. I've seen far more unrecoverable disk crashes than libraries burnings/floods/quakes.

Re:u r a moron

[errandum]

Those do not get payed so it doesn't count.

Either way, a proof of concept

[concealment]

He was just asserting that editors aren't necessary, correct? He disproved his own point!