Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article | Hacker News Reader

Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article

nature.com

341 pointsgaloisscobi205 comments

The easy response is to dunk on Nature for rent-seeking. (And it most definitely IS just that). However, the best target for ire is not necessarily the journals (even if they charge a lot and provide nothing more than unpaid editors whose value-add is dubious).

The proper target of anger is those who allocate grant money and use the number of publications in a few top-tier journals as the primary credential. Not only does this exclude early-career researchers implicitly (hard to have 50 publications before age 30), but it then forces the payments to a cartel of elite journals.

It ends when grant-writing allows for ANY other assessment of worthiness.

This +10 (if I could). Also target (for anger) those who rank universities by how many "top tier" journal articles their professors have published.

Could it be simply a way for nature of saying 'no, for real, we don't do open access, even if in theory we do'? Basically they don't expect anyone to actually pay for this?

https://blog.joss.theoj.org/2019/06/cost-models-for-running-...

"The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) is a free, open-access online journal, with no article processing charge (APC). We are committed to operating as a free service to our community, and we do so thanks to the volunteer labor of editors and reviewers, and by taking advantage of existing infrastructure. In this post, we examine the true costs of running a journal such as JOSS, and make the case that even when considering all services we don’t currently pay for, the true cost per paper would not exceed $100. Current APCs at many “gold” open-access journals exceed that by one or more orders of magnitude, (see, for example, PNAS, Nature, IEEE, etc.)"

Go JOSS!

Yes, the cost is excruciating and beyond excessive.

Given that every submission can be preceded by multiple bioRxiv versions and followed by a definitive PubMed Central version that was reviewed (perhaps embargoed for 6-12 months), who actually pays these charges?

I suspect this is a theoretical charge in most cases. The exception might be for those who are compelled to provide immediate unfettered access to their work.

I have seen publisher making open access mandatory, with an outrageous fee attached to it.

Also,iirc the pubmed central thing only apply to works with certain funds (i.e. NIH), many articles do not get to there.

Some grants require open access, which unfortunately often translates to tax money being transferred to big publishers.

Without it, tax money still transfers to publishers, only via a less direct route. It funds the research that produces content, without which the publishers would have nothing of value to sell. I really don't like the high APC practice, but if tax money is going to the publishers anyway then I have a little bit of tolerance for slightly more going there to add significant value with open access.

PNAS, in case anyone is not aware, is the journal where members of the Academy of Sciences publish research they can't publish anywhere else for various reasons.

It's a dumping ground for PIs desperate to get something published.

PNAS has two tracks. One is extremely selective, with thorough review. The other, which is marked with “communicated by” in the byline on the papers, is as you describe: NAS members can send in more or less anything they want.

Proceedings Not Accepted by Science

But it does require a "hook up" which tends to screen out the low IF 3 quality stuff

I published a paper in JOSS and it was by far the most pleasant and transparent journal submission and review process I’ve ever gone through. It felt like the future of academic publishing that I wish we could have distributed more widely today.

In Machine Learning the top journal JMLR is also completely free and open access. Nature tried to introduce a machine learning journal but it is being boycotted by many researchers.

Someone on HN should compile a big list of top free-open journals for various fields.

But not all! In fact lots of people, to my surprise, are publishing in Nature: Machine Intelligence

Because they can brag annd say "I published in Nature". I've seen that so often, same thing with the various "Science something" journals that get transformed as "In my Science article..."

The best is the borderline-predatory journal called "Journal of Nature and Science".

"My track record includes numerous publications in Nature and Science."

That is amazing.

The costs are exaggerated. For example, it is not possible to replicably develop that software infrastructure for $50k. It is possible as a one-off if you're an engineer working on your own project, but for example, a biology journal couldn't drop $50k on that infrastructure. A lot of these things rely on individual heroics. I appreciate heroics, but they don't scale to an industry.

I'm glad for the good work they're doing.

Publication and diffusion software can be Free there are a lot of options. Often university libraries even provide them with support for you.

They're free only if sysadmin time is free. It's the same rabbit hole. In practice, maintaining, supporting, and running a server, especially with archival-grade backups and retention -- is gonna require more than $50k (let alone $5k) of human time each year. You can't pretend there is no cost or that the cost is an order-of-magnitude lower than it is. At that point, you end up with solutions which can't work.

Many people would gladly donate a megabuck a year if a significant portion of science went open as a result. People won't do that if you pretend the annual costs are $5k. Likewise, university libraries fielding that cost is a good solution -- and far cheaper than journals -- but it won't work if you pretend the cost figure is lower than it is.

I said Free as in Free software. Of course there is a cost. But this is nothing compared to the tens of millions of dollars a state university has to pay each publisher each year.

Not sure what other people do, but I always publish at a journal then put my manuscript on arxiv, or whatever field equivalent, and then on my personal website.

Then I submit it to scihub.

Best we can do these days

First -- Thanks! But second, how do you have the right to that ? Doesn't the institution you work for or the paper's co-authors restrict distribution so to maximize the royalties and recoup research costs ?

Authors and institutions don't get any royalties at all - only the journal profits.

Research institutions don’t get royalties from papers. If they license or commercialize discoveries, they will get royalties. Papers are not a source of income for them and are typically a cost center as they pay for subscriptions to the journals full of papers written by scientists they employ.

To add to the other replies, most journals allow you to post a preprint to arxiv or your personal site as long as you don’t use their final layout, typesetting, and branding

How do you submit your papers to scihub?

Submit manuscripts as e-mail attachment to the Editorial Office at ajmds@scihub.org, A manuscript number will be mailed to the corresponding author same day or within 72 hours

I’ll never forget getting my first paper accepted to a conference, only to learn that presenting will cost a mere $600.

Work paid for it but still - what an absolute racket academia is.

