
Open access: The true cost of science publishing - ananyob
http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676
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betterunix
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.

~~~
frl8fxdfdf
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?

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

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

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impendia
> 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.

~~~
mjn
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.

~~~
impendia
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.

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ChuckMcM
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.

~~~
toufka
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.

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Steuard
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...](http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-deal-for-particle-
physics-1.11468)

------
drallison
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.

~~~
CapitalistCartr
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.

~~~
reeses
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.

~~~
mjn
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.

~~~
reeses
Everyone wants the citation. Good point. :)

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alphydan
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.

~~~
pedrobeltrao
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.

~~~
RabbitAngstrom
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.

~~~
alphydan
<<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.

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ig1
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.

~~~
Thrymr
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.

~~~
ig1
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.

~~~
RabbitAngstrom
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!

------
gwern
> 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?

------
Xcelerate
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...

~~~
RabbitAngstrom
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.

------
lifeisstillgood
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.

~~~
pedrobeltrao
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.

~~~
mjn
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.

------
vph
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.

