
An efficient journal (2012) - jampekka
https://blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-journal/
======
robertwalsh0
@dougmccune makes a great point that "with the right conditions a quality
journal can be run incredibly cheaply." Discrete Analysis is prime example of
this (and there are others), the editors have been able to run the journal on
a small grant using Scholastica for peer review and publishing via the arXiv
model. Full disclosure - I am a co-founder of Scholastica. I think the key
here is that in order to make journal production cheaper it has to be
_despecialized_. Journals have come to reply on corporate publishers because
printing and early online publishing were too cumbersome for them to manage on
their own. In turn publishers have built up levels of specialization for their
role. But today, with existing technology and services, journals can assume a
pared down publishing model that addresses their needs in a much more
affordable way and allows them to retain control of content and its
distribution.

------
scandox
As someone involved in publishing (but on the literary side) I've always made
the point that if we reduce the value that we provide to something mechanical,
we will eventually become dispensable.

The key to that kind of publishing (and I believe this story illustrates that
it matters in academic publishing also) is providing a framework for the best
to come to the top. That means supporting, encouraging and publishing good
authors.

The JMLR has the great unspoken advantage that all of the people involved in
its production have a job that allows (or encourages) them to pursue this
project also. That won't always be the case. Often the key people involved
will have to have salaries if the enterprise is to thrive. But the point
remains the same: if you measure your value by the bureaucratic production
aspect then eventually people will simply say: what do we need these guys for?

~~~
bachmeier
> The JMLR has the great unspoken advantage that all of the people involved in
> its production have a job that allows (or encourages) them to pursue this
> project also. That won't always be the case.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. The vast majority of hours have always
been donated by referees. Then there are the editors, who are either
volunteers or paid only a small amount. Aside from that, it's a matter of
posting the papers on a website.

~~~
scandox
Well I'm saying that all these people have a livelihood. Within that they are
able to afford to volunteer time. That is a somewhat privileged position to be
in. In a really good and positive way.

Nonetheless a lot of people that want to do important work in one field or
another, need to be able to make that their livelihood. Usually because what
they do has not got the automatic financial value attached of something like
Machine Learning.

------
dougmccune
This is definitely a good example of how with the right conditions a quality
journal can be run incredibly cheaply (on the order of < $10 per published
article). And it looks like JMLR has a better impact factor (in the 2.4 range)
than the Springer journal (IF ~1.8) that the editorial board resigned from
[1]. So they're obviously doing it incredibly cheaper, with good results. I
don't think you can extrapolate from this that the same model can be applied
to every field (as the author acknowledges), but it's certainly a good example
to try to emulate. Another would be Discrete Analysis [2] for an example in
Mathematics (also a field well-suited for efficient publishing).

I know this submission comes on the heels of the discussion of scholarly
publishing on HN a day or two ago [3]. It's certainly a good counterpoint to
my previous argument that you can't run a journal super cheaply, although I'd
argue that one or two cases in one or two fields don't prove you can scale
such a system to work for all of academia. But it certainly shows that it's
possible to do at a small scale, and maybe there's someone clever enough to
figure out how to scale it up.

[1]
[http://www.springer.com/computer/ai/journal/10994](http://www.springer.com/computer/ai/journal/10994)
[2] [http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/](http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/)
[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15265507](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15265507)

~~~
jampekka
Discussion about APC pricing would be a lot more fruitful if there was some
honest and open discussion about how laborious the publication and it's
different work phases actually are. As I said, and as you verified, in the
previous thread, no publisher wants to give any breakdown of the costs. This
post on JMLR is one of the few where an outsider can actually get some kind of
grasp of what it actually takes to publish a journal, and as seen, it isn't
that much.

If the actual cost structure was better known, it would be a lot easier to
evaluate if the price level is reasonable. Also, it would give a push towards
"unbundling" most of the APC. Eg, the author could do the typesetting
themselves (as in JMLR) or buy it from somewhere else for cheaper, and thus
save grant money that could be used to pay at least something to a grad
student or a postdoc currently working for free instead of, as I cynically
assume, line up pockets of rich investors and overpaid execs.

I find it a very odd claim that somehow doing publishing at large scale should
be MORE expensive than doing it on small scale. My hypothesis is that it's not
the production costs, but that at the moment academic publication is so ridden
with network effects that publishers can ask for greatly inflated prices to
make huge profits and/or be done very inefficiently. It's also such a good
business that journals/smaller publishers tend to get bought out or at least
invested into by larger companies (most of this was actually done in past
couple of decades), who of course have an interest to keep the profit margins
as high as possible. And this can happen quite naturally even without full
monopoly or cartel, although I wouldn't be surprised if there's some kind of
"common understanding" among the big publishers that price wars aren't good
for any of them. Also, it's one of those businesses where almost nobody
actually pays anything from their own pocket directly, which generally isn't
very good for price competition.

But in the end, I find most of this discussion sort of moot. I quite strongly
believe, and can't seem to get any evidence to the contrary, that the actual
labor going into the publishing is so low that the industry in it current form
shouldn't be, and hopefully won't be, sustainable given the current, let alone
future, technology. But OTOH, even if I'm correct, they have huge lobbying
budgets, democracy is in such a sorry state and people are so indoctrinated to
be selfish, short sighted greedy creatures, I wouldn't be too surprised that
the industry can keep the racket going for decades.

