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.
It comes out of the grant that also pays salaries, so excessive paper costs might mean that a research group can't afford to pay as many postdocs and grad students.
Absolutely relevant. Had a huge issue with the University recently about being able to publish in a journal because they wouldn't pay the fees - every point at which there can be a problem, there will be.
So you had issues using your funding to pay for open-access fees. Are you going to use your own money to pay the fees? You are not. You'll just submit the paper as non open-access. So your salary is not relevant here.
No, the funding body specifies that all work has to be published as open-access. So if you publish without open access, you are getting yourself into trouble with the funding bodies which is a bad idea.
I'm struggling to understand what happened from your comments.
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?
A funding body grants you money and demands open-access. They often state very clearly that costs for publications (submission or publication fees, open access fees etc) cannot be paid from grant money. Thus, you need another source. The first address is your institute / department / faculty / university. If they decline to pay the open access fee, you are in trouble.
That’s actually common practice in a lot of fields.
> A funding body grants you money and demands open-access. They often state very clearly that costs for publications (submission or publication fees, open access fees etc) cannot be paid from grant money.
I don't believe you. Show me one source for this, and from a decently sized funding body if it's such common practice.
> They often state very clearly that costs for publications (submission or publication fees, open access fees etc) cannot be paid from grant money.
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]
Sure I get all that but you are literally never in any situation going to use your own money to pay for open-access fees. If you actually did that, sure, let me know lol.
That was a huge mistake on your part. You should never do that. If it's required by your grant, then get them to pay for it. If it's not required, then publish non open-access.
Why do we even need publishers? What is stopping the scientific community from saying "Fuck this" and simply posting their PDFs on their own websites, or on an archival site? Is it simply bureaucratic inertia?
It's not about the publishing itself, it is all about the review.
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.
There are a lot of good arguments [0] that peer review doesn't work, and leads to worse outcomes than just publishing openly and letting the marketplace of ideas decide which papers are actually worthwhile. Think about it. A small group of gatekeepers decides what research is worthwhile and what is not. How well does that kind of gatekeeping work in other areas? For example, Einstein only had one paper peer reviewed (which was rejected) and things turned out well for him. What if his papers had gone through a committee?
The group of gatekeepers is not small. When Science Twitter was still a thing, two common topics were editors complaining about how difficult it is to find peer reviewers and academics complaining how many review requests they get. Pretty much every established researcher is involved in the gatekeeping, and they can devote as much time to it as they want.
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.
> There are a lot of good arguments [0] that peer review doesn't work
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.
This is why we're building OpenReview. We provide the algorithms and UI to match papers with qualified reviewers for peer review, host the discussion forums, and archive the data after the conference/journal is over. Many of the top ML conferences like ICML, NeurIPS, and ICLR have already switched to OpenReview.
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 not even about the review. If it was, people who have Nature papers retracted would be in very dire straits (despite the fact, they tend to do very well anyway).
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).
The culture doesn't allow it. If you don't publish enough, in prestigious enough journals, instead of tenure you get replaced. That's one reason this is a pretty interesting move - by providing an alternative publishing location based on principles that the universities supposedly value, this sort of departure _could_ help push the academic culture toward a less-abusive publishing model. Institutional change is hard.
I keep trying to organize my academic friends to join unions and engage in organizational sabotage of administrators, who have completely taken over the academy and left most faculty in a state of abject misery. Huge endowments seem like part of the problem, universities are essentially run as financial concerns with a vestigial teaching staff attached that many regents would rather do away with completely.
True, but in the meantime faculty need to find ways around the power of the administrators rather than waiting for fairy godparents to intervene, especially given that administrators control all the budgets and have entire departments devoted to flattering donors.
Researchers do post PDFs on their websites, and on preprint servers like the arXiv, bioaRxiv, etc. Unfortunately, publishers act like gatekeepers towards career progress in academia. Climbing the ladder depends on getting publications in high impact journals and getting your papers cited by other publications. Competition for academic jobs and funding is already very high, and anyone who refuses to play the game will most likely fall behind.
> is because academics are assessed on their achievements based on how many articles they have published in prestigious journals
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.
Part of it is momentum, they date back from when a) everything was on paper, and b) producing and distributing the paper was hard.
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.
Academia is addicted to pedigree and prestige. People in academia could very well create their own publishing and peer review platforms that they all use, cutting out the middle men but there's an obsession with top journals/conferences and how that is tied to career progression that stands in the way.
Then what’s stopping very very busy scientists from submitting to open access and “less prestigious” journals? Those journals exist today.
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.
