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Comment by bmurray7jhu | Hacker News Reader

Preparing papers for publication requires a non-negligible amount of not-fun work. Someone has to proofread the paper, verify compliance with the journal's house style guide, manage the interactions with reviewers, etc.

For high impact journals, it may be possible to find enough volunteer editors who are willing to accept compensation solely in the form of a line of their CV. Less prestigious journals need to provide additional incentives to editors, and cash has a proven track record of motivating people.

Perhaps academic publishers collect to much rent from their pseudo-monopolies on specific publishing niches, but it is difficult to escape the basic economics of publishing.

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I just don't get this. I was involved in a conference committee this year (CS is published in conferences), and as far as I know everyone from the general chair on down was a volunteer. There were some costs like conference space for the program committee meeting that had to be covered via the cost of admission to the conference, but in a journal presumably even those would not exist since you don't need reviewers to meet in person.

As far as I know, the only ongoing costs for the publisher (not immediately recouped via conference admission) would be running their own website and providing downloads. These hardly seem like massive expenses to me.

I don't see any fundamental reason why the model in CS couldn't work for other disciplines even if you don't want to adopt conferences; people are willing to step up and do the work, so why is so much money going to the middle men?

> so why is so much money going to the middle men?

Because the scientific community hasn't put forth an alternative.

> why is so much money going to the middle men?

Because the middle men like getting free money, and it's not other people's jobs to fix the problem. If you're an academic, your job is to produce papers that get published, not fix the publishing system. If you're a library, your job is to make materials available to patrons, not fix the publishing industry. In contrast: If you're a for-profit publisher, your job is to maximize profit, which means minimize your costs and maximize your income.

What's changed is that the costs are now so steep, and the value provided by publishers is so little, that it's become painfully obvious that scientific journal publishers don't provide value compared to the rent fees they charge everyone else.

> Preparing papers for publication requires a non-negligible amount of not-fun work. Someone has to proofread the paper

Many journal publishers do not even provide proofreading or editor services any more. The author is expected to do all that on his own, and then provide camera-ready output. In the case of for-profit publishers, about the only thing that they provide is the actual printing and distribution, not anything editing-related, and so you can imagine their profit margins.

> Less prestigious journals need to provide additional incentives to editors, and cash has a proven track record of motivating people.

Again, at least in my own field all of our journals, regardless of prestige, are produced on the part of volunteer labor. Where are you that people are being paid to serve as editors or reviewers?

> Preparing papers for publication requires a non-negligible amount of not-fun work. Someone has to proofread the paper, verify compliance with the journal's house style guide, manage the interactions with reviewers, etc. For high impact journals, it may be possible to find enough volunteer editors who are willing to accept compensation solely in the form of a line of their CV.

It's true that there are some editorial costs, but most open access journals have a one-time editorial cost that cover this. Since it's one-time, the total costs to society are far, far less. Currently governments pay hundreds of thousands of times to access each article (via library subscriptions), instead of paying once to have it published. And since the public is paying for this research, it makes sense that the public should get the result.

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