Editors quit top neuroscience journal to protest against open-access charges
nature.com
nature.com
Absurd cost for publications was a major reason I left academia as a postdoc. Senior scientists with large grants and salaries write it off as a business expense but paying 2-3k for a paper is insane for junior staff that are already being underpaid.
Arxiv and opensource publishing options exist. But for neuroscience, the funding and direction of research is implicitly governed by the reviewers and chief editors whom are embedded in these journals. Thus for your work to get exposure and citations it is critical to publish in the given journal for your domain.
Journals have a reciprocal relationship with chief editors in that journals will publish "special" editions essentially allowing the editors to publish their work with their collaborators carte blanche. Switching to an open source model is objectively a better option, but there are entrenched incentives that prohibit this change.
So your funding source requires publishing as open access. (This is generally good imo, but details matter and challenges may remain.) But when you tried to publish in your selected journal the university objected... to what exactly? Allocating funds from the grant to pay for the publishing fee? Or did they have to pay out of pocket?
That’s actually common practice in a lot of fields.
I don't believe you. Show me one source for this, and from a decently sized funding body if it's such common practice.
I think you've been misinformed. At least in the US, EU, Canada, and Australia, that's just not true. Public or private funders are telling grant writers to put open access publication costs in their budget or have other funds to pay for them. I only speak English, I'm so unsure of other non-EU countries. But this took just a few minutes of searching to find each agency's official policy or advice to grantwriters on this:
US NSF: "The proposal budget may request funds for the costs of documenting, preparing, publishing or otherwise making available to others the findings and products of the work conducted under the grant. This generally includes the following types of activities: reports, reprints, page charges or other journal costs" [1]
US NIH: "NIH continues its practice of allowing publication costs, including author fees, to be reimbursed from NIH awards." [2]
EU ERC: "publishing costs (including open access fees) and costs associated to research data management may be eligible costs that can be charged against ERC grants, provided they are incurred during the duration of the project and the specific eligibility conditions of the applicable Model Grant Agreement are fulfilled" [3]
All Canadian government research funding: "Some journals may require researchers to pay article processing charges (APCs) to make articles freely available. Costs associated with open access publishing are considered by the Agencies to be eligible grant expenses" [4]
Australia National Health and Medical Research Council "over the grant lifetime, funds can be used to support costs associated with publications and open access such as article processing charges, which are the result of the research activity and which are in accordance with the DRC Principles." [5]
Gates Foundation: "The Foundation Will Pay Necessary Fees. The foundation shall pay reasonable fees required by a publisher or repository to effect immediate, open access to the accepted article. This includes article processing charges and other publisher fees. " [6]
Howard Hughes Medical Institute: "May use their HHMI budget to pay publication fees charged by open access journals" [7]
[1] https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappg18_1/pappg_2.jsp#II...
[2] https://publicaccess.nih.gov/faq.htm
[3] https://erc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/document/file/ERC_...
[4] https://science.gc.ca/site/science/en/interagency-research-f...
[5] https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/file/18478/download?token=xCagap4H
[6] https://openaccess.gatesfoundation.org/open-access-policy/
[7] https://hhmicdn.blob.core.windows.net/policies/Open-Access-T...
it's quite reasonable to have a policy not to cite an original source without a literature review attached
these are not the same functions.
Why have these companies been so successful at curating prestigious journals?
I hate our academic publishing model. But I'm careful dismissing the journals as pure rent seekers. Their is a source to their staying power beyond merely habit.
However, I suspect much of the staying power is that organizing and executing on a top tier journal, or equivalently replacing it, is real work - and it is real work with no model for getting paid for or otherwise compensated for in an academic career.
There is also some value to being arms-length. A few top universities could gang together to pay for a flight of journals, but there would understandably be concerns about acceptance policies, etc.
"I'll donate again when you reduce your ratio of admins to faculty to what it was in the 60's"
Then we might see some change.
I’m not saying the onus is on scientists to fix the entire issue but the progress has to start by committees that hire and promote people in academia and to stop looking at publications in prestigious journals as a marker of career progression and differentiation.