Conferences cost money. You have to rent an appropriate venue, people tend to expect refreshments, etc. Why would it be free just because you are presenting there? So are most of the attendees.

Two things.

The person walks away after this $600 poorer. We've found ways to do things of arguably far less social value then say, a new medical discovery, such as stand up comedy or say a club dj without them having to fork over $600 to do what they're being advertised for.

In fact, they actually get paid.

Second, the enterprise for expanding human knowledge shouldn't come with a door fee, full stop. If we want to progress the sciences we should find out how to collectively pay for it without charging amounts to all involved that they cannot afford.

If we want, say, 1,000 Einsteins as Jeff Bezos believe we should be aiming for, we should try funding the process and not sticker shock it at every step.

Stagnation is always a structural problem. This is so fixable if we actually exercise the will to do it

It’s not a good analogy. Gigs and stand-up comedy have big audiences. Academic conferences don’t. Hiring a venue, paying for dinner, these things have cost. $600 isn’t unreasonable. By contrast $12,000 to publish a PDF on a website is criminal.

> Academic conferences don’t.

Untrue, as shown by there being a conference in the first place.

Not only but there's plenty of 20 seat comedy nights and tiny drive bars where the performers gets paid.

This isn't a necessary artifact of a structural reality. It's a political choice that we can exercise the freedom to change.

Some conferences are big. Many are 20 people.

Whenever I speak at a tech event, my attendance cost is free. (I'm still on the hook for flight and hotel, usually.)

Those events usually aren't the ones where most of the attendees are presenting, though sometimes things like Bar Camps can get the venue etc. sponsored. Finding sponsors to foot the bill can be harder for conferences for academics who aren't interested in leaving their tenure-track position to configure Kubernetes at a hot new Uber for Guinea Pigs startup.

Still, church picnics, potluck dinners, and wedding parties usually don't cost US$600 a person. Do we really need the Anaheim Convention Center or the Four Seasons Hotel to hang out and chat about capability-secure hardware architecture or isopiestic measurements of deliquescence points? Or could we maybe pitch some circus tents in a field somewhere and rent some folding chairs and tables? Instead of whiteboards we can use 4'x8' melamine sheets.

I like your style. We should start StateFairCon someday

Ooh, that's an excellent point! State fairs never cost US$600 per person, even when you include all the funnel cakes and donut-bun hamburger sandwiches bought from the concessionnaires. Typical admission prices in the US are maybe US$20 per day? But they have plenty of space, lots of conference rooms, bathroom facilities, handicapped accessibility, folding chairs, and so on. I bet you could hold an academic conference at a state fair fairgrounds for under US$100 a person. But I've never heard of a sci-fi con doing this, so maybe there's a fatal flaw in this idea I'm not seeing.

Academic conferences are usually "comfortable" environments with plenty of air conditioning. It might undermine the prestige a bit if we did that.

Or maybe it'd have a different charm than the norm.

It might be worth it if people could present their research without having to fork over US$600 or US$6000 to register for the conference. Air quality is worth a lot, though. I recall falling asleep from too many people crowded into a room at the physics department when they announced they'd discovered the top quark. Fairgrounds in lots of places do have air conditioning.

We held CodeCon in a nightclub --- during the day, when it would normally just be closed. This caused problems for aaronsw, because legally they couldn't let him in, and he didn't want to accept special treatment unavailable to other people his age, so he just didn't attend. Len got pretty mad at me when I took Aaron's side.

Sure, but $600 felt like a massive over expenditure to me.

And there was no conference - this was in 2020, so the entire thing was virtual. No refreshments either. Also, every staff member I met was a “volunteer”.

Also, they are fundraising mechanisms for the professional societies that put them on. The pandemic killing conference attendance no doubt put a lot of them in a budget crunch.

doesn't it cost to go to the conference?

I would expect the people who are listening to the presentation to be the ones paying, not the one giving the presentation.

Usually, most listeners are presenters too.

It costs a separate $45 to attend as well. If you present, they don’t combine these fees.

Governments and sponsoring companies should pay for it. The rest of us a presenters and private inviduals should get it free. Knowledge should be free flow not at every steps being VAT-ed.

I understood that the $600 is not the attendance fee but am additional charge for the privilege of presenting. The only reason they can get away with that is that people may need to have such things on their CV.

Conferences are social gathering events. They are better attended if there are organized in better and more accessible places. Taking care of everything at conference, and do it at some better location has a cost.

Some conferences are institutions, have a formal organization that stands behind them and it is well organized so has some of these costs figured out and planned well in advance. Many are not. Many conferences are organized by different institutions each year, and are organized in turns by the hosting institution at locally available venues.

Imagine a small conference organized by a small department and it's total budget: - 100 presenters * $500 registration + 100 attendees * $100 registration = $60000

You need a venue. Many departments do not have resources to organize conferences in a presentable manner (lack of space, lack of rooms/halls). So you need a venue. Plus if the conference is in a nice venue, for a cheaper price - it will certainly be attended more.

Let's say that you were lucky and that some hotel accepted to be exclusive venue and they offered all of their equipment and halls, if at least 50 participants decided to book a room for the duration of the entire conference and there were 50 such participants. That way, you don't have to rent the hotel's halls and their projectors/laptops/screens/microphones.

You will still need to pay for this:

- costs to get respectable keynote lecturers and pay for their travel fees, room, meals, etc.

