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Comment by krastanov | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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$.

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