And more to the point, these prestigious conferences and journals often get the best researchers in the field to peer-review for them, because doing that work (for a prestigious venue) also holds some value in the promotion/hiring process. People like to dump on peer review, scientists more than most, but in retrospect many (some) of my papers have improved through the process of getting those people to sign off on the work.
That's why these editors move is a good one. Collective action protects individuals. To support them, I've already signed up to serve as a reviewer.
With suitable metadata linking the data back to the published article, and links to archive.org included in the article, there’s little risk that the data would get lost. Authors putting things on their own websites won’t have the same success rate.
Probably cost and reach.
Anyone with an internet connection can write a "paper" and publish it, but that doesn't mean it is useful to the scientific community. Peer review allows the community to filter out quack papers, research which is inherently flawed, or research which has been done before.
This leaves the journals filled with novel research meeting a minimum quality standard, allowing other scientists to build upon them. If you can't get your research published it ostensibly isn't worth anything, so a lot of institutions use the number of papers published and the citations they get as a measurement of a researcher's output. There is nothing wrong with this process.
However, the issue is that journals have been captured by rent-seeking publishers who charge exorbitant fees. This is made even worse because some journals have historically been more strict than others, so getting a paper published in a strict one leads to a higher valuation - and of course the publishers charge higher fees for the more prestigious journals.
Changing this entire model is difficult. Publishing in one of those journals is literally how your worth is valued. Breaking this circle can be done, but it won't be easy.
[0] https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...
In many fields, preprints have been an established practice for a long time. That allows us to see the alternative to peer review. The main variables that predict how much attention your preprint gets are your name and the topic. With all its imperfections, peer review at least gives a second chance for less known researchers working on less fashionable topics.
That is not a good argument. It points out that research productivity has changed and then tries to correlate this with the rise of peer review, before admitting that the entire argument is confounded and pointless. Then it goes on to the standard non-practitioner approach and cherry-picks examples where peer review didn’t find flaws, which I mean, duh. Of course peer review doesn’t work perfectly to find all errors and fraud, nobody is arguing the point. You could write a similar post demonstrating that fire departments don’t fight fires, or that restaurant health codes aren’t needed to prevent food poisoning.
As a non-academic working in neurotech/sleeptech, we've seen some very questionable studies, and even in discussion with researchers, they've suggested how the study can be designed to get the result you are looking for.
I hope an open system with discussion can improve the state of research and access to research for a larger group.
It's a metric that you need to advance your career. A line on your CV, a reference in your next grant proposal or facility proposal. It shows that people are invested in your work and think it is worthwhile to carry out (regardless of the verifiability of it).
Every author should do this - either the final version if it's open access, or a preprint if it's an awful closed journal.
Though I prefer boycotting awful publishers like Elsevier in the first place.
It's not just inertia that keeps scientists using the old journals. Anyone can issue a preprint. The material that ends up in the journal is usually the better material. The filtering helps and so does the editing. The filtering may be flawed, but it's better than nothing.
Taking Elsevier claims at face value is a bad idea, but an obvious solution would be make the authors responsible for all of the above. Which is basically the arxiv publishing model:
In CS you get this service for free. Neuroscientists have to pay for the privilege? Wow.
This kind of points to rent-seeking or cartel behavior, doesn't it? If this was a competitive market a publisher could get an upper hand by automating and offering their services at a lower rate.
But let's accept it at face value. And now take it all the way. Suppose you reject 15 papers for every single one accepted.
And suppose that accepted pays $3K
So what costs $200 per rejection?
What is that work that you need to put in that adds up to costing $200 per rejection? Or $300 or $500?
In my experience at least half (if not more) of the rejections come right from the editorial desk ... someone spending 5 minutes with the paper.
Let's reject 80% of them right off the bat from the editorial desk.
We now have twenty articles left to properly peer review. I had originally said 15, so let's make it 15.
In order to get three peer reviews in an article, you have to email thirty people, because the conversion from "request to peer review" to "get a review" is 10%. So, to get 3 peer reviews, you have to email 30 people, and then maintain a funnel (some people dont respond, some people say maybe, some people say yes, but in a month, etc. etc. then reminders, follow-ups, etc.) until the peer review is done.