What stops us is that many Universities and departments only count certain journals/conferences as “prestigious” and make both hiring and promotion decisions based on the number of publications in these venues. Even if you’re senior enough not to care about promotions, you will always have students and junior collaborators who need to run this gauntlet.
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.
My academic career is checkered at best. I think about this [1] from time to time. For a long time, it seems like, university was a place to hide the weirdos and occasionally neat stuff would pop out that changed the world. That institution mostly survived industrialization. but I'm pretty skeptical it'll survive monetization.
We already have both systems running in parallel. Many researchers post PDFs immediately. Then they go through the process of trying to get them into a journal. Both have advantages. While the peer review and typesetting process of publishing in a journal has many issues, the changes generally make the papers better. It's usually easier to read the final published version than an early preprint.
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.
Peer review is a recent development in science that has slowed scientific progress immensly, as well as making all papers read for reviewers and not actually be understandable for other people to read them. If you've ever seen a scientific paper before peer review, you can see that they were actually made to be understandable (unlike papers today). There's a reason Einstein hated peer review. Peer review is an experiment on the scientific method, one that has failed spectacularly.
Anyone who wants their paper to be understood by a non-expert audience can write a blog post explaining the work. Here’s a great example [1]. Papers have become more intricate and technical because science has become more intricate and technical, in some cases because we found subtle errors and exceptions in the more casual early papers!
Archiving, especially of scientific data sets, can already be done for free too. Researchers could simply upload them to archive.org.
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.
If you are a US taxpayer, you should be highly critical of exorbitant publishing fees of major journals. Grant money is automatically reduced by the rent seeking behavior of firms like Elsevier i.e. you are not getting your money's worth out of taxes which make their way through NSF et al.
> "Elsevier, based in Amsterdam, says that the APCs cover the costs associated with publishing an article in an open-access journal, including editorial and peer-review services, copyediting, typesetting, archiving, indexing, marketing and administrative costs."
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:
"copyediting and typesetting"? Ah, that would be where they take your article, already formatted using the LaTeX template they made available, and completely change the formatting so that all the formulae and all the tables become unreadable.
In CS you get this service for free. Neuroscientists have to pay for the privilege? Wow.
The arxiv publishing model does not do peer review, though. The papers on there aren't validated beyond a very cursory look into whether it is basically spam or not.
The publishers are working hard to give the term "open-access" a bad reputation in the scientific community, by charging researchers extortionate fees.
They say their charge is going to be about half of the Elsevier fee, but Elsevier's net profit margin is 19%. So basically they are saying they can be more efficient than Elsevier, but they're still going to have a fee to publish as open access.
Not only that, i ve noticed they now charge more for reprinting an old picture in a new article. Years ago, in Rightslink the reuse rights for almost all the images was $0 , now it's $70-90 and everybody has to pay, including students, nonprofits etc. The whole thing is just insane and the needle doesnt seem to move
> fee at Nature Neuroscience, published by Springer Nature, is $11,690
WHAT!? That's our f** average annual income! No wonder independent science is in such weak and obscure state :(
Is Elsevier generally considered the Walmart of academic publishers, or is this just some random misperception I’ve had? I’m really bad at the who’s-who bit of academics.
I work for an academic publisher, so I’m deeply biased, but I’ll say this: criticism usually consists of something like “it doesn’t cost $6300 to publish one article”, and that’s true, but, it does cost that much to receive 15 articles for submission, peer review all of them, reject 14 and then publish 1. Remember: publishers don’t charge for a rejected submission, but incurs costs with all of them.
I did my share of peer reviews. Mostly conferences, but that doesn't make a difference in this case: peer review doesn't pay. Those $6300 do not end up in the pockets of academics or institutes. Many journals even have a board of unpaid editors.
Didn't you say that it costs money to peer review 15 articles, and reject 14? It's unpaid reviewers and editors who do virtually all the work to peer review and accept or reject articles, so why does it cost money to do all that? Where does the money go?
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?
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.
Sorry but I just don't believe that. Why would you pay people to do all that job when you can get an automated system to do it, or a researcher? That just sounds like trying to sell services that nobody needs and demanding to be paid for it.
I am pretty sure we very quickly in this discussion jumped from "what the state of the industry is" to "what the state of the industry ought to be", a very common debate failure point. I am just telling you what the case is. When you say you don't believe me, you don't present an argument that demolishes my case and says why I am wrong, you are just telling me that the industry is not doing what it could be doing. But what you originally asked me is "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?"
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.
Maxim of relevance: "Be relevant — i.e., one should ensure that all the information they provide is relevant to the current exchange; therefore omitting any irrelevant information."
