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Comment by mvonthron | Hacker News Reader

reviewers are not paid by the publisher in the current system either

basically:

  - authors pay to publish their work
  - readers pay to read the articles
  - reviewers review pro-bono

now you are thinking "well where the hell goes the money" and you are in the same situation as 99% of scientists

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It is actually quite time-consuming to do the editorial tasks of a journal:

* Ensure that the content of a submission meets minimal guidelines for submission.

* Figure out who appropriate reviewers might be. This means figuring out which research areas are relevant, filtering out reviewers who might have conflicts of interest (same institution, previous advisor/advisee relationship, recent collaboration, etc.). You also need to ensure that you load balance reviews across reviewers.

* Appropriately double-blind the submission so that the reviewers don't know who submitted the paper, and the authors don't know who reviewed the paper. You are now an intermediary for all of this communication.

* Make a judgement call of which papers will be accepted for publishing.

* You need to facilitate necessary edits from the authors to get it ready to publish.

* Convert paper formats, supplementary data, etc. for uploading. Basically all the editing tasks that you probably thought was the only thing on this list.

* Oh, and reviewers and authors are likely professors who are horribly oversubscribed in terms of their time, so you need to play babysitter to make sure that the tasks actually get done in a reasonable manner.

When you consider how few papers actually get published, and just how much administrative work is required to publish a paper, costing hundreds or thousands of dollars to publish a paper is not unreasonable.

Scientific Journals make 36% margin[0].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...

Put another way, that means that if you eliminated all profit from costs, you'd cut the price by only a third (not to a third). That's still hundreds-to-thousands of dollars per article.

No, it'd only cost so much if the alternative did the same thing, and that would be a foolish thing to do. It costs a lot of money to restrict access to information: you have to print lots of paper, use digital rights management (DRM), have an army of people to negotiate and manage expensive contracts with libraries, and so on. You may want to write and maintain special search engines. You also have to employ an army of lawyers to sue anyone and everyone who has the temerity to share scientific research (even though the publisher didn't pay for the research to be done in the first place), as well as try to track down those evil people who dare share publicly-funded scientific work.

An open access journal doesn't have to do any of that. They have to have some editors do final editing (who get paid), a website where they post the article, and they'll probably pay a CDN (so the website doesn't even need to be very fast). If they're smart they'll create a static (generated) website, which is extraordinarily cheap to maintain today. They don't need to create paper copies - if someone wants a paper copy, that individual can print it. They don't need to worry about the massive overhead of digital rights management (DRM) systems, because they don't need them. They don't need to negotiate expensive contracts with libraries (they still have to negotiate small contracts for editing and such, but small dollar amounts are easier to manage). Normal search engines can use their data directly, so they don't need their own search engine. You don't need an army of lawyers to punish the sharing of scientific results that were paid for by society; you don't even need to track down those people who were sharing scientific results. An open access journal needs reviewers, but they are already volunteers, so that wouldn't change.

For-profit publishing requires a tremendous amount of overhead that provides no value to society. Publishers do it because they can do all that and still make a giant profit, and they can just pass all those costs on to society.

More than that probably. At 36% margins you don’t really have to worry about cost efficiency - there’s probably a lot of cost savings to be had hiding behind all that free cash flowing around (and if that 36% margin disappears, it won’t take long for the CFO to find them).

Many of those jobs are done by the same academics as authors and reviewers who also work pro bono or for very little money as well.

The kind of work you describe though is small, compared to the effort the scientists have to put to conform with the journal's author guidelines [about the detailed formatting of the paper and the figures etc], and the amount of time it takes to the reviewers to review the paper. Authors often suggest the reviewers themselves - but even if they don't the editor just goes through the list of people who have published on the same subject in their journal before - that doesnt sound that hard or time consuming. Double-blindness is not even a concern in the age of computers. Their judgement call is usually made by the reviewers, and their role is limited to cases that are on the fence, and even then it's more of a roll of a dice . They often do a lousy job at keeping with deadlines - you ll sometimes have to nudge them to get some progress. Babysitting is the wrong term, given that reviewers are generally more qualified scientists than the editor. But yeah when you expect to get free work, you have to do a bit hustling for it.

