AAS Journals Will Switch to Open Access | Hacker News Reader

AAS Journals Will Switch to Open Access

aas.org

215 pointssohkamyung43 comments

As a matter of fact, I have been studying the economics of open access publishing. It's important to distinguish the price of open access publishing from the cost of open access publishing. Commercial publishers are hopeless because they are of course trying to make the most profit they can by obfuscating costs, practicing price discrimination, and shifting licensing fees through transitional models. ACM, IEEE, and others use their revenue from publishing to fund various other activities (like lobbying or outreach). There is a very interesting recent article about the _cost_ of publishing here: https://f1000research.com/articles/10-20/v2

Arxiv is useful for making stuff available, but peer review and professional publishing are still necessary for academics to advance and enhance their reputation. The peer review process is what typically establishes the quality of scientific work.

One thing that software people often overlook is the cost and value of human copy editing. Scholarly work often benefits from having a skilled editor correct grammar and formatting. Metadata and citations are incredibly important, and are usually mangled badly by lazy authors. If a journal accepts Microsoft Word (which is very common outside math and CS), then it has to be typeset to produce consistent PDF. All of this human effort costs money; perhaps a few hundred dollars per article.

I applaud this change!

In practice, however, I don't think much will change. In astronomy, and my subfield in particular, all papers are free on arXiv, and the publishing and referee process are almost more of an afterthought: the threat that you better produce a high-quality paper to get it officially published and usable in a job application.

But for research, arXiv is king. (There are even reports of some people no longer bothering submitting to a journal once they got tenure...)

If you can't pay the publication charges (usually paid by your grant), then there are other reputable journals in astronomy like MNRAS and Physical Review D. Physical review even let's you submit by importing from arXiv.

in biology we have bioRxiv, but there's still a lot of hesitancy to submit to it, especially by PIs.

Covid certainly helped push the field in that direction, and eLife is going to only publish articles from preprints going forward: https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/e5f8f1f7/what-we-have...

what is the cost structure for a typical journal?

if reviewers work free, where does the bulk of the money go?

there is so much publicly-funded research bottled up in journals like science. how do we break this model so that taxpayer-funded research is more like wikipedia and available to all?

The estimated cost structure is 1% webserver operation, 1% indian editing team worsening submitted papers, 1% printing stuff that still is delivered on paper, 2% office staff, 25% advertising, 30% legal cost to harass and prosecute students, researchers and universities, 20% executive compensation, 20% dividends.

It's worth noting that the AAS is a nonprofit scientific society, and so has different incentives than a for-profit publisher like Springer. You can take a look at the AAS tax returns here: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/210...

In 2019 the Journals division reported $7.3M revenue against $5.6M expenses. Direct-paid salaries appear to be a minority of expenses; the AAS journals are hosted by IOP publishing (https://iopscience.iop.org/), so presumably IOP charges for its journal hosting platform are a significant proportion of the remaining expenses.

Why should hosting papers cost so much?

Unless their fee involves paying for a granite-imprint of the paper to preserve it for centuries, the marginal cost should be near-zero.

Well these are scientific articles and as such must be preserved, the cost of which must be paid for sooner rather than later. So it's not just the 'wire cost' of sending PDFs around, but the archival work too that needs to be paid for.

I also think that journals are too expensive, but that's why I only publish in society journals.

> Well these are scientific articles and as such must be preserved

What guarantees about preservation do journals give, though? (Hence my remark about papers being carved into rock)

I encountered this issue recently. I wanted to read an old paper of pretty narrow interest, published in a long-defunct journal. In its day, within the relevant small community, it was considered a quality paper by a respected author; it was not some obscure paper that no one ever read.

It isn't officially available anywhere today. There's no invisible hand to save those old publications from being lost to time. Happily, with the help of strangers online, I was eventually (after many months) able to get my hands on an electronic copy. The formal system of publishers was of absolutely no use, and the fear of copyright trouble is likely the reason the paper isn't easily available from some online archive.

Doubtless there's no profit in preserving such papers formally.

The marginal cost of an addition paper is nil. The cost is in developing and maintaining the bespoke CRUD app that supports it. Could it be done more cheaply? Almost certainly! But it's a small and opaque market--not a lot of startups competing for the business, I'll bet.

For a second I thought this said "AAAS" but no, I guess Science is not going Open Access.

I was so excited to see Science going Open Access as well... but one publisher is still a step in the right direction.

Publication charges for authors and students will probably rise for a factor of 2 or more... open access journals in technical fields are approaching $500 per page.

