Open access: The true cost of science publishing | Hacker News Reader

Open access: The true cost of science publishing

nature.com

68 pointsananyob39 comments

Publishers shot themselves in the foot. The unbelievable rate at which they have increased subscription fees was first noted decades ago -- these greedy companies can try to make excuses, but the "serials crisis" predates the Internet. No library should go broke trying to pay journal subscription fees.

If these companies had been less greedy and less annoying with their paywalls (seriously, even when your library has a "Spring subscription," you still get hit by paywalls) they would have a much easier time defending themselves. At this point, though, I think it is fair to say that publishers should be cut out of the loop entirely -- universities should spend their money hosting archives instead of paying subscription fees, and distribution should be done entirely over the Internet (perhaps using BitTorrent to distribute large archives). If publishers have something to bring to the table other than editing (which is done by volunteers in many journals, so what claim to publishers even have on that?), let them bring it.

I work in a small research institute, and we cannot afford a Springer subscription (or any other for that matters). Just too expensive if your institute is small.

We skim through the abstracts and buy individual papers. It's a joke.. seriously. How are we supposed to work that way?

Or you could just get a graduate student who has access to these papers to intern with your institute.

Every public university that I have been to so far has offered free journal access to non-students.

Our annual budget includes about 7% allocated to subscriptions and memberships and we're still stuck with guessing from abstracts and citations whether individual papers will be worth it. I'm OK when they're $10-15, but more than that and I have to think about how much time it's going to save.

Then again, it's annoying when we elect not to buy the papers, decide to publish our results, and...Ffffff.

You got it: when you follow the money, it's clear why this article is happening. Journals have long used free labor for peer review and editing, and rake in the money with subscriptions (paywalls) and advertising.

The most impacted journals, in my estimation, will be the smaller ones that make no money via advertising or editorial. And there are hundreds (thousands?) of small journals to every Nature or Science.

> But publishers of subscription journals insist that such views are misguided — born of a failure to appreciate the value they add to the papers they publish, and to the research community as a whole.

Okay, let's hear it:

(crickets)

Commercial publishers offer one and only one thing: the journals' names. I want to publish in Journal fur die reine und angewandte Mathematik and Inventiones mathematicae and lots of other journals with names every mathematician has heard of (and some of which are even in English!) I want the warm glow of having my ego thus flattered, and tenure committees are looking for the same thing too.

But nobody will actually go and read the journal. Why bother? If you want to actually read the paper, that's what the arXiv and my personal webpage are for.

And this used to matter when you subscribed to a few journals and they arrived at your home or workplace. Those that did were your sources of even access to the information.

Now we have this thing called 'google' - where if I want to find something out, I can find it. I can find it regardless of it being published on my personal blog, or on Nature's website.

For middle-tier journals I agree. But people actually do check the latest issues of the top-tier journals. Journalists in particular check those almost exclusively. If your article is coming out in the newest Science, there are a lot of people who will see it when the table of contents comes out.

Okay, fair enough.

But not really in math. By the time anything appears in the Annals of Mathematics, which is the top journal, people will have already heard about it.

Wow, that is so sad. It reads like a parasitic relationship not a symbiotic one. As we get more data is there anyone looking a retraction rates vs cost? (does someone get bolder in their claims if the cost to publish is less, or do they get more conservative, or neither? [1])

[1] Interesting that you can do science on the publishing of science, nicely recursive.

As a practicing (biomedical) scientist I can say that the claims get bolder the higher the publishing cost. This is because the highest costs generally are associated with the most prestigious journals, and you won't be published in those journals if your paper doesn't make bold claims. The same exact set of experiments can be sold a number of ways - and when you shoot for the prestigious ones you try to sell it as hard as you can.

The correlation isn't perfect because some of the newer, more prestigious, open source journals are pretty well curated.

I was a little surprised not to see one recent shift toward open access mentioned in the article: the SCOAP3 consortium's deal to make the vast majority of particle physics articles open access starting next year. The links below give details, but the short version is that a very large group of libraries and funding agencies have struck a deal with many publishers: the publishers will release all high energy physics articles as open access, and the libraries will keep paying as if they were still subscribed. Thus, the publishers' revenue doesn't change, but the whole world benefits.

