Are you, as a taxpayer, willing to pay (your share of) the extra $1000 or so per paper that it would take?
>But that financial model requires authors to pay a processing charge that can run anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 per article so the publisher can recoup its costs.
Edit: also, I don't expect margins of 30% from companies producing very low value. Do you really think that if they'd lower their margin to 0, with prices of around 30% less, everyone would stop complaining?
Given that peers review a paper for free and it costs fractions of a penny to host a pdf, why should we care about the publishers? What value do they ultimately bring to the table?
We should be rethinking how this is done entirely.
This is off the cuff, but...
Perhaps researchers applying for public funding should be required to register as peers. Each researcher submits their publication to a public service like data.gov (maybe research.gov?). Peers are automatically assigned according to area of expertise. The peering process proceeds much like it does today.
On completion of review and approval, the paper and any materials needed to reproduce the research is made public and available to anyone.
The cost for all of that would be relatively trivial.
Also, many of those journal fees are paid for with tax dollars to begin with. An expense that would no longer be necessary.
1. Their margins are extremely high, 90% range. 2. Open access journals can charge orders of magnitude less
Neither is broadly correct.
Regarding the claim that ~30% margins are excessive: do you think that if their prices went down by 30%, everybody would be happy?
It is insane that they go after people who wrote the paper when they try to give it away on their own website.
A little reading goes a long way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier
Claiming that they're just extracting rent ignores the cost, which even at a 40% margin is still 60% of what they charge.
Do you have any information on their legal costs that would reduce the cost above?
Do you think everyone complaining about prices would be happy if they would reduce prices by 35% across the board, thus making no profit? Or would you still want it to be free? If the latter, your complaint is not solely based in Elsevier's "rent extraction", but in something else.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jan/16/academic-pub...
It's hardly surprising that publishers would fight dirty to hang on to a business model where scientists do research that is largely publicly funded, and write manuscripts and prepare figures at no cost to the journal; other scientists perform peer-review for free; and other scientists handle the editorial tasks for free or for token stipends. The result of all this free and far-below-minimum-wage professional work is journal articles in which the publisher, which has done almost nothing, owns the copyright and is able to sell copies back to libraries at monopolistic costs, and to individuals at $30 or more per view.
It seems much more likely that PLOS simply charges the "$1000 or so" because they can, and it's easy enough to piggyback on the traditional publisher narrative that they are actually providing this amount of added value.
People forget the weird workflow in any journal that does biomedical work (including most of the PLOS family): manuscripts are submitted as Word files, then converted to XML and reformatted by a semi-automated process. There's manual labor involved to format the references and cross-references, mark up tables and figures, and proofread the HTML, PDF, and XML versions. The XML is then submitted to PubMed Central for archival storage.
There's a lot of manual labor involved in the profess. You can't just hand-wave away and say "peer review is provided for free" and assume the rest of the process is free.
Nice value added by the MSRI style right here.
Proper formatting makes it possible to automatically extract bibliographic reference data, text-mine the contents for whatever interesting purposes you might think of, display it in apps and new formats, and store it for decades in a stable format.
There's a slow-moving Scholarly Markdown project, but I don't know what its status is. http://scholarlymarkdown.com/
I agree with the sentiment, though. If there were some markup language that supported what academics do with LaTeX and Word, and converted cleanly to JATS XML and to nice-looking PDFs, it would be enormously useful.
Do you have any evidence of such economies of scale in existing publishers? As the article says, their margins are around 30%. That means the maximum they could reduce the price without losing money (with simplifying assumptions) is in the 30% range. If you have a way to be significantly more efficient than the status quo, go ahead, I'm sure everyone will be thrilled.
>As a taxpayer, you already pay state universities to access those papers.
That's a fair point. Is the government paying more in access fees than they're saving by not using open access journals?
Here's an example of how to do it on the cheap:
"Scholastica charges us $10 per submission. We have a grant to cover this and our other costs, which are very low. Our total costs probably average about $30 per accepted article. Therefore, there are no charges for authors, and obviously there are no charges for readers either. A typical article processing charge for one article published in a traditional journal would keep us going for around 50 published articles."
https://discrete-analysis.scholasticahq.com/post/40-welcome-...
Additionally, these journals really do provide more services than most specialized journals. In particular, the editorial service at Nature or Science is of much higher quality than your typical specialized journal. The editing includes editing the text for language and clarity, typesetting, and commissioning third-party high-level summaries (Nature's "News and Views" section). In contrast, at least in computer science and mathematics, most journals do minimal, if any, editing. The editors of prestigious journals do add value, and this helps to maintain the journals' relatively broad audiences.
And for a lab that's publishing a lot, it can add up. Some labs are putting out 10+ pubs a year. And depending on the field, that $10-20k can be a big deal.
>But that financial model requires authors to pay a processing charge that can run anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 per article so the publisher can recoup its costs.
They may have pulled it out of thin air (although I've seen similar numbers elsewhere, this doesn't seem to be in dispute).
Other open access journals are similar. Publication rates are high, because the vast majority of published research is NOT open access.
And furthermore, they're minuscule compared to costs of journal access.
Edit: I'm wrong on the second point. They're actually comparable. See comment below.
Research costs may be correct. Do you know where I can find data on average funding for published studies? Or how many government funded studies were published at what budget?
Let's say that I'm writing a paper. Maybe the underlying research cost $100K. So paying $3K for publication isn't much. And let's say that I need to review 100 papers for background, discussion, etc. At $30 each, that's also $3K. Even less, for subscription-based access.
So maybe it's a wash for grant-funded academics who publish in journals that charge $3K to publish and $30 per copy. But it certainly isn't a wash for academics with marginal funding, not-for-profits, etc, who publish at much lower cost.