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Comment by olliej | Hacker News Reader

They also don't pay reviewers. The costs for a journal are only the cost of sending a webpage (which they charge what, $30 for?), the paper journal itself (for some absurd amount each year).

They do not pay the authors for the content, they do not pay the reviewers (who are the "added value" they harp on about).

They're basically a tool that converts tax payer money (the vast majority of those people writing papers are paid in part or entirely by tax payer funds) into private money for the publisher.

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I agree with what you've said - one thing that is sometimes overlooked is that publishers pay academic societies for the right to use the journal. I am on an editorial board for a small-ish society: we make about $5000 per year in member dues (they are low) and about $120,000 per year in publisher royalties. We use this to fund grant programs, scholarships, conferences, etc, so it is not all bad, but yes the publisher is probably making much more.

Well, academic societies like this are the problem.

When high journal fees are talked about an often over looked fact is that scientists chose this model. Scientific journals were originally run as non-profits by their members.

I guess it was considered too much hassle, and they decided to move production too an external company... that’s when all this rent seeking behavior began.

My opinion really, is that scientists themselves should move back to the scientific society runs the journal model. It doesn’t make much work to publish a bunch of PDFs in an archive anymore.

In physics, we do. The American Physical Society (APS) journals are the gold standard in my field.

I'm a huge proponent of open-access publishing, but one must also appreciate the importance of the journals to the health of the society.

Here are relevant passages from statements by both candidates for treasurer in the 2018 APS election:

Candidate 1: James Baird

For now, there would seem to be three principal threats to the financial health of the Society. These are:

1. Open Access Publishing: Paid library subscriptions to APS journals constitute the largest single source of income to the society. Open access publishing threatens this subscription model. If paid library subscriptions disappear entirely, a new payer or payers will need to be found. Currently, this appears to be the author or the author’s institution. APS open access journal, Physical Review X, and the open access opportunities offered by the other Physical Review journals, are an ongoing experiment. The treasurer will need to be alert to financial trends in open access publishing.

Candidate 2: James Hollenhorst

APS is in very good shape, both in carrying out its mission and in its financial health. Nevertheless, the Society and its membership face many challenges, not the least of which is the threat to the business model due to rapid changes in the scientific publishing field. Open access is the rallying cry from the government, the universities, and from the readers and authors of our journal articles; but someone has to pay for the added value that APS brings.

What is the "added value" the society brings? If there was enough value add for researchers, then it could be incorporated into the membership fees. Conferences can be funded by commercial booths or higher attendance fees (most academic attendees are already paid for by grants); student conference scholarships can be paid for by a trust estabilshed by and promoted to senior scientists. The only other added value I can think of is political lobbying.

The society is a network of researchers with like interests. Political lobbying is also important for a lot of academic societies (like APS).

I find it interesting that you are advocating the removal of a current capitalistic/greedy funding model and replacing it with...another capitalistic/advertising model.

That post doesn't advocate for a new model; it just points out possible deficiencies in current conceptions.

>The society is a network of researchers with like interests.

So, the added value is for the researchers in the network, but that value is subsidized by the "payers", who are not the researchers?

>Open access publishing threatens this subscription model. If paid library subscriptions disappear entirely, a new payer or payers will need to be found.

Your scientific society sounds bad, and essentially has morphed in to a publishing company.

Seriously, a society should not be funded by publication fees.

Personally I think it would be better for the societies to stay small and be funded by membership fees or grant funding (as part of out reach other activities, meetings etc on grants).

If you find it through publishing you can’t really complain about the rent seeking behavior of journals...

Here is my hot take. Strictly speaking for APS, this funding model does not seem to be a big deal. If you are an active physicist in research, you are very likely to be part of an institution that has a subscription to the journals (university or national labs). If you are not an active physicist in research, the papers are probably prohibitively incomprehensible to you. I also think it makes sense for a society to publish journals. Societies facilitate the communication of research progress. This is clearly one of the goals of conferences. Papers in journals are usually a better format for communicating advances (more detail, can refer back to it at your leisure, peer reviewed, etc)

This. Several societies I am a member of are essentially only financially solvent due to their journals.