$200. Let's say the total cost of an employee is $50 / hour (salary + insurance + taxes). Surely it's plausible that it takes a total of 4 hours, spread across multiple months, to maintain multiple (start at 30 and then drop) threads of communication that eventually get a review to completion.
And I did not include in that calculation anything that even remotely includes any other administrative costs, or, heaven forbid, "how much the CEO makes"
All that is either handled automatically -sending emails to people who submitted articles on online submission systems- or performed by unpaid editors -soliciting reviews, desk rejection or communicating with authors to request clarifications or respond to questions, chasing reviewers, and so on, and so forth.
But, hey, if the editors in your journal get paid for all this drudgery, then please let me know where to apply.
Look, I understand that your livelihood depends on this but I encourage you to consider the possibility that the vast majority of academics who think journals like yours are leeches might have a point.
In my view, the arguments are much weaker than the people making them believe they are. I don't mean to say they hold no water. I just mean that they are not made from people who stare at financial spreadsheets day in/day out trying to make a red number become black.
From https://www.mdpi.com/editors "MDPI is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. The in-house staff consists of Managing Editors, Assistant Editors, Production Editors, English Editors, Copyeditors, Data Specialists, Software Engineers and Administrative Specialists. Except for most English Editors, all are employed by MDPI and its subsidiaries and work at the MDPI offices. Our collaborating editors on our Editorial Boards are typically employed at academic institutions or corporate research facilities located all over the world.
...
Assistant Editors process manuscripts through the peer-review and production procedures..."
As an author, I exchanged multiple emails with employees of PLOS even before it was submitted to peer review (or reached the editor desk) because the automated process of submitting my paper to the system crashed and required intervention. And mine was N=1, and it still broke. It's not "Google-quality engineering", if you know what I mean. So, all this "oh, that's just an automated system" just does not hold water.
Now, my turn to insinuate. Have you ever written a multi-step workflow management software system that coordinates thirty email threads? If yes, how much human involvement from the operators of that multi-step workflow is needed? And if not a whole lot, do you work at a "cool" VC-funded modern firm, or at a company that got started with servers in a datacenter in the 1990s?
People pontificate about why something is the way it is, then someone with actual experience steps in and explains, then they get attacked, downvoted and told "no that's no true".
LOL
I've now read https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle and am curious how exactly I've claimed that; I am sure you are correct but it's not obvious to me.
You talked about the act of peer review as if it were a relevant source of cost, when in practice the work done by the peers is unpaid.
Now, these maxims aren't laws, just descriptions/theories of how information is interpreted, but they work pretty well.
I mean, I'm interested to know. I peer review for a few journals and I never make a dime, so where does all the money go?
Come to that, why don't I get paid? It takes days to review one journal article. Why is Springer or Elsevier making money from my toil and I make jack shit?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35657217
and
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35657036
I don't know specifically about Springer and Elsevier. From elsewhere in this thread, I learned that they expect the editors to do all the work recruiting reviewers and do it for free. I don't support that model. For publishers that assign internal staff that get paid a salary to help Editors recruit reviewers, it is far from unreasonable to spend $3K recruiting reviewers for 15 papers, even while the actual work of reviewing is unpaid.
I told you exactly where the money goes. You are entitled to an opinion that it's a bad way to spend the money, and that's fine. I happen to think that it's a suboptimal way to spend the money as well. But your question of "where does all the money go?" has been answered properly.
And no it doesn’t cost that much.. that’s the rate with a fat 50% margin, corresponding to the massive profits Elsevier rakes in. It’s just a tax on the system
It's hard for me to see what journals are actually doing or offering other than web hosting, the $6300 seems like just rent seeking with the journals name.
"MDPI is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. The in-house staff consists of Managing Editors, Assistant Editors, Production Editors, English Editors, Copyeditors, Data Specialists, Software Engineers and Administrative Specialists. Except for most English Editors, all are employed by MDPI and its subsidiaries and work at the MDPI offices. Our collaborating editors on our Editorial Boards are typically employed at academic institutions or corporate research facilities located all over the world...
Assistant Editors process manuscripts through the peer-review and production procedures..."