
What Open-Access Publishing Actually Costs - danso
http://chronicle.com/article/What-Open-Access-Publishing/234108
======
PaulHoule
It depend what services you want.

I was involved with arXiv.org and we estimated costs somewhere around $5 a
paper, however we were not doing any typesetting (mostly we got submissions in
TeX) and no peer review. It may sound blasphemous, but it is not clear how
much value you really get out of peer review.

One key is that arXiv was running on a very large scale, if you are
considering the cost of the programmers, hardware and such, it is just as
expensive to run a small "journal" as it is a large one.

The reason I don't work there anymore has to do with the extreme difficulty we
had in finding that $5 a paper. After years they've finally been able to get
other academic institutions to put some chips in the pot, but it seems to me
that it is much easier to find money for a boondoggle than it is for a lean
operation.

~~~
fdej
It seems to me that all we really need is a way to attach reviews/endorsements
to papers already posted on the arxiv. Tim Gowers's initiative is a good
start, but with just one specific overlay journal, a tiny one.

~~~
PaulHoule
It is a tricky problem.

For one thing there are a lot of people who are not qualified to have an
opinion who would like to chime in on the topic and in certain fields (say
gravity) they outnumber the real researchers. Some of these people are clearly
psychotic but some of them will put up an huge fight, in the courts even, and
other people are marginal cases, right on the edge, where you will lose the
moral battle if you keep them out.

Another issue is that some senior (and junior) scientists tell it like it is
(or rather how they think it is) and don't stop to think about the emotional
impacts their words have on people, particularly when shared with the wider
community.

These people have valuable things to say, but they make mistakes like the rest
of us, and the peer review process defuses much of the tension in this
situation, although it too has the problem with tail cases with very high
cost.

------
omginternets
All I hear from academic publishers is "publishing costs money", but that's
not the point, and they know it.

The point is exactly threefold, and much simpler than even the simplest
article they review:

1\. It costs dramatically _less_ to publish it used to.

2\. Editors routinely offload expensive tasks to those submitting, i.e.:
formatting figures and text, converting to publication-quality file formats,
and in some cases even layout, to the point where we're not even sure what it
is they _do_ anymore.

3\. Most research is publicly funded. It seems ethically wrong for there to be
paywalls, especially considering the hefty price-tag associated with
submitting an article in the first place.

Editors: we're academics, not idiots. Please respond to our actual goddamn
points.

~~~
capnrefsmmat
I think point #2 is only true for LaTeX-heavy fields like math, physics, and
statistics. It's certainly not true for biology, medicine, psychology, or
other fields where Word is king.

In biology and medicine, NIH open-access requirements mean most articles are
converted to XML ([http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/](http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/)).
Articles are submitted in Word files, edited and converted to XML via some
proprietary complicated toolchain, typeset to PDF with a big proprietary
system like Arbortext, and shipped off to PubMed for archiving. Figures are
usually TIFFs or PDFs converted to whatever formats are needed for the web or
print.

I don't know how the conversion process works, but I suspect that turning
arbitrary Word files into semantic XML with accurate bibliographic cross-
referencing metadata and high-quality tables and figures requires a lot of
manual work. You have to deal with complicated tables, weird Word formatting,
and whatever weird styling the authors think is a good idea. The bibliography
has to be annotated with DOIs and converted to a standard format.

LaTeX and BibTeX, or some other structured markup language, are undoubtedly
much easier to deal with and much easier to automate.

I think Michael Eisen of PLOS has commented on the situation and said they're
actively working on rebuilding their publishing toolchain to automate more of
the process, since it requires hours of work for every paper.

~~~
pgtan
Automatic typography isn't! Let's suppose for example, there is $P_A$ in the
text. According to the rules of math typesetting if A stays for description
like "Alice", it should be set in the current math roman font i.e.
$P_\text{A}$. So $P_A$ looks suspicious, what shall the typesetter do? 1.
ignore everything and this way leave the typographic responsibility to the
author; 2. set it correctly, because she is one of those underpaid TeX-
typesetter, who can read out of the text, what A stands for; 3. send back a
question to the author for clarifying. And this is just a simple example. The
before/after gap betweeen author typoscripts an proper typesetted books is
enormous.

Sadly, the job of the scientific typesetter is not valued this days any more.

~~~
gradstudent
The job of the scientific typesetter should not exist. Give me your reviews
and your latex template (and only your latex template) and get out of the way.

------
kriro
Here's my naive view:

1) Upload PDF of a paper to a server 2) Reviewers get notified and do their
thing 3) Paper is accepted and set to public (or rejected)

Collecting related papers and typesetting them and whatnot should not be
default but rather addons. All that matters is getting the paper, quality
control and making it available. No need for set release dates and quarterly,
just kanban it. As long as you have enough reviewers who are willing to do the
work that should work.

Optional: 4) Allow git style updates to the paper (author needs write access
for this) 5) Comment system (potentially mark papers as "not so great after
all, should not have made it through review")

~~~
xorcist
> Paper is accepted and set to public (or rejected)

Is this even relevant post-scarcity? Just make everything available all the
time, just like the rest of the web works.

If it is obvious how many citations a paper have, and of their respective
quality, that would carry over to make a quality index for the paper itself.
Low quality papers would languish as only friends and family would bother with
the.

~~~
Fomite
What about a new medical study that hasn't had time to gather citations? What
is its "quality index"?