This will basically lock out people in the developing world from publishing in these journals.

> JOSS (Journal of Open Source Software) has managed to get articles indexed by Google Scholar [rescience_gscholar]. They publish their costs [joss_costs]: $275 Crossref membership, DOIs: $1/paper:

>> Assuming a publication rate of 200 papers per year this works out at ~$4.75 per paper

> [joss_costs]: https://joss.theoj.org/about#costs

^^ from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24517711 & this log of my non- markdown non- W3C Web Annotation threaded comments with URIs: https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-24517711

A low cost of $1/page just shows how much of a scam even prestigious journals have become for all involved parties.

Referees work for free. Submitting authors pay through the nose for presumably typesetting and proofs whose true cost is closer to $1/page rather than hundreds. Editors are overworked.

Sci-Hub was supposed to disrupt that industry, but it seems all it's done is shift burden to authors and created pay-for publishing.

Moderation costs money, too.

Additional ScholarlaryArticle "Journal" costs: moderation, BinderHub / JupyterLite white label SaaS?, hosting data and archived reproducible container images on IPFS and academictorrents and Git LFS, hosting {SQL, SPARQL, GraphQL,} queries and/or a SOLID HTTPS REST API and/or RSS feeds with dynamic content but static feed item URIs and/or ActivityStreams and/or https://schema.org/Action & InteractAction & https://schema.org/ReviewAction & ClaimReview fact check reviews, W3C Web Notifications, CRM + emailing list, keeping a legit cohort of impactful peer reviewers,

#LinkedData for #LinkedResearch: Dokieli, parsing https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle citation styles,

> keeping a legit cohort of impactful peer reviewers, [who are time-constrained and unpaid, as well]

"Ask HN: How are online communities established?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24443965 re: building community, MCOS Marginal Cost of Service, CLV Customer Lifetime Value, etc

From https://joss.theoj.org/about#costs :

> Income: JOSS has an experimental collaboration with AAS publishing where authors submitting to one of the AAS journals can also publish a companion software paper in JOSS, thereby receiving a review of their software. For this service, JOSS receives a small donation from AAS publishing. In 2019, JOSS received $200 as a result of this collaboration.

Does anyone here have thoughts on JOSS? I've reviewed for them once, had the impression the editors take their job seriously, and think I'll review again in the future. The review approach that the journal facilitates has a strong focus on engineering aspects, i.e. it addresses a weakness of other venues, where it often does not matter how messy, unstable, and poorly documented the code is (or even if it compiles). On the other hand, the JOSS reviewers are typically not experts on the problem that the software is solving.

I'm currently reviewing for JOSS, and have done so before. In many ways they're a very strange journal: the paper is nearly an afterthought, and the review is focused on the code. But I like them. As you say, the editors take their role seriously. And it seems to have two valuable contributions.

Firstly, encouraging and structuring code review in academia. My own code is almost entirely solo (and messy), so a venue for structured review and an incentive to robustify public code is good. Secondly, the culture in some disciplines is that code is not citable, only papers - and JOSS is an end-run around this. I hope this second situation is changing, but we're not there yet so JOSS has a valuable role for the moment in simply being a 'journal' assigning DOIs basically for code packages.

[Scholarly] Code review tools; criteria and implementations?

Does JOSS specify e.g. ReviewBoard, GitHub Pull Request reviews, or Gerrit for code reviews?

The reviews for JOSS happen on github[0] but the journal's not prescriptive about how you develop your package as long as the code is public. The criteria for the JOSS review are very clear[1].

I don't want to oversell the depth of the code review possible; not all of the reviewers will be fully expert in whatever tiny cutting-edge area the package is for (making correctness checks difficult beyond the test suite), and most of us are academics-who-code rather than research software engineers. But the fact it's happening at all is a great step forward.

[0]: https://github.com/openjournals/joss-reviews/issues [1]: https://joss.readthedocs.io/en/latest/review_criteria.html

Thanks for the citations. Looks like Wikipedia has "software review" and "software peer review":

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

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

I'd add "Antipatterns" > "Software" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern#Software_design

and "Code smells" > "Common code smells" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_smell#Common_code_smells

and "Design smells" for advanced reviewers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_smell

and the CWE "Common Weakness Enumeration" numbers and thus URLs for Issues from the CWE Top 25 and beyond: https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/

FWIW, many or most scientists are not even trying to be software engineers: they just write slow code without reusing already-tested components and expect someone else to review Pull Requests after their PDF is considered impactful. They know enough coding to push the bar for their domain a bit higher each time.

