What Open-Access Publishing Actually Costs
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
I was involved with arXiv.org and we estimated costs somewhere around $5 a paper, however we were not doing any typesetting (mostly we got submissions in TeX) and no peer review. It may sound blasphemous, but it is not clear how much value you really get out of peer review.
One key is that arXiv was running on a very large scale, if you are considering the cost of the programmers, hardware and such, it is just as expensive to run a small "journal" as it is a large one.
The reason I don't work there anymore has to do with the extreme difficulty we had in finding that $5 a paper. After years they've finally been able to get other academic institutions to put some chips in the pot, but it seems to me that it is much easier to find money for a boondoggle than it is for a lean operation.
For one thing there are a lot of people who are not qualified to have an opinion who would like to chime in on the topic and in certain fields (say gravity) they outnumber the real researchers. Some of these people are clearly psychotic but some of them will put up an huge fight, in the courts even, and other people are marginal cases, right on the edge, where you will lose the moral battle if you keep them out.
Another issue is that some senior (and junior) scientists tell it like it is (or rather how they think it is) and don't stop to think about the emotional impacts their words have on people, particularly when shared with the wider community.
These people have valuable things to say, but they make mistakes like the rest of us, and the peer review process defuses much of the tension in this situation, although it too has the problem with tail cases with very high cost.
The crux is figuring out how retain the good aspects of the existing system (well-considered and appropriate peer review, approximate ranking by importance) and getting enough traction to allow it to take off.
The point is exactly threefold, and much simpler than even the simplest article they review:
1. It costs dramatically less to publish it used to.
2. Editors routinely offload expensive tasks to those submitting, i.e.: formatting figures and text, converting to publication-quality file formats, and in some cases even layout, to the point where we're not even sure what it is they do anymore.
3. Most research is publicly funded. It seems ethically wrong for there to be paywalls, especially considering the hefty price-tag associated with submitting an article in the first place.
Editors: we're academics, not idiots. Please respond to our actual goddamn points.
It's similar to a large old software system with lots of customers. Ripping out a feature you've offered forever comes with massive customer disapproval, even if it's the logical thing to do for the product. So in that regard it's easier for the small new entrant to be nimble and not have to deal with maintaining the legacy stuff.
I must insist that this is missing the point. On some level, you seem to (inadvertently, perhaps?) acknowledge this since you qualified your argument with "subscription academic journals".
I would argue that this is an outdated business model, due to the fact that publication costs per se have dramatically dropped.
Of course, it costs more to run an outdated business! Join the PLoS team, or die, I say! (Respectfully, of course!)
To be less dramatic, my argument is essentially this: stop offering subscription-based services. It doesn't work for you for the same reason it doesn't work for the New York Times, and you're suffering the same consequences.
PLoS figured out a formula that works for a portion of the market with PLoS One. Note that that doesn't really work for the humanities and social sciences because the funding situation is so different. So then you have Open Library of Humanities, which is surviving currently on grant money with the hopes that they can get universities to fund their journals (not all that different than subscriptions to be honest, just that they are a nonprofit). But it's entirely unclear if that's going to be sustainable.
So even a brand new state of the art low cost journal needs to find funding somewhere. How that works in STEM might make sense (APCs coming from research funding) but how it works outside of that is entirely undefined.
Regarding the humanities/sciences division, I agree that the market is different. I think, however, that this difference is very accurately modeled by a single factor: technical literacy.
On the whole, I find that the humanities are not interested in the inner workings of computers. They do not care, and it annoys them greatly to think of such things. Now consider the fact that open access online journals are started by tech people, which is to say people from the sciences. Every open-access journal is just too damn complicated for people who don't care about social media, or even social logins. They want (query in) -> (paper out).
I think a simple experiment would be very convincing. Start a journal whose only job is to manage the peer-review process in the most transparent manner possible. University computing centers can donate storage space to the project. The now-slim editorial costs can be covered by modest submission fees -- say $100 for any non-3rd world university.