~~~
xorcist
What is its status today, before it is published? It's very low, but there is
a system in place to get a select few peers to review it. Could there not be a
similar system of reviewers in place, without necessarily making a difference
between "published" and "rejected"?

------
cubano
> Eventually, the publisher won’t need a programmer...

Yes, they will need 5 ;)

------
kragen
arXiv.org, which does just the _publishing_ part of publishing — without the
typesetting, lawsuits, sales staff, and political lobbying against freedom of
speech — spends about US$1 million per year, with a staff similar in size to
the Open Library for the Humanities, but more highly paid:
[https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/culpublic/arXiv+Susta...](https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/culpublic/arXiv+Sustainability+Initiative;jsessionid=3B375E7BFF6B88E48141AA7B29C46974?preview=/127116484/327622987/arXivCY15Midyear.pdf)

I didn't say "without peer review" because, although the arXiv doesn't pay for
peer review, traditional academic publishers don't pay for peer review either.
Instead, scholars do the peer review for free, often as a favor to the journal
editor (who may or may not be paid).

They do have a moderator on contract for physics submissions to keep out the
cranks.

They currently get about eight or nine thousand submissions per month, all of
which they publish:
[http://arxiv.org/stats/monthly_submissions](http://arxiv.org/stats/monthly_submissions)
and about 12 million downloads per month
[http://arxiv.org/stats/monthly_downloads](http://arxiv.org/stats/monthly_downloads).

Reducing these figures to SI units, arXiv spends 32 millidollars per second,
accepts submissions at 3.2 millihertz, and provides downloads at 4.6 Hz. If
you impute their costs to the submissions, then they spend US$10 per
submission.

Definitely see PaulHoule's comment
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10539269](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10539269)
about how they were struggling badly when they were trying to get by on half
that.

A couple of academic fields — notably math and physics — have switched almost
entirely to arXiv. These are, perhaps not coincidentally, fields where the
researchers already did most of their own typesetting.

It's probably worthwhile to cost out how much it costs on the market to buy
academic editing (in the traditional sense of fixing your prose so that other
people can read it) and typesetting services. That information is not as easy
to find because those services are not as standardized; the US$380 per paper
given in this article is probably not too far off for typesetting, but I think
editing can run somewhat higher, particularly for non-native speakers who have
not yet reached a high level of competency.

------
dougmccune
The biggest thing I object to in this article is the following quote from
Michael Eisen (one of the PLOS founders):

 _" The costs are largely the same between open-access journals and non-open-
access journals," said Michael Eisen, a co-founder of the open-access project
PLOS. "We’re doing essentially the same thing as traditional publishers."_

The type of peer review that megajournals (like PLOS One) do is categorically
different than a lot of traditional journals. A megajournal will typically
review for scientific soundness only. If the methodology is sound then the
paper should be accepted regardless of whether it breaks new ground in the
field or is seen as important.

This is not the same kind of peer review that you will find when submitting to
Nature, where they are trying to curate for importance in addition to vet for
soundness. I won't argue one way or the other about whether one type of peer
review is better than the other, there are arguments to be made on all sides.
But they are not the same, and they do not cost the same amount.

Methodological peer review is cheaper. That's why the megajournals like PLOS
One, et al do it that way (well, it's one of the reasons, the other main one
being a philosophical reason). You could not run the big OA operations at
their price points with traditional peer review. Their revenue is purely
driven by acceptance volume, and so therefore anything that slows down peer
review or rejects too many papers has a serious material impact on revenue.
It's a balancing act between ensuring you don't accept quack science
accidentally but don't reject too much than you have to.

~~~
dumbmatter
PLOS ONE is only one of many PLOS journals. The others do also review for
importance. This is probably why PLOS ONE is cheaper than their other
journals: [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/publication-
fees](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/publication-fees)

So Eisen is correct, it's the same thing. A non-open access publisher could
make a non-open access equivalent of PLOS ONE if they wanted to (and maybe
somebody has). It's not a question of open access.

~~~
capnrefsmmat
I don't think the cost difference comes from the type of review, or at least
not entirely.

Consider that PLOS ONE, because it doesn't review for importance, has a much
higher acceptance rate. Only accepted papers pay processing charges, so each
accepted article has to subsidize the review and rejection of all the rejected
papers. In PLOS Biology or PLOS Medicine, with a low acceptance rate, each
accepted article has to subsidize review of numerous other articles, driving
the cost per published article way up.

~~~
dougmccune
I was arguing the cost of APC can only be low in the megajournal review format
precisely because of the points you mentioned. So I think we agree, the type
of peer review drives the acceptance rate, so with a higher acceptance rate
you can charge a lower per-article APC.

------
hackuser
The focus on costs as business expenses overlooks the primary problem with
non-free journals: It limits the dissemination of knowledge - the primary
reason for publishing - to the few who can pay.

Currently, independent scholars or intellectual members of the public who want
to learn something have very limited access to this knowledge. AFAIK, you need
to go to a library to access it - you can't even join a library and get remote
access to their computers. That means all the well-researched, expert
knowledge in those journals is replaced with whatever is found on the
Internet. How will the next brilliant patent clerk participate and make
her/his contribution?

(If anyone knows a way to access JSTOR without enrolling in a university or
going on-site to a university library, I'd love to know.)

------
jmount
I found an example of a Wiley journal that claims to be "open access." But you
dig around it is really "pay to place". Example: [http://www.win-
vector.com/blog/2015/11/fast-food-fast-public...](http://www.win-
vector.com/blog/2015/11/fast-food-fast-publication/)