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.
The act of peer review is a relevant source of cost because at least at some publishers, the cost of shepherding a paper through peer review (not the actual peer review, but the process of peer review management - the costs of which I've already broken down elsewhere in the thread, and they are measured in hundreds of dollars of employee time) is borne by the publisher, not by the unpaid editors or the unpaid reviewers.
When you say "paying for peer review", the immediate interpretation would be that the peer reviewers get paid. By not phrasing it as "work related to getting peer review done" you violate the first maxim, effectively cementing that idea, which makes it a bit of a lie.
Now, these maxims aren't laws, just descriptions/theories of how information is interpreted, but they work pretty well.
I just don't see how this is possible. Most journals have volunteer editors, that need to find and send the article to volunteer peer reviewers all by themselves. I don't see how that would cost anything at all. At most, there is software that handles all of this, but there are numerous competing companies that offer complete off the shelf already hosted solutions for this, so I really doubt this software costs more than $10 per paper. Most journals seem to use Aries Editorial Manager, which doesn't list prices online.
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..."
There is a lot of diversity in journals, but MDPI has a very atypical model. More famous/prestigious journals, as well as more niche society journals are able to get PIs to work as editors for free just for the prestige of being affiliated with them. MDPI seems to have a very hard time finding volunteer editors and reviewers, to the point that they are aggressive and annoying- I was getting so many review requests from them (many per week) that I blocked e-mails from their domain, when polite requests to stop were ignored. That said, I did publish a paper with them once, and it was a positive experience.
The costs are minimal to handle rejected submissions. Most of the work is done by reviewers.
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
Nothing. Nice gotcha, bro. I never said reviewers get paid. I mean the internal machinery that needs to get 15 articles reviewed costs money - employees that search lists of potential reviewers for people with expertise in the relevant subfield, email the potential reviewers, wait for them to accept or reject a review request, coordinate the entire thing, etc. etc.
I used to be an editor in a journal from one of the big publishers (not Elsevier). We searched for reviewers, invited them, reminded them when they were late in responding, evaluated their submissions, send the approvals, etc. And I didn’t get paid a dime. All the publisher had to do was maintain the platform. And sure that costs money too, but the costs are shared between multiple journals and papers.
Yea, that's not a good model. Better publishers have publishing managers, internal employees assigned to work with editors to get this done.
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..."
They're just people running the peer review and production systems (think the online submission system, solving technical issues, writing emails, etc). It's in the name: assistant. They're not the people looking for peer reviewers or doing anything scientific.
As I point out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35657036 the costs of having employees that "write emails" scales linearly with the number of submissions that are eligible for peer review, not with the number of papers that are successfully published.
I'm sorry, have you ever been involved in the process of publishing a scientific paper as an author or editor? Because it clearly doesn't sound like it from your description in that linked comment. The numbers you write are just nonsense. The assistant editors also don't interact with submitters - that's typically handled by the online platform. They interact with authors when it's time for reviewing proofs, signing documents, etc. But all that only occurs after papers are already accepted.
I've been an author, and just once; never a reviewer or editor. It was with PLOSOne which is different and, though a lot cheaper, is still $2000.
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?
I'm not even sure why my experience as an author matters. As I said in the very beginning of this giant thread, I work in the industry. Most of the systems I've encountered or heard about are not the beautiful automated platforms critics imagine them to be; and I am not even talking about technical intervention.
Yeah, emailing a handful of reviewers from a fixed list and following up via email definitely sounds like it costs $6300. What are the net profits of your employer? How much did the CEO make last year?
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.
Like I said in the very beginning, "I am deeply biased", which means that I have deeply considered this possibility, and I have heard many, many academics. This thread is a replay of something that has happened multiple times already.
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.
As an academic editor for a society journal this is ridiculous. Most of this process is automated and takes a grand total of 15 mins of time. Also, Nature charging $10k for open access while PLOS charges more like $2k should tell you what’s going on here
Most publishers do not have this process automated, I assure you. Even so, the theory that an automated process requires no maintenance does not hold water.
For a high-prestige journal, you get 50 submissions per 1 published article.
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"
>> 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.
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.
> Most publishers do not have this process automated
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.
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".
We passed the point of rational debate a long time ago. Now it's just a part of people's identities that "I believe that academic publishers are leeches"
20 years ago Neuroimage was the journal researchers went to when their results were borderline unpublishable. Amazing how these publications manage to stay in business, no surprise they are raising publication fees paid by authors. While it’s good to see editors vote with their feet, there are plenty of academics who will line up to take their place to burnish their CVs.
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.