Are there points for at least in-writing planing for the complete lifecycle and governance of an ongoing thesis defense of open source software for science; after we publish, what becomes of this code?

That is a new round of FUD from the predatory publishing industry.

On balance, open access helps the developing world far more and costs less: Because access to journal and conference articles is now possible. Before open access, article fees around $50 for reading a single article meant, that to write an article you had to spend the $500 on the roughly 10 (usually more) related articles you needed to research and reference. To even get to the stage of writing an article, you need to read quite a few, impossible with the sky-high subscription fees that even rich western institutions balk at. And as everywhere, university libraries reimburse publishing fees out of the subscription cost they saved.

Open Access is cheaper, fairer and especially beneficial to education in the developing world.

Of course reading articles costs nothing on SciHub, but I guess the people you are working for don't want that to be known, eh?

No, Sci-hub and the arxiv was always an option for people in developing countries.

All that's changed for researchers now is they have to fork over a factor or two or more to publish in the same journals as a few years ago.

Well, they were always an option, but becoming less so. Increasingly financial aid from the west and trade agreements are bound to "IP protection", meaning the protection of the scientific publishing racket at the expense of scientists and SciHub (among other things).

Pretending that things are fine now is dishonest imho. Business practices of the IP industry aren't suddenly a-ok just because you can pirate your way around it and pretend that therefore they aren't harming anyone.

Presumably university libraries are also forking over much less, since the increased publication fees are replacing drop in subscription fees?

So part of it is the university just needs to figure out how to appropriately reallocate it's resources?

I wonder how often the university employers of article authors pay these publication fees, and if those budgets are going up? (If university library subscription fees are not going down, then that's another sort of mystery to look into).

Page fees are usually paid out of the grant. Some science journals have, in the past, waived page charges for people not supported by grants or institutions, or who just couldn’t pay, sometimes at the cost of slower processing of the article.

I would like to meet one of those journals. Every journal I've published with has been a 'pay first, then we publish' model.

“APCs are waived for authors from developing countries that APS offers free online access to under the SRKS Program.”: https://journals.aps.org/pra/authors#pubcharges

“submission in some electronic formats qualifies for a publication charge discount (Physical Review Letters) or waiver (Physical Review A, B, C, D, E, Applied, Fluids). Acceptable formats for the discount or waiver are currently REVTeX (preferred), LaTeX, Harvmac, or MSWord”: https://journals.aps.org/pre/authors/submission-faq#discount

> That is a new round of FUD from the predatory publishing industry

How do you define exactly "predatory publishing" ? Every journal that is not one of the major monopolistic journal that profits from the work and money of others ?

I call "predatory" the commercial publishing businesses that profit off the need of researchers to publish and their free work, off the free work of reviewers and conference organizers while seeking extortionist subscription prices from the same institutions that employ the aforementioned scientists.

To name and shame: Elsevier, Springer, deGruyter, Wiley, Nature and lots of other smaller ones.

> Publication charges for authors and students will probably rise for a factor of 2 or more... open access journals in technical fields are approaching $500 per page.

There's a charge comparison table[0]. Prices are going up, but they'll be lower than the previous AAS Journals Open Access premium. Their sample paper prices are $60-225 per page (because AAS journals have "quanta" charges, where a quanta is a set number of words, a figure, etc.).

https://journals.aas.org/oa/#charge_comparison

Thank you for this comment! At least they acknowledge this and offer waivers.

I disagree. Most open access journals offer lower, and sometimes free pricing, for researchers from developing countries. For example PloS One (one of the main open access journals) offer free publishing to ~100 countries <https://plos.org/publish/fees/group-1-countries/>)

This does not affect the open access business model: Only a small fraction of papers is submitted by researchers in developing countries.

PloS One is not really open access... The vast majority of journals function under a Subscription/Paid open-access model, PloS One just mandates the second option.

I've forked out >$4k for a high-quality journal to make my research open-access. Or I could have paid $0 and it would be behind a paywall.

Some like Nature, publish largely open-access but it can cost >$8k to be published there.

That's great news and a step in the right direction for research!

This is great !

I hope the ACM got the memo, cause i would really like to see them follow suit...

They don't discuss how they'll be balancing the books without subscription charges? That's the interesting part!

Generally open-access charges the author. $1000-$2000 an article is typical. Research grant applications include modest conference and publication costs.

Historically about 2/3rds of AAS journals revenue came from page charges rather than subscriptions, so the shortfall is not enormous.

When can we expect the same from ACS (American Chemical Society)?

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