I’m a member of a few professional societies and while we do get revenue and sponsor scholarships, we also employ a bunch of people to promote and represent the society.

So it’s probably a wash if we lose the revenue, but don’t pay for the various people.

Largely, I think it’s tradition.

I'm confused by the relationship. Don't the publishers own the journals? What rights are the getting from the academic societies? Please excuse my ignorance. :)

Naming rights, like when you want to call your journal the Proceedings of the X Society.

A role not mentioned above is the editor.

By this I don't mean a copy editor, but the person who decides who to send the manuscript for review, and makes the decisions on whether the manuscript is rejected, accepted, or more review is needed. Doing this job properly basically requires a researcher with experience in the field the journal is about.

It appears there are many journals where no editor is employed full-time by the publisher. If all of them are unpaid, then indeed the journal operation should be cheap.

There are however some journals (iirc Nature and APS journals are like this) with professional editors employed by the publisher.

I had this job as a second year computer science student at an Elsevier journal. Was payed <$10USD an hour. Spent most of the time on Google or dblp looking for reviewers, emailing them, and trying to get them to turn in their reviews. Actually among the 5 of us, 3 were undergrads and 2 were master students. One undergrads wasn't even computer related field. Said journal charges >$50USD per article and >$2500 for a yearly subscription.

That does not speak well of the publisher. Of course with Elsevier, just add it to the pile...

Actually, many journals require you to give up to five names of possible reviewers, so the authors are somewhat responsible of this task too. And it can be quite difficult if you are in a niche field and you have been there for a while, because you cannot suggest any colleague or anyone who has published with you, neither you want anyone with whom you may have a conflict of interests.

Anyway, most of the journals I know use unpaid editors, that do it because of prestige. That does not make the journal articles any cheaper.

Sure, authors can suggest reviewers, but the editor cannot always assume the list is reasonable. This is one of the things where a good editor with understanding of the field can in principle "add some value".

Yes, publisher profits - especially for places like Elsevier - are ridiculous, even for the costs involved.

But it's easy to overlook important costs in the publication system. One, as others have observed, is editors (and some administrative staff). Their value is certainly up for debate; I have had colleagues ascribe significantly more value to them than some of the other comments here.

Another, though, is archival and continuity of access. The publisher I am most familiar with is the ACM; they have contracts with archivers in place so that should they go insolvent or otherwise be unable to continue providing access to the published papers, these firms will take their archives live so the work remains accessible. By the very nature of the business, the fees they collect now need to be sufficient to keep the work accessible in perpetuity with no further payment.

As with other societies, ACM's journal revenue also goes to fund conference development, outreach and advocacy activities, student grants, etc.

There is a lot of rent-seeking in scholarly publishing, even (in my opinion) from scholarly societies. I personally believe that many of our needs could be better met by investing the funds we currently spend on commercial publishing in university libraries and rehoming the scholarly publishing enterprise there. However, sustainable open access is not as simple as just running a web server.

I think you're downplaying the actual costs they have quite a lot, which is a shame, because even without that the share of profits they extract is still disproportionate and unjustifiable.

On one hand you have free journals out there and on the other entertainment companies producing billions of dollars worth of content for less money charged to their consumers.

These people spend 0 on content and their infrastructure is easily rivaled by free alternatives.

He is in no way downplaying anything. The whole thing is ridiculous.

Those journals do a lot less. I'm not saying that the other stuff is worth doing, but at least it's something they're doing - there's no need to brush that aside.

>I think you're downplaying the actual costs they have quite a lot

Yeah right, that's why SciHub[1], which does it for free has been nearly impossible to maintain. The main difficulty is the cost of hosting, and not at all the mounting pressure from the litigation from the publishing industry.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub

I assume you're being sarcastic?

How are their costs significant? Web hosting is extremely cheap. As far as I can see their only really cost is staff to arrange reviews (which is surely a very low paid job).

Everything else they might do - collating papers into a physical journal, complaining about bibliography formats, etc. is superfluous nonsense that nobody really cares about.

Look at arxiv - the only thing it's missing that journals have is reviews.

