Journals sell one thing: reputation. That is why researchers continue to publish their articles there, and why they are prepared to pay outrageous prices for it.
And it's not their own reputation that they sell; it's that of their (often paying) authors, and of their (usually voluntary) reviewers and editors.
It's a very comfortable position as rent-seekers for the publishers. And it keeps working because the authors get a needed (for tenure, grants, etc.) boost of their own reputation as well, and because reviewers get pressured into doing the work via arguments like
> every scientist who wants to publish in these commercial journals are also obliged to review 2-3 papers for every paper they intend to publish, otherwise the system would not work.
Good on the author for not being coerced by that, nor misleading themselves they can "engender small and positive changes from within". They're not abstaining from reviewing altogether, so if "the system" would not work, there would still be ways for works to get reviewed and authors to get their stamp of approval. But maybe, just maybe, this time without the middle man.
(Disclosure: I work on https://plaudit.pub, one of several attempts to establish alternative means for researchers to lend their reputation to support quality work.)
May I assume that you mean open access fees by "outrageous prices"? At least in my area of research not a single reputable journal asks for money for publishing an article. It's always free.
You're right about the open access fees, though, just wanted to clarify this.
Some, if not all, IEEE journals (which are generally very reputable) have a publishing fee, separate from the open access fee. Surcharges apply for exceeding page limits and for color figures in the printed journal.
The basic fee can be waived if the authors are unable to afford it, under some conditions.
Primarily, yes, although there are journals that (additionally) ask for other publication fees, like page charges, or for imagery. But yes, primarily "Article Processing Charges".
Although that said, with some more layers of indirection, the same holds true for subscription fees: libraries have to keep paying those, because authors keep letting publishers lock away their research outputs behind paywalls, because they get reputation in return. And those subscription fees are equally outrageous.
I feel that peer-reviewed journals aren't even going to be relevant much longer. Putting aside the commercial side of it, the actual scientific quality of peer review seems to have drastically declined. Most of the referee reports I receive nowadays are trivial and superficial, even at the top journals of my subfield. I suppose a lot of research has become so specialized that an outsider isn't able to give much intelligent commentary on it either way.
As a reader, I almost exclusively look at arXiv and other preprint servers, and I find myself caring little if/when the papers there are "officially published". In fact some of the best "papers" and important references in my field are certain lecture notes, monographs, and theses that have never been "published" anywhere but arXiv.
Do you not feel the issues of commercialization and scientific quality are more closely linked?
The state of quantity over quality in academic publishing, which is a force that is compounded by commercially focused journals, does not incentivize deep consideration or rebuttal, and only occurs because the academics care about what they do.
> Nature have open access publishing charges that seem outrageous, but they were justified by the editing services of full-time professionals
Nature might benefit from full-time professional editors, but that has become a rarity in some fields. Some of the major for-profit academic publishers in linguistics, for example, expect the unpaid editors or the authors to do all the editing, proofreading and even typesetting themselves, and just give the publisher a camera-ready PDF.
A lot of respected journals that are a few decades old were originally published by non-profit learned societies. For-profit publishers convinced them to hand over their journals by claiming that the publisher could provide quality. Then, they gradually stopped providing that added quality.
> they gradually stopped providing that added quality.
I had a paper accepted in a well regarded mathematics journal, and the copyeditor proceeded to thoroughly mangle it. I had to explain that the meaning of a fraction changes when you move stuff between the top and the bottom.
This journal charges $3,250 per year for a subscription. Although they are in fact a nonprofit, attached to a university.
I really fail to understand the economics of this industry.
It's only a matter of time before Sci-hub is shut down completely.
The eight things the author suggests "to make science free, open, and accessible" remind me of Borges' short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote."
Don't suggest replicating the sci-hub database. Don't suggest changing the laws that make sci-hub illegal. Instead, let's get out our paper swords and attack each of our own pay-walled articles, one at a time, reinforced by tiny CV revisions that move up open access publications from page 3 to page 2.
Seriously-- let's manually rewrite an entire 33 terabyte database so that in forever minus a day we end up with 33 terabytes of the same content, in the same form, but for different reasons.
Consider retrieving [insert journal article here] on Elbakyan's site: it's a mere mechanical act.
But consider looking up [insert journal article here] on an open access site where the author purposely went through the physical labor of ensuring open access. Here's there's something truly revolutionary in the act of downloading such an article-- an act not only of sharing in a body on knowledge greater than one's self, but also acting in solidarity with a purposeful act of defiance on part of the author.