~~~
Vinnl
Here's a good article on why it's hard to calculate per-article costs:
[http://cameronneylon.net/blog/pushing-costs-upstream-and-
ris...](http://cameronneylon.net/blog/pushing-costs-upstream-and-risks-
downstream-making-a-journal-publisher-profitable/)

But yes, prices are not a reflection of cost, but of how much publishers can
ask. Unfortunately, given that publishers sell subscriptions in bulk ("Big
Deals"), there's no downwards price pressure: if they add another journal to
the deal, they can ask more money, without that leading to libraries cutting
subscriptions elsewhere. There's no real pressure for APCs as well: authors
want to publish in "reputable" journals, and don't pay the APCs themselves, so
publishers are free to raise them quite considerably.

------
StefanKarpinski
Perhaps this is my bias showing, but if you read through this whole
interaction [1,2,3], Kent Anderson comes across as a real dick, while both
Yann LeCun and George Monbiot come across as pretty reasonable albeit ticked
off about academic publishing (imo quite rightfully).

[1]
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academ...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-
publishers-murdoch-socialist)

[2] [https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2011/09/01/uninformed-
un...](https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2011/09/01/uninformed-unhinged-and-
unfair-the-monbiot-rant/)

[3] [https://blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-
efficient-j...](https://blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-
journal/)

~~~
Vinnl
I often feel the same, although like you, I'm afraid it might have to do with
my bias. The Scholarly Kitchen is an interesting place to catch up with the
views of the publishers, but interactions like this and articles like most of
Joe Esposito's don't really help with the image of "evil Elsevier et al"...

------
Vinnl
I feel like the "let authors pay for copy-editing themselves, if needed" could
be extended to typesetting as well. I can't imagine most manuscripts being
_that_ hard to read in the author's format, especially not if they know that
it might affect how often they get read/cited.

~~~
dougmccune
The field of author services (as actual paid-for services, not bundled with
journal publication) is an interesting field. Peerwith [1] is one new entrant
into the field, which is part of the Springer-Nature incubator Digital
Science. They're sort of a marketplace for academics to connect with (and pay)
other academics to help with manuscript services, everything from peer review
type work to copy editing.

[1] [https://www.peerwith.com/](https://www.peerwith.com/)

------
sitkack
> In fact, JMLR, Inc. didn’t even have a bank account until recently; there
> was no need.

Heh. Those Elsevier and Springer profits look gross but from the other
direction. What are they doing with all that revenue?

~~~
Vinnl
Make profit margins of 30%-40%... [1]

(And also sponsoring academic conferences and societies, etc. But mostly
profit.)

[1]
[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-
business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science)

~~~
sitkack
My point was given how little they do, even a 40% profit margin is hard to
justify. It should be in the 70-90% range!

~~~
Vinnl
Well, OK, there's more. For example, like the author relies on submitters
delivering a properly typeset article (using LaTeX), traditional publishers
often discard the original formatting, re-typeset it using an XML-based format
that can then produce HTML and PDF outputs again (in the journal's branding).
In this process they often introduce errors, and one can question whether it's
actually necessary. Then again, the publishers are realising that themselves
as well, and are more and more often relying on author-typesetting as well -
which in that of course boosts their margins some more.