This doesn't address all of the issues surrounding the publishing industry (not by a longshot), but I think it's a model worth considering when having these discussions.

http://scoap3.org/ http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-deal-for-particle-phy...

The cost of publication and the cost of access are both significant factors in scientific publication, but the major issue is quantity. Most fields are overwhelmed by the volume of publications.Individual papers tend contain only a small amount of new material and a lot of redundant information. Because there are so many, most papers, even important papers, are not read by very many people. What's needed is a curated channel that filters and deprecates noise and identifies the gems. But, even if we had that, we'd be complaining that serendipitous discoveries and correlations are masked by the process. Arguing about the costs makes some sense. I personally get angry when some paywall asks me for $15 or more to view a two page paper. But the real problem is finding a way to minimize the noise and get the gems to people who will find them beautiful.

You can have your cake and eat it, too, with open-source publication. A Google-style search engine can give you a custom search of papers to allow bot good filtration, and cross-pollination. The key is for the papers to be open.

Google Scholar is pretty good for indexing the major libraries/journals, but you still run into the paywalls in places.

It also turns up copies of paid papers that someone has stored in a public web/ftp server. Usually it's a student obviously working on a project. I must admit that I've used these on occasion to decide if a paper is worth buying.

I guess it depends on your personal views, but I don't find much wrong with just using these articles. Some people even leave them "accidentally" open not really by accident (I have some colleagues who conspicuously fail to take much care to keep Google out of indexing their course reading lists).

If you really want to cross your t's legally and still not pay, you can almost always email the author and ask for a copy, and they are typically authorized by their publication agreement to privately send you a preprint. So in practice just using a version you found online is not much different, except that you save the author some time responding to your request for the same PDF by email.

Everyone wants the citation. Good point. :)

Does anyone know why there's not a free pre-print server (http://arxiv.org/) in other areas of science? It's the morning paper of most theoretical physicists, big papers get published there first (and in Nature, Science second), or even Fields medal winners publish only in the arxiv and avoid journals. Why hasn't this happened in other disciplines? Is it lack of LaTeX knowledge? critical mass? ... I've always wondered.

It was tried and failed in the life sciences. Genome Biology and Nature tried to create pre-print servers but there was no adoption. You can still find Nature's server online (precedings.nature.com). Why have they failed ? I don't know. I think it is a critical mass issue. Usually it takes a switch from a whole community and for some reason it is hard to get life scientists to switch. arXiv does have a quantitative biology section and the genetics and genomics people are using it increasingly.

Also, I have seen wholly unreviewed material in Nature Precedings, which I can only assume is due to the pressure of being scooped. As you might imagine, non-peer-reviewed scientific literature is the antithesis of the research culture, and the few colleagues who have mentioned Precedings have done so with distaste.

<<non-peer-reviewed scientific literature is the antithesis of the research culture>>. I don't think it's necessarily so. The arxiv is not really peer reviewed (you need to be recommended by someone to enter, but then are free to post pretty much anything).

The research culture is using your own critical thought to separate the wheat from the chaff. There are countless poor quality (and plain wrong) papers which are peer-reviewed. A scientist should not rely only on a journal's peer-review to give a seal of approval.

It's common in the social sciences, economics, and law to use ssrn.com as the main pre-print server. Lack of LaTeX knowledge doesn't seem to be an issue: people just post manuscript-version PDFs exported from Word.

I don't think it's as good an arrangement as arxiv.org, because it's a for-profit company, so I'm more skeptical of its long-term aims. But it's widely used.

There's a certain irony to a post criticising 30% profit margin being popular here, when many of us are in the tech industry where profit margins of 70%+ are the norm.

The difference is that scientific publishers are pure middlemen: scientists themselves are the content creators, consumers, and peer reviewers. As peer reviewers they are unpaid, and as authors they often pay to publish their work. No wonder they are pissed off at the price they pay as consumers.

The difference is that YouTube are pure middlemen: users themselves are the content creators, consumers, and reviewers. As reviewers they are unpaid, and as creators they often pay to publish their work.

The difference is that Facebook are pure middlemen: users themselves are the content creators, consumers, and reviewers. As reviewers they are unpaid, and as creators they often pay to publish their work.

Interesting point; in the scientific community some are quite honored by being chosen as a peer reviewer. It's like a rite of passage.

