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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.
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.
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!
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.