On pastrami and the business of PLOS | Hacker News Reader

On pastrami and the business of PLOS

michaeleisen.org

55 pointsHooke29 comments

All together we have a staff of well over 100 people running our journal operations, and they need to have office space, people to manage them, an HR system, an accounting system and so on – all the things a business has to have. And for better or worse our office is in San Francisco (remember that two of the three founders were in the Bay Area, and we couldn’t have started it anywhere else), which is a very expensive place to operate.

...

Now I want to end on the issue that seemed to upset people the most – which is the salaries of PLOS’s executives. I am immensely proud of the executive team at PLOS – they are talented and dedicated. They make competitive salaries – and we’d have trouble hiring and retaining them if they didn’t.

From the outside, it seems obvious that having a hundred-person office in the one of the most expensive cities in world is simply incompatible with having a low-cost high-quality international journal. While it's understandable how they ended up in this situation, the question now is whether their original mission is important enough to sacrifice the "good thing" they have going.

It seems unlikely to me that the current executive team would ever decide to cut their own salaries in half (or more) and decamp to a lower cost location. But it also seems certain that there are lots of talented people in more affordable locations who would have a good chance of doing an equally excellent job at a much lower cost. But given the (possibly legitimate) self-interest, I don't see any way they can make that transition.

Perhaps instead of trying to cut their costs, their best hope going forward is to keep their prices and profits high, and use the proceeds to fund some new completely independent "startup" journals to achieve their admirable original goal? And perhaps dedicate what they can of their current team to developing software and processes that others can use to run a lower-overhead journal?

It doesn't seem incompatible to me at all.

As a general rule, the parts of your staff that scale O(n) with revenue should be cost sensitive but the parts that scale O(log n) or O(1) should be quality sensitive.

As long as they can keep their growth rate up, the ratio of their staffing expenses to revenue should go down over time, regardless of how high the original denominator was. Thus, if you're a high growth potential company (which, if you compare the size of PLoS to Elsevier, seems plausible), you should pick the city that maximizes your growth potential.

Since traditional publishing was such an intrinsically distributed process in the first place, PLoS has an unusually easy time building a distributed workforce for all of its journal specific workforce like editors which keeps those costs low. At the same time, the team working on functions that span all journals like software or marketing can centralize in a city like SF which bats above it's weight in those areas.

In essence the last point has already occurred. PeerJ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerJ) is another open-source journal that is a lower-overhead journal that was created by a former PLOS ONE exec (Peter Binfield). However, it isn't well known and in part for that reason has an impact factor roughly one half that of PLOS ONE. Part of running a successful journal is getting mindshare to get people to submit and to read (and cite) what is published there. And that means advertising, one of the things Kern doesn't like that PLOS does.

There are highly successful super low-overhead journals that do not advertise, do not pay 6-figure salaries. See http://www.jmlr.org/ for example.

If you receive a 300k$ a year grant, then $1k per paper is 0.3% of your budget. And it is not uncommon for medical researchers to get a lot more than 300k$ a year.

I'm not sure I agree with Kern's implication that a not-for-profit company should be eating the figurative Ramen and running on shoestring budgets. His description of their assets reminds me of something that's very common, very valuable, and very useful in the NPO world: endowments. So they've got capital? Great! The more they make off their investments, the less they must charge in order to pay for opex (they're light on capex partly because of gratis support they get from similarly-minded companies).

I'm also not sure I agree that under $400k/yr is "big salaries". Especially in a company that can't offer stock, doesn't offer big bonuses, etc. I was offered a job there a couple of years ago, and spent some time talking to the CTO. She was remarkably candid with me about PLoS' financials and their plan for growth (which, I note, they've executed on marvellously). I have never, ever, ever been more impressed by an executive. If the rest of the executives are of the same calibre as Ms. Rayhill, they deserve every red cent.

> I'm also not sure I agree that under $400k/yr is "big salaries".

It is. Your perspective is warped.

compared to what? in this world, there are lots of executives who get paid literally millions of dollars to do nothing at best, or actively destroy value at worst.

These people are a tiny minority at the tail of the income distribution. Using them as a metric is the statistical definition of the warped perspective.

Having a six-figure household income at all puts you in the top 15% in the US. Having a $400k salary puts you very close to the top 1%. I would say anyone making enough to put them, by themselves, in the top 15% is arguably making a "big salary". The Valley has really warped the perception within this industry in particular and the US in general as to what "normal" money is.

we're talking executive salaries here, not individual contributors or 'normal' i.e. median income for people at the lowest pay scales of an organization.

400k is a good executive salary. i guess you could call it 'big' but it doesn't strike me as something 'too high' or as an indicator of something nefarious going on. it's in line with very senior executive pay at the c-level or a very senior VP/MD. someone like that probably oversees up to 8 or 9 figures of business.