- organizing teams costs (even if they volunteer their time, they still have traveling expenses to visit the venue at least several times and organize local issues)

- hosting for a dedicated web-site for many years to come + web designer to support it 24/7 during the call for papers and during the conference

- print/publish the proceedings + editor

- venue for either the opening or the closing ceremony or some joint excursion or museum visit or all of these if you want to leave an impressiong that you are a host that wants to pamper their guests (if you don't pay for at least some of these, most people will not come next year, as the point of the event is to be a socializing trigger, and socialization always happens in the margins of the conference, at these social events, so the whole point of the conference will be lost if you don't take care for at least several such events)

- at least 2/3 photographers to cover social events and parallel sessions

- finger food / coffee / drinks / even water during breaks, maybe lunch for all participants

- banners, badges, posters, ...

I have organized an international conference and I can say that this is just the surface. If you organize an IT conference, you need to take into account that each participant will have at least 2 online devices, maybe more. So you will need wifi access points and routers capable of peaks in new wifi associations ranging from 200-300 per minute, or more. You will need a lot of electricity cables and plugs, power convereters etc. Most hotels doing small gatherings for 100-200 persons, are in fact organized to accomodate weddings and not IT professionals and their net streaming needs.

Do you own total, depending on wherever you are. In some countries this will cost much more than the budget, in some less so their might be something left to pay the organizers and even volunteers for their effort. Not much, but at least something so they do not avoid you when you decide to organize another conference in two years.

I’ve worked on a couple NSF grants and I believe this cost could be covered by the grant. Whether the granting institution is okay with this I don’t know but if I had to guess they probably see an $11K spend to distribute the results of the research in a (the?) prestigious journal as reasonable.

To me $11K seems pretty steep. But I might go for $5K to put Nature’s stamp on my work and have it open access.

If the deciding factor for publication becomes money rather than quality, I wonder how long Nature's prestige will endure?

Agree. Academics are now going to write an extra $11k into their grants (=$15k if you count uni indirect costs), with the justification "I plan to produce Nature quality results". If your article doesn't get accepted by Nature, all the better there's now an extra $9k in your budget to play with. Let's just keep in mind, these grants are funded by taxpayers.

I always build one open access publication into my grant budgets - but $11K is way above what's normal.

This short video explains the system very well. https://twitter.com/DGlaucomflecken/status/14846797598292090...

The article says "Our aim is to ensure that lack of funds is never a barrier to publishing with us." As in they will provide funding if someone can't afford it.

Isn't this a really good thing? What is the average budget for an research project that ends up with an article published in this journal?

Clinical trials are in the millions, and research grants are often 6 figures.

I know people see this as rent seeking, but journals DO provide a service which costs money. The issue is before they prevented freedom of information. With this model, they are not.

Some smaller labs at my tier 1 research institution have their grad students TA (so the university pays their salary) because they don't have the ability to pay them the $30k salary. $11k for one paper is a meaningful amount of money, and other journals can publish for an order of magnitude less.

It doesn't cost $11k to read a paper, send a few emails and do some typesetting. People pay for this kind of thing because having a Nature paper on your resume makes it much easier to get a tenure-track job. It's just a prestige racket.

I get that but also consider that people are free to publish in other journals.

Although it does make me uncomfortable that its a for-profit company, they only print 7-10 articles a month, so I can understand the financials mathematics of needing to make it this amount per article if they want to continue to have a full staff maintain the journal the way they want to run it. I am just grateful these articles are now open to the public for free.

They can publish in other journals but at the expense of their career. Many publications at leading journals is your only real chance of making a career in academia - it matters more than actual impact because they're much easily measurable :)

A prime example of "what can be measured can be managed". Grim news for science.

Yep! My wife is a postdoc at Stanford and has become completely disillusioned by the whole thing, pretty sad to see after so many years of loving it!

By contrast, another Springer journal, Scientific Reports, charges about $2000 per article… and publishes about 23,000 articles per year. So it’s not all down to high fixed costs. It’s rent-seeking.

This. 11K would be a full tenth of the discretionary money I got for my startup package. The paper would be a sweet get, but this is definitely a "Rich labs get papers in Nature journals, get better grants and become richer labs..." problem.

Yep, $11k is a term’s worth of stipend when I was a PhD student.

...and what service is that?

While I normally defend publishing fees fairly actively, $11K is uncalled for.

I'll point you to Fields medalist Tim Gowers, who is kind of a leader in the free academic publishing movement against Elsevier and co. and has launched new journals himself: https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an...

His journals can manage at a whopping $10 per submission, and that's with a SaaS platform in the middle. Throw in a few bucks for arXiv hosting costs too if you will.

So what the hell do these protection racket journals provide at >$10k per submission? And do realize they sell subscriptions to institutions — I highly doubt institutions get better deals when some authors pay for open access — and physical copies on top of that, so it's not like they actually get nothing for these open access articles.

The prestige provides access to jobs/promotions, invitations to talks, and higher scores on grants. The tangible benefits are more than $10k.

Not saying this is right, but nothing will change until scientists stop ranking other scientists by the number of publications in prestigious journals/conferences.

Other than inertia and prisoner’s dilemma, there’s zero reason a cheap journal can’t be equally prestigious. The bloodsucking big academic publishers contribute approximately zero to science for what they charge compared to a Gowers-style journal run by the same editors and reviewers.

> I know people see this as rent seeking, but journals DO provide a service which costs money.

I don't know the specifics of Nature, but the main service provided by journals (peer-review and selection) is usually done by other researchers that are unpaid. Most journals will do little or nothing about typesetting and edition of articles.

What journals do is stand in the middle of a system where researchers need to publish in high quality journals in order to advance their career and also need to access the same journals in order to gain knowledge.

> Clinical trials are in the millions, and research grants are often 6 figures.

Maybe for Nature, but other journals have high open access fees and publish research from groups with lower budgets. You could very well find journals for which the open access fees are in the order of four, five months of salary of the main researcher, just for sending the article to reviewers and hosting the PDF in a website at zero marginal cost.

