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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.'"
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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.
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.
"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.
Naw, just run them through Dreamweaver and post them to Angelfire.com or livejournal.
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!
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.
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.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
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.
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).
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.