I posit that if such a system were to be developed, the humanities would latch on immediately. In other words, I suspect the humanities want more open-access and unrestrictive licensing, not less, as it's actually more convenient for them.
In short, I argue that the editorial business is resisting an inevitable market change.
Edit: to end on a more positive note, I'm sure a business opportunity exists for editors who can make present us with a convenient set of tools to work with this data.
If we leave the publishing-as-a-business area, I wonder how much university libraries currently pay annually for their subscriptions. And I do wonder, if it would make sense for universities to let their libraries take care of archiving and publishing the respective uni's publications. Open-access everything, host it at home.
To reiterate, however, I think it'll still be necessary to have some sort of submission fee to cover the costs of peer-review.
A few more points: - people outside of computer sciences (and maybe physics) do not want to deal with LaTeX. As a result, they want to submit ugly word files and get a nicely formatted paper out of it (this has a cost, but not in CS where we submit nicely formatted LaTeX papers)
- most journals do not do copy-editing, but the big ones actually work on the figures, the text, fix the references, etc. Again, this is not common in CS.
In biology and medicine, NIH open-access requirements mean most articles are converted to XML (http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/). Articles are submitted in Word files, edited and converted to XML via some proprietary complicated toolchain, typeset to PDF with a big proprietary system like Arbortext, and shipped off to PubMed for archiving. Figures are usually TIFFs or PDFs converted to whatever formats are needed for the web or print.
I don't know how the conversion process works, but I suspect that turning arbitrary Word files into semantic XML with accurate bibliographic cross-referencing metadata and high-quality tables and figures requires a lot of manual work. You have to deal with complicated tables, weird Word formatting, and whatever weird styling the authors think is a good idea. The bibliography has to be annotated with DOIs and converted to a standard format.
LaTeX and BibTeX, or some other structured markup language, are undoubtedly much easier to deal with and much easier to automate.
I think Michael Eisen of PLOS has commented on the situation and said they're actively working on rebuilding their publishing toolchain to automate more of the process, since it requires hours of work for every paper.
Sadly, the job of the scientific typesetter is not valued this days any more.
And while easier to automate, I'll take a manuscript laid out by a professional any day of the week.
LaTeX with a good template looks much better than some of the "professional" work I've seen.
Also: the real question here is whether the "professional" layout adds enough scholarly value to make it worth paying the outrageous journal subscription price.
Journals are not intended to be aesthetic experiences. That is not their purpose. Their purpose is to disseminate knowledge. High prices are counterproductive to that goal.
I wouldn't be willing to do an editor's job for free (unless underwritten by another employer, as I am for peer review), and I wouldn't expect anyone else to do so either.
Publishing costs are far, far lower than they used to be, but good proofreading and style-guide checking still takes time too.
One of the major journals in my field has a ban on sentences that start with adverbs. I'll admit my writing often uses adverbs it shouldn't but the journal will silently turn sentences like:
> Typically, data are ...
into
> It is typical for data to be ...
instead of rewriting the sentence to avoid starting with "typically" in a more readable way.
At any rate, edits are pretty common, but they're usually to match internal style guidelines, as opposed to editing for readability/content/etc.
As a counter-example, though, I have had one case where a typesetter noticed that I had an incorrect paper in the reference list purely from the actual scientific context in which I was referencing it. It was a really nice catch, and interestingly, it implies that the person doing the typesetting has a _very_ deep background in the field and a very broad knowledge of the relevant literature. It's not something that could have been guessed from the titles of the articles I was referencing without knowing the subject matter intimately.
Sometimes they'll catch a subtle error, sometimes they make edits to bring the document into compliance with their own style guide, and occasionally they'll introduce an error. On balance, they make the publication much stronger and more consistent. I've gotten nice PDFs that highlight the diffs and any questions/concerns they may have.
As an author I am very careful about what I say in my papers and how I say it. If something sounds stilted or odd, there's probably a reason. Words mean things and subtle changes can affect their interpretation. For this reason I do not like being edited by a non expert. If I feel my work needs such attention, I'll ask for it.