> the editor I was corresponding with had a different take. Like many things in life, you get [what] you pay for, he wrote. Journals like Nature have open access publishing charges that seem outrageous, but they were justified by the editing services of full-time professionals and unmatched quality they provided, and the citations the papers generated.
Oh yes, I just recommend the editor to browse through e.g. npj computational materials and have fun with the "editing services" just pushing through horrible english grammar...
This is not directed at the op, but I feel like voicing my frustration.
I detest Elsevier like many scientists. I also would like to be evaluated based on my merit, and not on an intricate game of status (where I, being relatively junior, share the smallest endowments).
It must be clear that the burden lies with tenured scientists. Junior scholars in many fields need publications in certain journals, as their career and positions are at constant risk. Instead, it is the universities and the senior scholars who propagate the reputational signals that these journals provide.
Some calls from tenured scholars towards nontenured scientists to choose open access journals just grind my gears.
Science nowadays has next to zero job security and a switch to industry is often difficult. As a junior researcher, your first and only goal is to survive. Furthermore, too few tenured scholars actually forgo these journals. The reason is simple: These publications, if only in the long run, are worth a lot of money - and once you have them, you'd like their reputational effect to persist.
Anyone who has a secure job has some moral obligation to publish open access.
Furthermore, politics must act. Each mandate towards open access is a good step.
Change must come from the top, or from outside. You can not expect those with the least power to change the system for you.
Serious question: Why don't tenured professors take more risks with their papers and research, as opposed to seeking more prestige in the form of quantity of papers? Aka why the quantity over quality? Or do they not do this?
Ostensibly once you have tenure at most institutions you really don't have to do anything except teach one or two classes a semester - that's what tenure is; no real duties and you can't be fired. Once you're tenured you don't need the reputation afforded by lots of papers that take little risk... That's what you do to GET tenure, I thought.
The above is restricted to fields where progress doesn't require boatloads of monetary grants (thus requiring reputation, inevitably in the form of citation counts and paper counts).
My understanding of academia is that even tenured professors can still be subject to the same publish-or-perish pressures that non-tenured faculty have. My understanding of tenure is that you cannot be fired without cause, but you can still be fired for not fulfilling the obligations of the job, and maintaining the department’s and university’s expected levels of research output counts. Ultimately it depends on the university.
In the sciences after tenure, you have to bring in grant funding to keep your lab running and your postdocs and students paid. Summer salaries for faculty and teaching load reductions are funded from faculty grants as well.
While conditions of tenure vary from university to university, there are institutions where tenured faculty could give up all research and retain their jobs, but they will never get promoted beyond associate professor, get a raise, etc.
"the perfect business model to make a lot of money. You have the producer and consumer as the same person: the researcher. And the researcher has no idea how much anything costs"
Tough times ahead for academia. I fortunately work in a lot of "applied research" projects funded by industry.
You have to be a masochist to want to work in university research for your entire life. The pay is mediocre, the hours terrible, and some of your colleagues are outright psychopaths. Everyone works towards what the incentives are, and the incentives in American Universities (and South American) are to publish or perish.
With the decline of antitrust and corporate research centers, universities and institutions have had to take up the slack with govt. grants and the like. Not sure how all this plays out, but it's not looking pretty.
The policies and paywalls of Elsevier and many other commercial scientific journals do impede the progress of science. One way to improve things over current practice would be for authors to only cite works published in open access journals.
And it's not their own reputation that they sell; it's that of their (often paying) authors, and of their (usually voluntary) reviewers and editors.
It's a very comfortable position as rent-seekers for the publishers. And it keeps working because the authors get a needed (for tenure, grants, etc.) boost of their own reputation as well, and because reviewers get pressured into doing the work via arguments like
> every scientist who wants to publish in these commercial journals are also obliged to review 2-3 papers for every paper they intend to publish, otherwise the system would not work.
Good on the author for not being coerced by that, nor misleading themselves they can "engender small and positive changes from within". They're not abstaining from reviewing altogether, so if "the system" would not work, there would still be ways for works to get reviewed and authors to get their stamp of approval. But maybe, just maybe, this time without the middle man.
(Disclosure: I work on https://plaudit.pub, one of several attempts to establish alternative means for researchers to lend their reputation to support quality work.)