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.
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.
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.
The crux is figuring out how retain the good aspects of the existing system (well-considered and appropriate peer review, approximate ranking by importance) and getting enough traction to allow it to take off.
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.
I know it's hard to believe, but #1 is false for a lot of subscription academic journals. Traditional academic publishers might have to print less paper now than they used to (although even that is questionable) but they aren't able to stop printing paper copies of journals. We cannot switch straight over to electronic only for all our journals. Our customers (mostly university libraries) still demand print, as much as we'd like that to not be the case. So today traditional publishers are stuck in a tough spot, we either have to take on the full cost of both digital distribution (and no, this is not free or even super cheap) while also continuing with the cost of paper distribution. Or we could say across the board that we're done with paper and try to deal with the hoards of angry customers we'd get.
It's similar to a large old software system with lots of customers. Ripping out a feature you've offered forever comes with massive customer disapproval, even if it's the logical thing to do for the product. So in that regard it's easier for the small new entrant to be nimble and not have to deal with maintaining the legacy stuff.
>I know it's hard to believe, but #1 is false for a lot of subscription academic journals.
I must insist that this is missing the point. On some level, you seem to (inadvertently, perhaps?) acknowledge this since you qualified your argument with "subscription academic journals".
I would argue that this is an outdated business model, due to the fact that publication costs per se have dramatically dropped.
Of course, it costs more to run an outdated business! Join the PLoS team, or die, I say! (Respectfully, of course!)
To be less dramatic, my argument is essentially this: stop offering subscription-based services. It doesn't work for you for the same reason it doesn't work for the New York Times, and you're suffering the same consequences.
That's certainly a valid viewpoint, that there simply shouldn't be anything other than electronic only journals. Or to take it further (which I acknowledge isn't exactly what you said) that there shouldn't even be journals that attempt to bestow prestige at all (ie that should be a process of post publication of some sort). But it's also about the realistic challenges of running a sustainable business in academia.
PLoS figured out a formula that works for a portion of the market with PLoS One. Note that that doesn't really work for the humanities and social sciences because the funding situation is so different. So then you have Open Library of Humanities, which is surviving currently on grant money with the hopes that they can get universities to fund their journals (not all that different than subscriptions to be honest, just that they are a nonprofit). But it's entirely unclear if that's going to be sustainable.
So even a brand new state of the art low cost journal needs to find funding somewhere. How that works in STEM might make sense (APCs coming from research funding) but how it works outside of that is entirely undefined.
Regarding the implications of my viewpoint, I'd say that's an accurate summary. My opinion indeed implies a radical departure from the current state of the business, but it seems to me that my colleagues are by and large in agreement.
Regarding the humanities/sciences division, I agree that the market is different. I think, however, that this difference is very accurately modeled by a single factor: technical literacy.
On the whole, I find that the humanities are not interested in the inner workings of computers. They do not care, and it annoys them greatly to think of such things. Now consider the fact that open access online journals are started by tech people, which is to say people from the sciences. Every open-access journal is just too damn complicated for people who don't care about social media, or even social logins. They want (query in) -> (paper out).
I think a simple experiment would be very convincing. Start a journal whose only job is to manage the peer-review process in the most transparent manner possible. University computing centers can donate storage space to the project. The now-slim editorial costs can be covered by modest submission fees -- say $100 for any non-3rd world university.
I posit that if such a system were to be developed, the humanities would latch on immediately. In other words, I suspect the humanities want more open-access and unrestrictive licensing, not less, as it's actually more convenient for them.
In short, I argue that the editorial business is resisting an inevitable market change.
Edit: to end on a more positive note, I'm sure a business opportunity exists for editors who can make present us with a convenient set of tools to work with this data.
> University computing centers can donate storage space to the project
If we leave the publishing-as-a-business area, I wonder how much university libraries currently pay annually for their subscriptions. And I do wonder, if it would make sense for universities to let their libraries take care of archiving and publishing the respective uni's publications. Open-access everything, host it at home.
... and we still need to understand what these "costs of peer review" are! We are never paid for reviewing papers and most editors work for free. There is free software to handle the peer review process (e.g. http://myreview.sourceforge.net) which are used by some serious journals for years (e.g. http://ecj.fhv.at / http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/evco).
A few more points:
- people outside of computer sciences (and maybe physics) do not want to deal with LaTeX. As a result, they want to submit ugly word files and get a nicely formatted paper out of it (this has a cost, but not in CS where we submit nicely formatted LaTeX papers)
- most journals do not do copy-editing, but the big ones actually work on the figures, the text, fix the references, etc. Again, this is not common in CS.