AirBnB -- How are their costs significant? Web hosting is extremely cheap.

Yelp -- How are their costs significant? Web hosting is extremely cheap.

Twitter -- How are their costs significant? Web hosting is extremely cheap.

This would be a good reply, except you've failed to acknowledge arxiv's existence.

Is the value of journals over arxiv worth the price? (market says yes, but markets are sometimes wrong).

>This would be a good reply, except you've failed to acknowledge arxiv's existence.

Or SciHub's, for that matter.

Come to think of it, what does pay arXiv's bills?

Universities and foundations, etc.

https://arxiv.org/help/support/faq#2B

https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/arxivpub/arXiv+Budget...

Are you seriously comparing the web hosting needs of Elsevier and Twitter?

No, they're comparing the cost structures, which both do not consist only of web hosting.

Web hosting is cheap enough that Wikipedia runs entirely on donations.

Wikipedia definitely it not cheap, the donations that it receives are not a little, and web hosting are not its only costs.

Wikipedia only spends $2m on hosting out of a budget of $91m. It's biggest expense is salaries ($33m).

But this is one of the biggest sites in the world. Something closer to what Journal Publisher's would need is Arxiv.

Arxiv's budget is $1m of which they spend $60k on hosting and basically all of the rest on staff and staff support.

Eslevier's revenue is £2.5b. billion. Their profit margin is over 50%. What a monumental waste.

Their profit margins is usually between 30-40%. Which is still a monumental waste.

>Look at arxiv - the only thing it's missing that journals have is reviews.

That is a pretty significant difference.

>he costs for a journal are only the cost of sending a webpage (which they charge what, $30 for?), the paper journal itself (for some absurd amount each year)

They do have editors and other staffs, aren't they?

In my experience (especially with Elsevier), their copy editors are doing more harm than good. I dread having to go through proofs, as they always manage to sneak in mistakes, from spelling errors to changes in equations or figures.

My advice to students: NEVER just accept the proofs they send you, ALWAYS do meticulous proofreading of the proofs even if your manuscript was flawless. I'm aware of one case where they removed the entire abstract, and since the authors didn't notice that when checking the proofs in the publisher's online proof-checking system, the paper was published that way. They had to publish an erratum with the abstract because, once published, they don't allow changes to articles, even if it was clearly a mistake by the journal. (Disclaimer: It wasn't my paper, so I don't have an axe to grind here; I just found it appalling.)

I've given up checking the manuscript proofs, it's a waste of time. The real paper as it was intended is available on arXiv.

Yes "editors", those are people who will write you back "article does not conform with spec"(honestly though I think that's just a bot using their emails) until you fix the formatting yourself. And will send you the joined replies from the per reviewers.

They are not editors in any real sense of the word.

I do not think they are bots. A bot would not ask you to submit an appendix as a separate file in the first submission and merge it after the first review, for example.

Most of the work they do is, indeed, forwarding emails (not even reading reviews and authors responses). However, from time to time, they have to solve difficult issues (corrections, conflicts, plagiarism) and for that you need a person.

Yes.

Examples:

https://journals.aps.org/departments/editorial.html

https://www.nature.com/nature/about/editors

The list of Editors, Senior Assistant Editors, Assistant Editors, Assistant Senior Editors, Executive Editors, Editors Adjutant, Editors Emeritus, and Editors-at-large _did not stop scrolling_!

I have found that copy editors and layout people add an immense of value to the final product.

It's really the ultimate in gatekeeping and trolling.

Culture promotes an "authority" of a journal, while the journal gets to selectively choose what to publish, while collecting fees from scientists and their institutions & trying to gouge the public by renting out the work of scientists at high rates.

Re: taxpayer dollars, note that in the US the NIH is the latest source of public funding for research and requires open access publishing these days. The NSF (which does not require open access) is considerably smaller, as are all other funding sources.

The NSF does require public access, however:

https://par.nsf.gov/ https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2018/nsf18041/nsf18041.jsp#q1

This is fantastic! Not sure how I was unaware of this.

Also it’s very dangerous to stand in front of them, as they have people spending more tax payer money guarding their interests. Like it happened to Aaron Swartz

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