The pricing is like medical billing. There’s no logic to it. A number is just made up and the insurers (in this case the finding agencies) are willing to foot the bill. Once the insurers (funding agencies) decide they no longer like that number the billers will try a new made up number and the cycle continues.

What in the world? I have a hard time seeing this as anything but a racket, or possibly a legal maneuver to increase standing to sue Sci-Hub or something ("Look, we've offered free access already!")

How much did Nature Neuroscience pay to produce these articles? Do they pay their editors? Their reviewers? The authors?

Do they pay their typesetters?

Do they offer their print journal for free?

Do they have expensive contracts for cloud hosting?

Is the expected lifetime value of any article, let alone every article, anywhere close to $11,390?

Most journals already allow authors to distribute copies by request. This is nuts.

Price has more to do with willingness to pay than with cost. Nature is a prestigious intuition so people are willing to pay to get published there. It also sets a barrier to get a paper reviewed. I hear you that it shouldn't be this way but they are a profit seeking entity so they are behaving like one.

"Most journals already allow authors to distribute copies by request." Does anyone know how this works in practice ? I'd like to ask a few of my favorite researchers for a copy of their papers but I am a hobbyist and don't want to take their time and add to their likely overflowing inbox.

BTW, "this is nuts" isn't a claim you can make if you don't know the answer to questions you posted.

From their website: "an article is submitted and is assessed by our editors. If suitable it will be put through Peer Review". That peer review process could quickly exceed the $11.4k for example.

[edited] added the BTW paragraphs after responses were received to the question in my first paragraph.

For a sample size of one, go ahead and ask them:

https://twitter.com/hwitteman/status/1015049411276300289

how ironic that her blog post on how to access paywalled articles is currently "Access Denied"

https://holly.witteman.ca/index.php/2017/12/11/getting-acces...

The path has changed (link rot) but the article is still searchable and viewable: https://holly.witteman.ca/getting-access-to-paywalled-papers...

I sent her an email about it. I hope she can fix it. :)

Find their email address, write them, and ask. They're more likely than most people realize to respond.

Agree with the others - find the email address and ask. Especially if the lead author is a student / post doc, they are usually very excited to help. Profs often have an overflowing inbox and might be more hit or miss.

As a hobbyist, I just email the author, thank them for their work, maybe ask a question about or comment on their work and ask if they have the specific paper I can't get. Nobody's ever said no and I've asked dozens if times in CS, linguistics and for some climate and geography stuff. Academics are pretty accessible and even willing to chat about their work as long as you're not a crank.

I was super surprised the first time I emailed a researcher and asked them a question about their work while mentioning I didn't have access to their paper. A week later an envelope arrived at my office with the paper in it. This was last millennium.

This works in almost any field. Researchers generally love to hear from people, will usually answer whatever questions you might have about their work, and will happily give you a copy for free

Peer reviewers are all volunteers, the journal only pays the staff that coordinate the reviews- email a bunch of people and ask if they'll do a review (and often that's semi-automated now), and the editor that makes the decision after looking briefly at the feedback from the reviewers. The editors don't actually even do any proofreading or anything like that anymore, they just make executive decisions as to what articles to accept.

This is your experience with nature neuroscience? I doubt it

Hahahahaha. I'm sorry, but that was a pretty incredible claim. The journals sure as hell aren't paying for peer review, or at least nobody I know has gotten paid for it. Peer review is basically a gratis service done by other researchers in the same field.

Just send contact author a request for a reprint. This has been standard operating procedure for hundreds of years—the only new angle, the ubiquitous and annoying PDF format.

As a researcher, someone writing me to say they're interested in my work and would like a copy of my paper will:

1) Result in a PDF attachment with a short note.

2) Probably be the highlight of my day.

Sure, in most cases, you can ask authors for a copy of their paper.

However, that's not a reasonable way to distribute science. Most research requires you to skim through many different articles, so introducing a latency of a few hours/days each time you want to open an article makes the process unreasonable.

See also: Sci-Hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub

Nature pays their editors, unlike most society journals. But they are a for-profit business, and are clearly just looking for more profit.

The expected lifetime value of any article in Nature Neuroscience for the authors is well above $11,390, as that is probably 1% of the typical grant that will produce the article, and getting published in this venue makes it much easier to continue to get grants funded, to get top PhD students and postdocs, and to get promoted.

To be clear, though, the authors are not paying for this out of pocket. The funding agencies (i.e. the national government that supports the authors' research) is paying for it. Because many funding agencies now require authors to publish open-acess, Nature can more or less ask whatever price they want.

Note: Are we sure this is a mandatory charge or just the charge if the authors must publish an immediate open access article. I just published in Nature Metabolism and there was no charge at all. The quality of the review and editing was EXTRAORDINARY! I wanted to thank all of the reviewers for doing a superb job.

Had I required immediate open access then it would have cost!

But with both full versions in bioRxiv and Pubmed Central, I felt access was essentially complete.

Were the reviewers paid?

To me it sounds absurd to have to pay reviewers, when you have nothing guaranteed in return. If the publication would give insurance "we pay back 10'000 USD to the buyer of the paper in case we did a mistake because that's our guarantee of quality", then yes, but here, nothing guarantees you the quality / result, only that they tried to do reasonable efforts to somehow review and exfiltrate some of the most obviouses scams.

I'm just thinking that if Nature didn't pay the reviewers (and I agree it is very unlikely that they did) then the quality of the reviewing probably is not a result of money flowing into Nature, whether from the authors or from the readers.

Reviewers are selected not picked out of a hat....

> ... we pay 10000 in case of a mistake ...

Now please apply the same standard to software.

> reasonable effort

for many hours/days/weeks. Otherwise known as "work". Why is it absurd to pay for work?