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/). 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.
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.
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.
This. I find all over the place that the LaTeX-heavy fields assume everyone uses it for everything. This is definitely not the case - if I had to guess, a minority of papers overall are written in LaTeX.
And while easier to automate, I'll take a manuscript laid out by a professional any day of the week.
"I'll take a manuscript laid out by a professional any day of the week."
LaTeX with a good template looks much better than some of the "professional" work I've seen.
Also: the real question here is whether the "professional" layout adds enough scholarly value to make it worth paying the outrageous journal subscription price.
Journals are not intended to be aesthetic experiences. That is not their purpose. Their purpose is to disseminate knowledge. High prices are counterproductive to that goal.
Editing, in the journal sense of the word (finding good referees, hounding them to get reports back, responding to authors, evaluating revisions, etc.) takes a lot of work and time.
I wouldn't be willing to do an editor's job for free (unless underwritten by another employer, as I am for peer review), and I wouldn't expect anyone else to do so either.
Publishing costs are far, far lower than they used to be, but good proofreading and style-guide checking still takes time too.
Maybe it's because I'm a native English speaker with strong writing skills, but I don't think any actual editing of the text has taken place on the journal's side on any paper I've ever been on. Usually the co-authors do this in several rounds before submission.
It depends on the journal, but usually there will be subtle edits. In my experience, the edits usually make the article less readable, but they are common for major journals, at least in my field.
One of the major journals in my field has a ban on sentences that start with adverbs. I'll admit my writing often uses adverbs it shouldn't but the journal will silently turn sentences like:
> Typically, data are ...
into
> It is typical for data to be ...
instead of rewriting the sentence to avoid starting with "typically" in a more readable way.
At any rate, edits are pretty common, but they're usually to match internal style guidelines, as opposed to editing for readability/content/etc.
As a counter-example, though, I have had one case where a typesetter noticed that I had an incorrect paper in the reference list purely from the actual scientific context in which I was referencing it. It was a really nice catch, and interestingly, it implies that the person doing the typesetting has a _very_ deep background in the field and a very broad knowledge of the relevant literature. It's not something that could have been guessed from the titles of the articles I was referencing without knowing the subject matter intimately.
It's common for major physics journals to copy-edit before publication. The APS journals and the Review of Scientific Instruments both do it.
Sometimes they'll catch a subtle error, sometimes they make edits to bring the document into compliance with their own style guide, and occasionally they'll introduce an error. On balance, they make the publication much stronger and more consistent. I've gotten nice PDFs that highlight the diffs and any questions/concerns they may have.
This is a job nobody asked for but everybody has to pay for.
As an author I am very careful about what I say in my papers and how I say it. If something sounds stilted or odd, there's probably a reason. Words mean things and subtle changes can affect their interpretation. For this reason I do not like being edited by a non expert. If I feel my work needs such attention, I'll ask for it.
But journal editors aren't usually paid by journals. Typically they are full time academics paid by the University, editing the journal is only part of what they do. They might or might not receive some sort of cash amount but it won't provide a sustainable income, or even a minimum wage and is more an honorarium.
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")
A big part of "open access" is "accessibility" -- and a big part of accessibility is consistent formatting, typesetting, abstracts, etc. Without this, scientific papers become much harder to process electronically and turn into semi-structured data that is machine-readable. You need an organization to take stewardship of this process and escalate when the process breaks down, because all processes have escalations and exceptions.
You also need a group capable of certifying experts in a field. In journals, this is done by the editor - who is usually an expert, or at least enough of an expert to know who the experts in a field are. What you described is basically Reddit -- and there's nothing wrong with Reddit, but I think it's a little unstructured for scientific discourse.
> 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.
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"?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I agree that OA vs non OA isn't the argument, and that there are examples of OA journals with a particular focus on "impact", like eLife. My point is really about megajournal-style peer review vs traditional peer review. But in the press these two things get conflated, and when referencing how cheap publishing should be people always quote the lower price of megajournal APCs and not the higher price of traditionally peer reviewed journal APCs.
But it is worth noting that a move to APCs dramatically changes the incentive structure for a publisher, and there are built-in mechanisms in such a system to produce new strange dynamics that we haven't really seen much of before (ie the tension between needing to accept a certain volume to stay in business vs try to keep the reputation of the journal high).
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.
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.
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.)
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.