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Comment by cx91 | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what the remaining costs of publishing are under such an OpenAccess policy.

For the UK proposal, the Guardian article from July 15 [1] mentions article processing charges (APC) around GBP 2,000 per article, presumably paid by the institution to some private institution to manage the peer-review process. Of course, the peer-reviewing itself is done free of charge by fellow academics. The Nature post doesn't seem to address this point (unless this is what they refer to as "up-front publication costs" in the second paragraph).

Either way, charges around GBP 2,000 per article for processing are hefty (especially given that the bulk of the work is done by the academics for free). Maybe one should ask the question how this figure could be driven down?

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jul/15/free-access-br...

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The current peer review process requires expert supervision (qualified reviewers need to be selected, etc), so a charge of GBP 2,000 seems reasonable to me.

In time we can hope for an HN-like system where publications are ranked immediately on publication. The algorithm would have to recognize the expertise of authorities when assigning the value of each vote. When this is possible, that cost should dissapear. But until such a system has been proven out, peer review should remain and a charge of GBP 2000 is reasonable.

1) GBP 2,000 still seems steep to me. Assuming I'll have to pay an scientific editor (who selects reviewers, forwards manuscripts and decision revisions, etc) GBP 100 per hour, he could spend 10 work hours on the article -- total cost: GBP 1,000. I realize that there's a large variance on time required though, depending on how referees and authors agree, but 10 hours seems at the upper end of the spectrum. Of course, if we'll have to pay a typesetter + infrastructure, GBP 2,000 might be where we'll end up. However, I have the impression that these proposals offload all typesetting to the authors.

2) Can you enlighten me (or suggest reading) on how HN ranks submissions? I've had discussions about some sort of ranking of papers, but we generally concluded that the sheer amount of papers published daily would make it tough to get enough (>10?) votes for being somewhat representative I imagine (for example, astro-ph on arxiv sees 50-100 submissions daily). But as you suggest, some algorithm doing preliminary ranking might help this (although it also spells danger).

To rank academic papers you'd need a way to establish certain people as authorities within each field or area, and make their vote stronger. This authority ranking would surely have expert input initially, but I would expect that Citeseer and Google Scholar may be good places to look for inspiration on ways to crowdsource authority rankings.

For starters look at the Page Rank paper (named after Larry Page, not web page). Academic papers need something richer than page rank, but since tens of billion of web pages can be ranked for arbitrary queries, the volume of academic papers should be fime.

Ranking algorithms are one of my favorite subjects, and they are as challenging as they are important. "Search" has little to do with actual searching, it's really a ranking problem. Google's search was the first good ranking scheme for internet search, and their "I feel lucky" button was a way to show that off.

Happy to discuss by email.

"mentions article processing charges (APC) around GBP 2,000 per article, presumably paid by the institution to some private institution to manage the peer-review process"

I would gladly (and highly profitably) run a for-profit which "manages the peer-review process" for GBP 1 per article.

You'd be able to find 3 relevant peer reviewers for each article, get their comments, feed them back to the author, then make sure the article was appropriately amended prior to publication (or rejected if required) for £1 per article? Your time must be very cheap! Or am I missing something?

Exactly. I fully support the open research movement as it will drive competition, new business models and spread quality research, but the review process is probably a very challenging one to manage.

People will evenutally solve this problem parts at a time, but I wouldn't put a £1 per article price tag on it yet.

I think that's what PLoS does. Their costs are here: http://www.plos.org/publish/pricing-policy/publication-fees/

Their costs aren't low, and presumably they don't make profit either. It's fair though, although i might say a bit expensive for authors from developing countries. You want to have a barrier in publishing and a good review process, and it's more fair (esp. to students in the developing world) to charge the authors rather than the readers.

Hopefully, if we have competition among open-access journals even the costs may go down.

I cannot find 2011 data, but over 2010 their net surplus was $2.8M, $2M from donations and $0.8M from operations (http://www.plos.org/media/downloads/2011/Form990_2010.pdf)

I use 'surplus', not 'profit' because PLoS is a non-profit. They can build up reserves to guarantee continued existence in times of hardness, or for future growth (for example, they may need money in the bank to rent or buy offices, or to make them more attractive to prospective employees (who is going to work for a non-profit that, every month, hopes to be able to pay your salary?)

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