As an academic (unrelated to this journal and field), I’ve more or less stopped accepting to review papers because of the low reward… that is, there are virtually no incentives to me as a professor to do this and it takes a lot of time to do proper reviews. I have better things to do with my time.

I attended an ACM webinar some years ago on the topic of open access, and while the OA fees weren’t as high as this one, I asked how they could defend these fees… the answers weren’t entirely satisfactory to me — in general they claimed obviously admin costs, but also that such funds were used to support other well-meaning things ACM deals with such as scholarships/workshops etc for young and female researchers among other things… Personally, while these are good things for ACM to support, I dislike the somewhat arbitrary connection to OA publishing… PS: I’m not sure if this is still their policy.

I think the ACM should support young and female researchers by making all their papers open access, publicly endorsing Sci-hub, and committing to send Sci-hub some money every month. That would have a much bigger impact than scholarships and workshops.

I mean sure, making papers by underrepresented groups open access to increase their reach is actually a nice idea. Not sure what this has to do with sci-hub though, publishers are not going to fund sci-hub in the same way that the RIAA is not going to fund the pirate bay.

I don't mean they should make papers by underrepresented groups open access. I mean they should make the papers researchers need to read open access so that access to those papers isn't conditional on getting into a rich university, thus reducing the barriers to underrepresented groups and everyone else. By "their papers" I meant "the ACM's papers", not "the papers of young and female researchers".

It's extremely unfortunate that the ACM has been degraded into being a "publisher" rather than a learned society, and I agree that as long as they think of themselves that way, they will continue to obstruct progress and reproduce patterns of social and economic inequality in the way they are currently doing.

Cannot agree more.

ACM members can offer their papers open-access legally and for free, helped by the ACM.

ACM has an authorizer service that allows you as an author, to publish special links on your personal website, that will offer all visitors of your personal web-site free downloads of your papers.

Those who are interested in your paper don't need an account, they just need to click on the special links published on your website and the paper will be free to download in PDF.

A lot of the relevant authors are already dead, and many more of them will be in the next ten years, so this is not good enough. It may reduce ACM's conflict with authors but it doesn't particularly help a researcher who's trying to track down a result someone published in CACM 40 years ago.

Whoa! Best advice I ever received: accept everything. Here’s why:

(1) Editors will not send you garbage, but they will try at first

(2) You, in turn, torture yourself to find a path for the worst papers in your field (see “garbage” above) to make it through to publication—as in you do sooner of the work for the authors—anonymously of course, and you package it nicely in your review letter

(3) Editors still think: wow, that’s incredible—still going to reject this paper but this referee has skills

(4) Letter writing time you say? Good news, there’s a stack of editors that think you walk on water

(5) Tenure earned

(6) QED?

Never. I've reviewed for over 30 journals from low to high quality and you don't get a dime. And sometimes get the editor hinting you what they want you to say.

I'm thinking that if Nature didn't pay the reviewers then the quality of the reviewing probably is not a result of money flowing into Nature, whether from the authors or from the readers?

You have some incentives to review. In the US they are a factor to get visas and green cards. They are used for getting tenure in some places. It is also a way to get in the "club" because now the editor that revuews grants nows your name...

I didn't mean to say that no incentives exist. I meant to say that those incentives wouldn't get stronger if authors or readers sent more money to Nature.

This is just for open access, not for publication. I haven't published with Nature since it was owned by Macmillan (rather than Springer Nature, the current owner) and I think the publication fees were ~$1500.

My experience was that the editor and reviewers were more focused on the impact of the work rather than the technical quality. It was all about whether the work was Nature-level status; there were no changes to any of the analysis or the body of the paper, just the intro and conclusions. It felt slimy so I decided to only publish in non-profit society journals from then on.

Is the typical grant for a Nature Neuroscience study really over $1.1 million?

If we assume that most studies that get into Nature Neuroscience are NIH R01s, which have a cap before you need to start fleshing out the budget in exacting detail of $125,000 in direct costs per year, and we assume a 50% overhead rate...

We get $937,500. That's not far off, and center grants, large cooperative agreements, etc. probably give the distribution a decently long tail.

Graduate student in a neuroscience lab at a tier 1 institution in the US here. $1.1 million for a grant is very normal. I cost my advisor over $100k per year in tuition and stipend, not including the costs of any equipment and reagents that I use.

Tier 1 - dedicated channel for funding, right?

Is ground-breaking neuroscience research only performed at tier 1 universities?

> Is ground-breaking neuroscience research only performed at tier 1 universities?

Absolutely not. I'm just sharing my perspective. People don't seem to realize the sheer amount of money that circulates in these institutions. A decent confocal microscope costs $500k, and core facilities aren't cheap either.

There's a lot of funny maths with grants. It's a lot like taking money from one pocket and putting it in another. So a $1M grant is actually a fraction of that when it comes to actual money that a prof gets to use.

To be clear: they pay their own editors, the ones who do the coordination, not the authors (who actually edit the paper) or the reviewers.

11000 is the annual pay of a Phd student in southern europe, it's incredibly high amount. the $5000 that elsevier asks is already enough. prestigious EU grants run for > $1m. National grants may be $100000.

As an EU citizen i hate the fact that even more EU money is siphoned to enrich the NPG. We ve had enough and this must stop. I hope both them and elsevier get outright banned, because clearly open access is another revenue stream for them

> 11000 is the paycheck of a Phd student in southern europe,

A Ph.D. candidate (don't call them students please, they're researchers more than students) in southern Europe does _not_ get 11,000 USD / month. Something between 2,000 and 4,500 AFAICT.

he meant per year...

What, less than 1000 USD per month? But that's a joke. In the Netherlands it's something like... 2800 EUR or 3000 EUR per month, so let's say 3000 - 3300 USD / month. I know the Netherlands PhD candidates have it relatively well (in relative, not absolute, terms), but I find it hard to believe people are expected to live off of 900 EUR / month. Is it really that bad these days?

