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Comment by kirillzubovsky | Hacker News Reader

Could someone with knowledge of the matter explain why scientists still publish to these journals, and still sign up for access?

It seems like as long as every university in the world can just switch to a blog a do away with publications, they'd save a lot of money, improve science, and reduce complexity overnight.

Why are paid journals still a thing?

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It's a coordination problem. A journal is valuable because having a publication in it confers prestige and impact, which scientists need for jobs and tenure.

Now, if all scientists in a field were to switch to a new journal, they could take the prestige with them, get rid of the rent seeking publisher, and have the same science, prestige, and impact for a fraction of the cost. But if any individual scientists switches, they'd carry the full loss (of foregoing prestige/impact), while achieving no gain. So, you need to have everybody on board simultaneously.

A switch like that can happen [1], but it happens rarely. Often it takes the nestor of a field to get sufficiently pissed off with a journal and persuade everyone to move on. Great example: Don Knuth in 2003 convinced the Editorial Board of the Journal of Algorithms (which he had founded) to resign [2], and start ACM Transactions on Algorithms with a different, lower-priced, not-for-profit publisher. Elsevier kept the old Journal going, but gave up and folded 6 years later. Yay.

Wish that would happen more often. But given that the situation was basically the same 20 years ago, I am not optimistic. What needs to happen to shake the scientific publishing world up??

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editor...

[2] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf

It is slowly happening, but the inertia is a significant impediment. Every scientists agrees that open access is the way to go. But it takes a decade or two to create the "social proof" that your new community journal is indeed one of high standards. If you already know that the editors of your goto journal have high professional standards, you do not want to potentially waste time and risk your reputation on supporting a community journal. It is a social problem, not a technical one. Usually solved by getting all the luminaries of the field to be editors for your new community journal (which is a tall order).

One problem is that open access journals get paid by the author. So all so called predatory journals (not doing peer review, just taking the money and publishing the paper) are open access. Recently there was some hysteria about this, even if you publish by accident in one of those journals your career takes a very big dent.

It seems reasonable to me to pay a small one-time publication fee for an open access journal, to cover clerical and typesetting work (professional typesetting is important and expensive). Predatory journals exist and would exist independently of what the best practices of good journals are.

I have received plenty of emails inviting me to submit work to predatory journals, but their low quality and lack of peer review and general ethics is pretty obvious and they are easy to avoid. They feel more like a spammy annoyance than a real threat.

> reasonable to me to pay a small one-time publication fee for an open access journal, to cover clerical and typesetting work

In my experience, the author typesets themselves anyway - the journal doesn’t do this. And the clerical work is done by community volunteers - the journal doesn’t do that either.

In my experience with open access journals, if I am expected to typeset, I need to pay around 300$ for publication. If the journal does their typesetting, I pay on the order of thousands. Steep, but not unreasonable. And waivers exist.

Don't you just use a LaTeX template? I'm not really sure what typesetting there is to do beyond that?

Whenever I publish a paper, I just send them a finished PDF. There's nothing more done with it than that I believe.

LaTeX on its own does not magically solve all layout issues, especially if the exact placement of figures is pedagogically important or if the math equations are complicated. Usually you would end with 20ish compilation warnings (not errors) on a first draft. I think it is fine for a scientist to not bother with those, but I also think it is important for them to be fixed by someone in the final product. You can argue that I am snobish about typesetting, but that is different from saying that good typesetting does not involve an effort.

Also, I have never sent a PDF for publication. I always send source files. I do not know of journals that would accept a PDF (except for early peer review).

In your opinion what would constitute a small fee? $10? $100? $3000?

https://www.frontiersin.org/about/publishing-fees

In a sibling comment I mentioned. If they do professional typsetting, around 3000 is not crazy. If I do the typesetting, then ≤500 is what I would expect.

Roughly how long does it take to typeset a 5 page manuscript?

If you go for high quality and work on the figures is performed, my (unreliable) guess is half a day for a professional designer. It takes me much more, because my latex skills are limited and because I insist on using the most standard and reproducible tools/packages in latex.

Haha, can I get a few thousand dollars for typesetting my paper? That's absurd. Sure you can spend a month setting it in your printing press or illustrator or whatever, but just using the journal's template along with LaTeX is perfectly good nowadays, and the hardest part is getting to it to compile.

Just using the journal template and looking only for compilation errors does not produce particularly good results. If I am preparing something for a journal like Quantum, where I am in charge of typesetting my work, it would take me a day or so to ensure figures are well placed and margins are not weird (in other words, not simply make it compile, but make it compile without warnings (not errors)). Most scientists do not care about the warnings latex emits as long as it compiles, and the results are ugly papers. I find it reasonable to pay $1000 to someone to take care of that processing (if they do a good job at it, which APS's and Nature's journals do).

That small fee is usually ard 2000$.

Because a high Impact Index value is required to obtain grants later.

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

Therefore is a captive customer case. And captive here has the same meaning as slave. If you don't work for free for some journals, basically you can't have a scientist career. In higher levels articles are not enough and you need to consider seriously to write a book for Elsevier or somebody else.

And this cut both ways. Acta Vertebrata, the journal of the Doñana's Biological Station since 1974, have to be closed in 1997 after decades trying unsuccessfully to achieve a higher impact index as journal. Low impact index means that you obtain less and less of the researchers effort and that interesting articles fly away your radar. Researchers deciding to publish in Acta Vertebrata had a competitive disadvantage. It was a terrific journal, the problem is that they did science in the latinosphere, period. Nowadays science means do politics or go home

This is so sad. You'd think that IF would be calculated by how much value the paper created, but instead it seems like a popularity contest. Maybe made sense in 1975 when it was started, given the low volume and high friction of distribution at the time, but in the age of the internet, it makes no sense.

Probably because they have to in order to get a job or even graduate.

It's probably like Facebook or LinkedIn. Where else do you go that has the same audience? It's a lot eaiser just to stay.

Not all journals (and venues) are equal, just like how not all canyons are the Grand Canyon.

When planning your holiday, the canyon matters. When submitting your paper, the venue matters - is it the right audience, and does it maximalise the impact?

Article in Science / Nature is vastly more impressive than in most regional journals - which affects your career options.

Sadly, there's no credible alternative to peer review, and nobody has come up with a good system to do that free. Preprint repositories are a start, but you then go on to publish so you can get citations etc. Alternatives are being built (https://science-octopus.org/) but nothing with credibility and scale yet

Given that the actual reviewers of scientific works aren't paid, I'd say that the publishers like Springer and Elsevier came up with a pretty good system (first and foremost good for themselves, though) to do just that. ;)

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