Right, but we're not talking about whether a median employee's salary is big in a median market. We're talking about executive comp in the SFBA. I'd estimate the CEO of PLoS is making ~2.5x what the average employee makes, which is a completely reasonable multiple for executives that are reliably hitting their goals and doing good work. You may think comp in the SFBA is warped, but I don't think it's fair to dismiss context out of hand.

No, we're talking about total executive comp at a non-profit. If compensation in the SFBA is warped relative to the rest of the US it is fair to ask why a non-profit is based there and whether the salaries they have to pay to stay are justified.

Nope, $400K is typical executive compensation in major US cities.

I just pulled a few 990s for professional engineering societies. Except for their CEO/ED and one or two key regional managers, they make far less than $400k/year. That said, I looked at PLOS's 990 and saw numbers that were a) much smaller than I expected based on the $400k comment and b) in line with but slightly higher than what I saw from, say, the Society or Petroleum Engineers or Society of Automotive Engineers.

Make sure you restrict to major cities. That affects comp. Also I suspect those forms show base pay not total comp which is typically far higher.

Not sure about the legal reporting requirements, but since my wife works at one of them I can tell you first-hand that they don't get much on top of their base salary. Non-profits are 80%+ salary compensation, even at the highest levels.

Also, engineering societies generally are based in major cities.

My latest paper was in Springer. Part of their operation is running from India. Why can't PLOS run from India and operate on a shoestring budget?

Why didn't you take the job?

Ironically, because the pay wasn't enough to compete with other offers in the SFBA. I do very much regret not taking the job, but the cost (actual bottom-line cost) was too high to absorb.

A friend who worked for PLOS briefly described to me how they take a Word document as input for in article and have it outsourced to some folks in China to convert into an XML input, costing a tremendous amount of money and time to process a simple document. My friend's suggestion that this could easily be replaced with a script (and taking on writing that script) was met with indifference, because the existing process "worked".

There is cruft at PLOS. CEOs running a successful business produce cruft. It is worth criticizing this.

Public Library of Science (PLOS)

https://www.plos.org

"PLOS is a nonprofit publisher and advocate of Open Access research."

Pre-PLOS "common wisdom": only way to make journals work is by paid subscriptions and closed access articles.

Present "common wisdom": PLOS proved you can run a high-profile, open access journal and be a real business.

Future (who wants to take on this challenge?): Run an open access, high profile journal that charges less than $100/ article to publish.

....

Current price for each published article in PLOS: PLOS Biology $2,900 USD PLOS Medicine $2,900 USD PLOS Computational Biology $2,250 USD PLOS Genetics $2,250 USD PLOS Pathogens $2,250 USD PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases $2,250 USD PLOS ONE $1,495 USD

PLOS Genetics has something like 720 articles published per year so you can do the math on what they make from those fees.

I've published an unfunded side-project in PLOS ONE for free, they have a no-questions-asked free publication option. Back then, about 3 or 4 years ago, there was a box with "How much are you willing to pay?", I entered 0, it was published.

It's unfortunate that non-profits (in the US) have to compete head-to-head on salary with regular corporations. They get no breaks on federal payroll tax, income tax, social security, etc.

I suppose if non-profits did get tax breaks on this stuff, there would be lots of fraudulent organizations existing only to circumvent taxes without doing any social good.

The majority of non-profits don't compete head-to-head on salary.

They compete for hearts and acknowledge there will be a pay difference.

Exactly. The big question is how much of a pay cut. This gets especially touchy is how much when the competing compensation has outsize compensation tied to tangible performance. Two examples are endowment fund managers (the market price is multiple millions of dollars, and the difference of 1% of performance can be 50+ million a year compounding over time) and college football coaches (winning football programs are very profitable).

Except for the fact that they'd probably lose employees, PLOS should consider moving their HQ to Oakland, or another location where rents aren't so high.

Why would they? Do they have shareholders to account to?

Then their author costs would be lower. I could have suggested pinning their author costs to their stock holdings value, too.

Doesn't matter if they are nonprofit.

Necessity is a needed evil he seems to say.

Did they thought of stopping to provide archive on the web, but just send the whole collection of paper that requires 0$ / months to just keep them alive and just require lenses and light to read?

Well it will require an index. But old style librarian have method for this. You can make incremental archive, keep up to date indexes on a separate plan ... This would in turn help countries with bad internet/energy access.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microform

And maybe libraries are a great invention. Maybe universities should be opened to every one in the world to access ALL scientific papers. Maybe it is not executive at PLOS that are the most useful agent for spreading the knowledge but librarians.

As a great librarian once said: Oook! Ook, OOk, Oook!

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