Not a joke. Stipends for US PhD students tend to be low, unless you're in a STEM or business school.

Is that without social contribution?

Minimum wage in greece is 730 usd. Many if not most phds earn less than $1000, if they are lucky to have stable funding. Hence brain drain

What I quoted is the gross salary according to the national collective employment agreement. A more recent version than the one I worked under is here:

https://www.europeanpolarboard.org/fileadmin/user_upload/cao...

but more specifically, see page 3 here:

https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/sites/default/files/en_2...

PhD candidates are on the type-10 salary scale, and the current scale by years of experience is here:

https://www.staff.universiteitleiden.nl/binaries/content/ass...

Naturally you pay a bit of income tax and health insurance, but on the other than you may be eligible to reduced-rent accommodation, and there's an extra month's pay once a year, and retirement benefits allowance, and some remuneration for Internet access costs etc. etc.

I have been a PhD student in Spain for quite some time and my salary started with less than 1000€/month and ended at around 1500€. Of course cost of living is much lower too.

Sounds about right as an annual figure. My annual stipend in London was ~£16,000 and the cost of living there is commensurately higher than in southern Europe.

He means per year. Your estimates are generous. For my graduate studies I was paid 8000 a year.

As an aside, apparently there is a technical difference between “candidate” and “student”. A PhD candidate is one who has passed the qualifying exam, which occurs 2-3 years into the process. This usually coincides with the point at which all required coursework is complete, so “student” is probably a suitable label during that initial period.

This is not how it works in most parts of Europe.

> The expected lifetime value of any article in Nature Neuroscience for the authors is well above $11,390

This. Authors are the customers of the journals; the service they are buying is a push towards tenure and more funding. This has been true for a long time; open access only makes it more explicit.

When readers are the ones paying, you can argue that they are paying the journal so that it makes sure that they are reading serious, properly reviewed articles.

When authors are the ones paying, how do incentives align?

I think journals are now in a situation similar to the one of rating agencies and accounting firms. I don't think it will work out very well.

> I think journals are now in a situation similar to the one of rating agencies and accounting firms. I don't think it will work out very well.

Students aren’t paying for college, the government is.

The researchers aren’t paying Nature, the government is.

This is absolutely true in many cases. If I had myself to pay £2000 for journal submission, no way. But it comes out of research funds. And that in turn comes from whoever funds the University – government, or student fees.

Universities often limit what you can spend on OA, and even if there isn’t a hard limit, that money comes at the expense of other research items like student salaries and equipment. Funding agencies don’t write a blank check for publication costs.

Not sure why you are downvoted, most colleges, at least in US, have more money coming from research, industrial partners and clinics than tuition.

> I think journals are now in a situation similar to the one of app stores [only without the costs, and with all the benefits].

This is not true most grants do not allow for OA money or you have to take it from other lines (salaries, equipment...) and deal with that internally. But in the end it is taken from your research fund, the university is also taking a portion of the grants as indirect costs and a part of those pay for the yearly increasing secret library contracts (they are confidential you can't even get them with a FOIA). So in the end paying OA to large publishers, you are paying them twice.

I've never had anyone at NSF question OA fees in grant proposals. This might vary program by program.

I am not sure there is any requirement that your price be based on the cost of your bill of materials. Would shut down a lot of companies that are like "$30,000 per year for SSO". It probably costs them less to let you log in with Google than it does to store your password hashes, and yet it's always the "no, you have to pay us more" option.

The thing with these journals is that they have name recognition that makes people want their research to be published in them. Getting published is good for their career. Combine that with a desire to support open access, and you have a product that you can charge for.

It's doubly good, because it's not like authors are using their own personal funds to pay this fee. It just comes out of their grant. Whenever someone buys something with someone else's money, you know you're going to be ripped off. See also, Wifi at businessey hotels.

Anyway, if the taxpayers are paying for this, we should ask authors to just host the papers on their websites. If you need the $5 for a VPS or whatever, I'll give you the $5 personally.

Incidentally, https://sso.tax

In a well-functioning market, the price of goods should eventually shrink to their cost of production. If they do not, that's a monopoly.

Only for undifferentiated goods or commodities. Differentiated products can certainly command a premium to the cost of production. Those aren’t monopolies.

The point is that by publishing in nature, one of the things you're paying for is prestige. Prestige has a very high market value.

Another point is who pays. If the paper is submitted by a huge Consortium that received more than 2 millions for a given research, all the interests are aligned to pay 10K in publishing fees: Nature is very interested in publishing a less-than-perfect work if they pay 10K. The Consortium is very interested in publishing in Nature and Open Access to give the work a maybe undeserved push. And the money comes from other pockets.

I think you mean Nature is capturing some of the rents bestowed upon authors for publishing in Nature.

Honestly, I wish more journals mandated open for a fee—I want my work open, but the choice makes it easy for universities to decline to pay—if mandatory, they would gladly pay 3x to have their researchers publish in top outlets (I’m in administration for a large R1)

1. There is no such thing as a "well-functioning market", that's an ideological construct.

2. In a market of commodities, prices are determined by multiple aspects of the surrounding social power relations.

3. In a market, there tends to be a concentration of capital leading to an oligopoly or monopoly; this is more likely than a shrinking of prices to the cost of production.

"social power relations" are an ideological construct too, that's the idea, that we use ideologies to ideate better explanations, simpler explanations for things. No shit, in other words. Nice try, though.

> Do they pay their editors?

Yes

> Their reviewers?

No, not as far as I’m aware.

> The authors?

No, not as far as I’m aware.

> Do they pay their typesetters?

Yes

> Do they offer their print journal for free?