Absolutely, 100% agreed. Perhaps this was lost in my confrontational tone, but I agree that academic journals should be paid something.
I'm mostly opposed to paywalls, followed by the amount we're paying.
Where I partially disagree is in the fact that the editing tasks you describe are increasingly offloaded to the submitter.
1) Upload PDF of a paper to a server 2) Reviewers get notified and do their thing 3) Paper is accepted and set to public (or rejected)
Collecting related papers and typesetting them and whatnot should not be default but rather addons. All that matters is getting the paper, quality control and making it available. No need for set release dates and quarterly, just kanban it. As long as you have enough reviewers who are willing to do the work that should work.
Optional: 4) Allow git style updates to the paper (author needs write access for this) 5) Comment system (potentially mark papers as "not so great after all, should not have made it through review")
You also need a group capable of certifying experts in a field. In journals, this is done by the editor - who is usually an expert, or at least enough of an expert to know who the experts in a field are. What you described is basically Reddit -- and there's nothing wrong with Reddit, but I think it's a little unstructured for scientific discourse.
Is this even relevant post-scarcity? Just make everything available all the time, just like the rest of the web works.
If it is obvious how many citations a paper have, and of their respective quality, that would carry over to make a quality index for the paper itself. Low quality papers would languish as only friends and family would bother with the.
Yes, they will need 5 ;)
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.
They currently get about eight or nine thousand submissions per month, all of which they publish: http://arxiv.org/stats/monthly_submissions and about 12 million downloads per month http://arxiv.org/stats/monthly_downloads.
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.
Definitely see PaulHoule's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10539269 about how they were struggling badly when they were trying to get by on half that.
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.
"The costs are largely the same between open-access journals and non-open-access journals," said Michael Eisen, a co-founder of the open-access project PLOS. "We’re doing essentially the same thing as traditional publishers."
The type of peer review that megajournals (like PLOS One) do is categorically different than a lot of traditional journals. A megajournal will typically review for scientific soundness only. If the methodology is sound then the paper should be accepted regardless of whether it breaks new ground in the field or is seen as important.
This is not the same kind of peer review that you will find when submitting to Nature, where they are trying to curate for importance in addition to vet for soundness. I won't argue one way or the other about whether one type of peer review is better than the other, there are arguments to be made on all sides. But they are not the same, and they do not cost the same amount.
Methodological peer review is cheaper. That's why the megajournals like PLOS One, et al do it that way (well, it's one of the reasons, the other main one being a philosophical reason). You could not run the big OA operations at their price points with traditional peer review. Their revenue is purely driven by acceptance volume, and so therefore anything that slows down peer review or rejects too many papers has a serious material impact on revenue. It's a balancing act between ensuring you don't accept quack science accidentally but don't reject too much than you have to.
So Eisen is correct, it's the same thing. A non-open access publisher could make a non-open access equivalent of PLOS ONE if they wanted to (and maybe somebody has). It's not a question of open access.
But it is worth noting that a move to APCs dramatically changes the incentive structure for a publisher, and there are built-in mechanisms in such a system to produce new strange dynamics that we haven't really seen much of before (ie the tension between needing to accept a certain volume to stay in business vs try to keep the reputation of the journal high).
Consider that PLOS ONE, because it doesn't review for importance, has a much higher acceptance rate. Only accepted papers pay processing charges, so each accepted article has to subsidize the review and rejection of all the rejected papers. In PLOS Biology or PLOS Medicine, with a low acceptance rate, each accepted article has to subsidize review of numerous other articles, driving the cost per published article way up.
Currently, independent scholars or intellectual members of the public who want to learn something have very limited access to this knowledge. AFAIK, you need to go to a library to access it - you can't even join a library and get remote access to their computers. That means all the well-researched, expert knowledge in those journals is replaced with whatever is found on the Internet. How will the next brilliant patent clerk participate and make her/his contribution?
(If anyone knows a way to access JSTOR without enrolling in a university or going on-site to a university library, I'd love to know.)