Comment by discardable_dan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by discardable_dan | Hacker News Reader

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discardable_dan

A few things:

- AirBnB serves a significantly-larger infrastructure than a website hosting up PDFs. Github with Jekyll can do it.

- Software development is really at a minimum for journals. Hosting can be a static blog, and review infrastructure could literally be replaced with e-mailing PDFs / text files back and forth, and often devolves to that anyway.

- The editor of the JFP uses their university and external grant budgets to cover most, if not all, of their operating time and expenses.

- Legal is likely the largest cost (ensuring the journal has sole publication rights, and contracts to that effect), but open access can also simplify this.

- Without customers (e.g., open access), there is no need for customer support. HR and program management is a very small minimum, as well.

- Nobody involved in the actual journal work (editing, reviewing, etc.) is paid.

The cost of $1075 is, frankly, kind of absurd. What does it cost to host a PDF online forever? Volume 31 of the JFP published ~25 research articles, which would be ~$25k. When Github has the infrastructure to entirely eat the hosting cost, what justifies this much money?

So I think your assumption that academic publishing is "a website hosting up PDFs" is the source of confusion for "what justifies this much money." Just like AirBnB isn't just a website hosting JPEGs, while being worth 129 billion dollars. Hosting PDFs can already be done by arXiv or Google Drive or Github as you said.

Customer support is for peer reviewers who can't log into their account, for managing issues dealing with misconduct, for handling issues with payments, for post-publishing corrections and errata, for passing accounts from editors who become non-responsive to other editors, etc. Not just dealing with readers or subscribers.

As someone who has been on both sides of journal peer review, let me assure you that there is no "customer support" framework like what you are describing. The model simply doesn't work that way. The primary editor of the JFP, in particular, plays an active role and individually manages feedback and reviewer corralling. They are not paid for that service. When submitting to the JFP, my feedback was hand-delivered by the editor via email.

Sure, as someone who has also been on both sides, that's not what I was describing at all though. None of the examples I gave are handled by an editor, except maybe "managing issues dealing with misconduct" depending on the situation, but maybe by the publisher's legal team. But the other issues are not handled by an editor in my experience.

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