No, but in most of the world it is pretty cheap.

> Do they have expensive contracts for cloud hosting?

Yes. Well, yes and no. They mostly have a lot of expensive on-premise servers. At least as of 3.5 years ago.

I think partially it’s that they can get away with it, but there’s certainly a lot of work going into this on the Nature side as well (mostly for print publishing). And these articles are never going away. They stay online forever.

I think you hit it on the head. Value is subjective, and they'll charge whatever they can get away with. People will stop paying when it's no longer worth it to them (which will hopefully be soon as other models are embraced)

Who is the target audience here? And who exactly is paying for this?

Researchers who care about open access can and do already upload their work to arxiv and/ or scihub in addition to publishing their work in formal venues.

Maybe people whom want to have their papers referenced more often would pay expecting more exposure? Idk, just guessing.

Politicians who want to require open access journals for govt funded work? Researchers who need “gold plated name” journals for tenure?

Just speculation.

"Politicians who want to require open access journals for govt funded work?"

Not this one. The open access requirements tend to be a year's delay and then it's open access at no cost.

Most of this work is grant-funded, so the publication fees usually also come out of the grants. Primary investigators are not usually paying this out of pocket. It's entirely so that you can have an item in your publication list or CV that says "Nature Neuroscience" on it, in your fight for a tenure-track promotion, or to get the next grant, or to get a grant renewed, etc. Especially in life sciences, peer review is an essential component, and name recognition of the journal is unfortunately valuable- for Nature/Cell/Science due to the high bar they have for novelty, compared to other respectable but not-top-tier journals like PLoS.

Might I suggest a co-op, nonprofit journal publisher run for the benefit of multiple institutions that give access at near overall amortized cost and free access to individuals. Corporate greed in healthcare, utilities, government, and academia are Swords of Damocles waiting to happen.

See: http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/OA_journals_published_by_libr...

Also: https://www.openlibhums.org/site/about/

Let’s stop reviewing for publishers that profit from research! Join the strike! https://josephpcohen.com/w/reviewerstrike/

There needs to be nonprofit co-op publisher(s) for the scalable benefit of many institutions. Pack-up and form equivalent new journals.

I also have an initiative to boycott reviewing for closed-access journals with currently >350 signers. If you agree, consider signing it :) https://nofreeviewnoreview.org/

Indeed, for-profit publishing only works because researchers are willing to do free reviewing work for such publishers.

I wish this would work but it won’t. They’ll just get shittier reviewers who’re willing to do it. ImmigrNt researchers use reviews as evidence of expertise so there’s at least one group of folk who are incentivized to review for anyone.

Yes, there is a career incentive to review, but it's much weaker than the one to publish, and comes later in career, so hopefully more people can afford it.

And yes, there will probably always be people willing to do reviews for free. But if the quality/delay/expertise of reviews from commercial publishers starts to degrade, it encourages authors to look for alternatives.

The issue is as a semi disingenuous researcher (which honestly most are) you actually want reviewers who are not experts because they won’t ask the hard questions and do a thorough review. So if you can get your nat neur submission reviewed by a bunch of desperate postdocs aiming to please then you’re hitting jackpot.

True, but academic journals usually try to maintain some sort of acceptance ratio, and avoid accepting every submitted article. (If they do, they will have the reputation of not being selective, which will harm their rankings and will make people try submitting their work to more selective venues first.)

Of course, for commercial publishers, there is an incentive to publish more -- so there is tension between taking more articles (more revenue in APCs, more volume, easier to attract subscriptions, more perceived impact for extensive properties like h-index) and being more selective (more prestige).

So worse reviews probably doesn't mean more papers accepted but a more random selection of accepted articles.

Assuming that articles have some intrinsic "quality" that most researchers would agree on, and that good reviews are better correlated to this quality than bad reviews, one would expect that getting worse reviews would make the journal selection process (even) more noisy. This can harm the prestige of commercial journals (if they start rejecting articles perceived as "good" and publish articles perceived as "bad").

To be honest, it is a bit naive to think people will boycott one of the most prestigious journal in their field for this reason

I’ve never quite understood the hate against journals. Sure, they might be charging too much for subscriptions based on the effort, but plenty of products do that.

My understanding of positions are:

Researcher: I want to publish in your journal because it’s prestigious.

Academia: You better publish in prestigious journals or you won’t get tenure.

Journal: My journal is expensive, but very prestigious.

Researcher: I want what you offer (prestige) but don’t want to pay your price.

Seems like the researcher should be pissed at academia not the journals? If researchers just published elsewhere, these journals would have no choice but to change.

The current shareholders and editors of the prestigious journals contribute nothing to it being prestigious. It is historical accident and network effects that now let some journals charge $10k for $100 of work, which many rightly perceive as unjust profiteering.

Moving away from Elsevier and Springer Nature is a coordination problem just as difficult and just as desireable as moving everyone in your school off WhatsApp or iMessage or Facebook towards some less odious alternative...

It's a bit naive to think the editors of these journal don't contribute.

I actually think these fees are an easy problem to solve, but they can’t be solved by academics themselves due to the incentives (i.e. publishing in these journals plays a big role in promotions and possible future grants being awarded).

If funding agencies capped grant publishing fees at say $250 per article, while still requiring open access, that would be the end of these insane page charges. The journals would have to adapt. No one is paying $11,000 out of pocket to publish in these journals…

I’m not sure shareholders contribute anything to companies other than capital, so your point doesn’t make sense.

The editors most certainly contribute to prestige. You don’t get big name editors unless you matter.

And the prestige isn’t guaranteed. Several journals that were prestigious when I was a grad student no longer are.

So I reiterate my point, the journals provide something of value, people just don’t like the price.