The only difference I can see is that the YouTube/Facebook reviewer title is a lot easier to come by. I thought it more akin to Amazon Vine, but at least then you get to keep the things you test!

Your ISP/you don't have to fork over an upfront cash subscription/ppv to watch youtube. Institutional journal subscriptions can run to 100's of thousands of dollars a year+.

I wish I had 30% profit off of my research!

I don't think people would be upset if the industry operated at a higher profit margin. What is upsetting is that the industry has a strangle-hold on the market. If you want thrive in academia, you need to publish in top journals. This gives the top journals immense leverage over researchers. In effect, academics pay the journals to publish, and the Universities later turn around and pay a second time to have access to those same journals.

You're not adjusting for risk here. In tech, the norm is for industries to die within decades - how many tech giants are still around from the '80s? IBM, Microsoft, Apple (after a near-death experience), Oracle and... that's about all I can think of.

On top of the mortality rate, unlike a publisher or a journal, a dead tech giant leaves behind nothing that will still be valuable decades later: the technology is long-since obsolete, the brand irrelevant, and what intellectual property do they have? Their patents expire within 20 years while the publishers and journals' copyright on anything written since the 1930s will last what might as well be forever.

> Data from the consulting firm Outsell in Burlingame, California, suggest that the science-publishing industry generated $9.4 billion in revenue in 2011 and published around 1.8 million English-language articles — an average revenue per article of roughly $5,000. Analysts estimate profit margins at 20–30% for the industry, so the average cost to the publisher of producing an article is likely to be around $3,500–4,000.

Amazing. What mature industry can boast such profit margins?

It's funny that Nature is the one always publishing articles about open access like this. Why is that? I mean, I guess they'll be the last publisher to go, but still...

This is my first reaction too, but then I must remember that it's free to publish in Nature (and Science, et. al.) because of their massive readership. I don't think they'll go anywhere for a long time, because people will always want a prestigious place to put their research.

It may be a combination of idealism (fostered by their status as the leading publisher, which while I haven't looked I would bet means they make a ton of money) and cold business logic that this hurts their competitors more than them.

Firstly I think the PeerJ guys are doing a great job (I interviewed their DevOps guy a while back, nice approach)

Secondly, the journals argue they provide editorial quality - and this is true. I doubt that nature will lose subscribers over this, its the minor journals that are in trouble.

But this is not the point - editorial quality is not what science publishing is about - scientific quality is the issue. Are the results repeatable and significant? Not is it a convincing read?

Every scientist wants to do good science, write papers that are works of convincing literary merit and get published in nature with a talking head on the ten o'clock news.

Only one of those should be publicaly funded, and free to read for everyone else in the world.

> But this is not the point - editorial quality is not what science publishing is about - scientific quality is the issue. Are the results repeatable and significant? Not is it a convincing read?

This is true, and theoretically something that is quantifiable. Yet it isn't. Not just because of the possibility of faked data and results, but because even self-evident scientific worth is not always easily recognized, especially if it is hard to find in an obscure journal. No one wants to be the scientist who has great findings but gets ignored because the world is too busy to pay attention.

Scientific publishers (as it stands) provide 3 services (publishing, filtering, accreditation) - these could be decoupled and that is what PLOS One, PeerJ and other folks working on "alternative" metrics of evaluation for scientific publishing are pushing for. If pusblishers really only did publishing we would be putting our papers in blogs. It is very very frustrating that it is taking so long to decouple those functions and to have true publishing systems that are as cheap as blog hosting with services on top that are open for competition.

The highest-profile ones also provide publicity, which I think will be the last of their advantages to go (if it ever does). Even if we moved fully to a world where decentralized metrics (e.g. citation-based metrics) were the sole evaluation criterion, it would still be beneficial to publish in venues like Science and Nature, because they bring your article to the attention of many people (including journalists, who further spread it), which results in many more citations than you would get for the same paper published elsewhere. That's one reason, besides the prestige of the CV line itself, that people covet those kinds of publications: they're great for boosting your metrics.

Open Access places like PLOS, BMC journals, still cost a sh*t load to publish (~$2000). Michael Eisen and the likes just found a new way to make moneys. If any of these dudes are in the business of science and not making money, they would charge no more than $500 per article.

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