I m not saying it doesnt cost some amount, but for high impact journals a lot of the cost goes to publicity work, which in the end benefits the status of the paper but not science.

It goes to funding distribution models that can't deliver unicorns, rainbows, OR puppies to your doorstep. See the following quote from William Gunn, Communications head at Elsevier.

  When one user argued that people in rare-disease 
  families “shouldn’t have to jump through additional 
  hoops to access information,” Gunn responded, “Yes, 
  everyone should have rainbows, unicorns, & puppies 
  delivered to their doorstep by volunteers. Y’all keep 
  wishing for that, I’ll keep working on producing the 
  best knowledge and distributing it as best we can.”

https://slate.com/technology/2018/08/who-gets-to-read-the-re...

I know it seems superficial, but the usage of the word "y'all" makes Elsevier lose a lot of credibility in my mind.

Right, but we have the internet now. The costs of publication and journal subscription greatly exceed the costs of digital distribution.

Elsevier's profit was almost a billion pounds in 2017. They are the last people to complain about margins or cost/benefits.

They post a profit or about 33% according to others in this thread. This means they still have ~2 billion pounds in actual operating costs. Not that I support the current model, but that work still needs to be done, and it seems naive to expect it to be done for free / substantially less.

I wonder how far the 'fee per published article' gets to covering bare costs for e.g. the journal Nature.

I highly doubt most of the operating costs come from the journals. Considering there are far more people working for other publications in the Elsevier company. Usually the publications with high turnaround have low profit or break even, and I do not think the journals are among those and actually raise the profit margin substantially.

But then, I can't back this up with numbers as they do not publish specifics...

I would have a very hard time not looking him dead in the eye, saying "F* you", and spitting in his coffee.

When "best we can" obviously means "best (for us as) we can (scam the marks for)", you are a parasite.

Elsevier is full of nonsense, and this self-serving quote from William Gunn is just another example. You might find this article of interest: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...

Per that article: "According to its 2013 financials Elsevier had a higher percentage of profit than Apple, Inc."

There's no need to "distribute by volunteers". We have something called the Internet - put the articles on a website, click, and you're done. Indeed, for the most part publishing on paper is a mistake - what we need is the electrons, not paper. Editors aren't free, but they don't cost the money that Elsevier and others charge. Reviews are done by volunteers, almost without exception, so there's no need to pay publishers for review.

For-profit scientific publishers provided an important service in the 1950s. It's not the 1950s any more, and they don't provide any valuable services any more. All the real services - namely the scientific work - are paid by others, and so those others should reap the rewards.

> on producing the best knowledge

at best he s publishing it

To give an idea of how much pro-bono review costs the rest of the system: A thorough review of a journal article takes 6-12 hours. If the paper develops novel theory it is more likely to take ~ 24 hours to understand and check properly.

The average return on 1 hour of grant writing for a PI or experience staff researcher is ~ $300, averaged over the year. One 10-hour review therefore has ≥ $3000 opportunity cost to my lab.

Looking at the opportunity cost to my funders due to spending time on a review instead of on research, funders presumably believe that research is at least as valuable as the how much they pay to support it. At the rates I'm familiar with, the opportunity cost to them is therefore at least $800 for a 10 hour review. Worse, a portion of every grant from the NIH or NSF is filtered through the university system as "indirect costs" and paid to the publishers as journal subscription fees. (The amount paid in subscription fees is hidden behind NDAs.)

There are 2-3 reviewers per paper, and a paper may be rejected and resubmitted 2-4 times. Reviews don't follow a paper between resubmissions—the whole process starts again from square one with new reviewers. So multiply the per-reviewer costs above by somewhere between 2 and 12 to get the total cost.

One could counter that review generates similar value as other research activities. I doubt this. The cost-benefit tradeoffs involved in review strongly incentivize cutting corners or delegating the task to inexperienced workers, which lessens the average review quality. The median review is a list of gut reaction bullet points rather than an evidence-based critique. This promotes an adversarial relationship between reviewers and authors. Of course there are many idealistic people who fully commit to the process anyway, but the system as a whole is costly and wasteful.

(All of this is based on my experience doing academic biomedical research in the US. It is probably laughably wrong for other fields or other countries.)

its no different in europe since people are publishing in the same journals. And its not rare to see egregious or unprofessional behaviour.

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