Yes. And academia is made up of fellow researchers. We are putting the blame on a private company putting a price on a product that researchers will still continue to pay.

The hate should be against other fellow researchers and hiring/grant/tenure committees. They cannot judge the work of a researcher without counting the number of Nature papers they have in their CV.

I can guarantee you that if these committees did not care about the number of Nature papers a researcher has, nobody would pay that price or even go through the brutal review process of publishing in the top journals (or in CompSci: the top conferences).

Back in 2010 or 2011 I was offered a job typesetting similar articles (in the field of physics of chemistry), involving e.g. converting a Word draft into a final Latex document and communicating with the article's authors. The pay was... 40 PLN or 10 USD per article before tax.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/11/24/nature-add-op... gives some background:

> Someone must read and evaluate submissions regardless of whether they are accepted or rejected. That means under an open-access model where revenue is only collected from authors whose work is published, costs per published article are much higher at very selective journals than they are at less selective journals.

But mostly it seems that this is the price that Nature and Max Planck Digital Library negotiated, and Nature decided it was high enough that they could offer it to everyone.

> Someone must read and evaluate submissions regardless of whether they are accepted or rejected.

That's done by academics in the field who won't be paid for their time and effort.

"Academic Journals Doing Crime"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F9gzQz1Pms

Just increase the number of co-authors and split the cost ;-)

A stealth measure to encourage cooperation among researchers!

Mandatory voluntary collaboration + pass around the hat. Paper bylines will only be 3 pages long but everyone will finally get credit (except undergrad and grad students, they're free labor anyhow).

The price is inelastic. They can set the fee to almost any amount and people will pay it as long as publishing there results in promotions and grants.

You may be interested in this article: "The Money Behind Academic Publishing"

https://tidsskriftet.no/en/2020/08/kronikk/money-behind-acad...

The margin on these businesses is substantial. (e.g. This article says 40%)

I love Nature journals, but my goodness this is folly.

I wonder how easily they will allow open-access articles to be searched, found, and filtered from those that require a subscription.

The University world is so insanely broken.

There is so much money flowing in, and yet, all we hear about is students who are poor, and teachers who can't live off their salaries.

The whole thing seems to be setup so that young academics are constantly at war with each other, so that they have to write papers after papers for free and send them to these prestigious journals, which they actually pay for reading through their universities.

Honestly, from the outside it looks like a weird servitude system.

Elsivier alone siphons more money per year out of public funded science than ITER, the most expensive experiment ever.

Is there a catch here? That sounds incredible.

(edit: I got it backwards. That's horrible.)

The catch is it’s $11000

I mean, I'm coming at this from the perspective of a freelance journalist where sometimes the best rate I can get for a story that took three months to research is $250. Not talking just interviews and finding expert sourcing, but deeply involved work with code, data analysis, data cleanup, etc etc etc, often that nobody else is doing. So, that's pretty fucking good in my book, man.

You seem to have misunderstood. The authors don't get paid anything for publishing. Nature typically puts papers behind a paywall. Nature will make a paper available for free if the authors pay Nature ~11k.

It's like ransomware for research

Send 0.6875 BTC to address 188bBz5TPXNC46wVWhkA5ZDqSQBM4EqK8u to unlock this federally-funded research paper or it will be deleted in 195.4 hours.

It sounds like you have this backwards. Imagine getting paid $250 for an article and then having to pay $11k out of your own pocket so anyone can actually read it.

No, you have to pay 11k to publish

Like the rest of the comments say, this is a fee that the authors pay to publish, not a commission that is paid to the authors.

However, if they're Chinese, the authors may get paid quite a bit (~$50-100,000) as a reward for publishing in a top journal: https://www.enago.com/academy/paid-to-publish-the-chinese-ca...

Oh wow. Yeah, that's absolutely disgusting.

It’s disgusting... but, the value proposition is there.

As an inspiring researcher, it’s 100% worth it to spend the $11k. It’ll increase citations making it open and further peoples careers. This is a “pay to play” scheme.

Pay once is a thing of the past. As with most software recently switched to subscription model, they should have offered it at $999 per article per year, no contracts required.

Holding humanity and progress at ransom

"offers" !?

Not the onion.

This seems like a fair price. If there are 30 articles in an issue of Nature that’s 360,000 per issue assuming everyone eventually publishes open access and subscriptions go to zero. That seems like a very reasonable cost for editing etc.

This is sarcasm, right?

Why? I hope this isn't a critique of the form "Why does Dropbox have 3,000 employees, I could build it in a weekend." There are a lot of costs to producing an issue of Nature.

The bulk of the heavy lifting for any scholarly journal is done by unpaid volunteers. JOSS calculates their cost of publishing a paper at around $100. What additional expenses does Nature incur that justify charging two orders of magnitude more?

https://blog.joss.theoj.org/2019/06/cost-models-for-running-...

Not every journal has the same selective standards

Again, the vetting of papers is done by unpaid volunteers.

> All submitted manuscripts are read by the editorial staff

> Editorial decisions are not a matter of counting votes or numerical rank assessments, and we do not always follow the majority recommendation

https://www.nature.com/nature-portfolio/editorial-policies/p...

PLoS biology charges $5300 per article. PLoS was explicitly set up to provide a non-profit, open access alternative to commercial publishers - and it just about breaks even.

So I don’t think that JOSS calculation is anything close to correct for any mid to high quality journal operating at a reasonable scale.

What you said might or might not be true for those journals with volunteer editor. Nature, Science, and Cell they all have quite a few journals with hired editors, and the editorial process is quite different between those.

Lot of people in the comments here don't understand the Open Access funding model. Please read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access

Or people fully understand that the bulk of the work that goes into a journal is done by unpaid volunteers and are appalled at the sticker price.

Are they angry that someone volunteered?

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