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Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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)

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.

"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

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.

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