[denzil_correa]

> Elsevier and other giants are putting significant resources in mimicking free and open structures in their portfolio to hide the infamy of their business model (selling a few bytes of publicly funded research over and over again)

This is the key aspect here which everyone needs to address. Just moving from a subscription model to "open access" where you still pay 2000$ per article won't solve or alleviate the problem.

[chestervonwinch]

Doesn't "open access" usual mean free-of-charge access the articles (but perhaps at the expense of an open access, publishing fee to the author)? If not, in what sense are they using the term "open access"? Could you link to an example of what you or the parent commenter are referring to?

[TheOtherHobbes]

I recently tried to access an Open Access paper.

Apparently it's only open to users with university library access. Otherwise you have to pay for it.

I emailed the author directly and he sent me a PDF.

[Vinnl]

I don't think that's Open Access under any definition of Open Access.

[upvotinglurker]

Correct. The publisher in this case may have been misrepresenting a paid-access journal as open access, or the journal may have offered open access only to certain articles and presented this policy in a confusing way. I have certainly seen the latter before.

[chestervonwinch]

I see. So rather than providing open access papers in the sense of the common understanding of the term, they're providing them in a "free drink with purchase of two entrées" sense.

[denzil_correa]

The publishing fee to the author for open access could range unto 5000$ [0]. Why should universities pay 5000$ per article to host a PDF?

[0] https://www.elsevier.com/about/open-science/open-access

[jimktrains2]

Not that I'm defending the current, broken system becuase it really doesn't provide either of these benefits, but the idea is that the cost of (coordinating) peer-review (as the reviewers are often unpaid) and actual editing cost money. If services like that were actually provided, some fee would be understandable.

$5k though? That still seems a bit much.

[IanCal]

One of the reasons the figures end up higher than you may expect is that only the successfully published papers are paid for (usually). So depending on the rejection rate, which I think is ~95% in the case of Nature, you're paying for those other 19 papers to be checked.

PLOS for example is non-profit and charges up to $2900.

[tigerente]

> So depending on the rejection rate, which I think is ~95% in the case of Nature, you're paying for those other 19 papers to be checked.

Yes, the other 95% need to be checked, but reviewers are recruited from academics and typically do this task for free. The contribution that the publisher does at the stage of manuscript evaluation is marginal.

[IanCal]

It'll go through the editors first, in the case of Nature these are paid positions. There's a paid "Associate Editor" position at PLOS too, responsible for "Assessing new submissions and guiding manuscripts through the review process" and more.

A submitted paper does not simply turn up in reviewers inboxes, there are steps in between.

I think people pick a few elements of the whole process and then say everything else is negligible. If paid, the academic editors and reviewers may well end up costing a huge amount compared to the spend elsewhere, but that's not the same thing as saying those other costs are small. The proportion here is largely irrelevant.

The associate editor position on glassdoor is about £40k/year, which is £45k including tax costs. Let's say that's £47k including pension contributions as it works out neatly. In the UK there are 47 working weeks, roughly so that's £1k employment cost per week purely on that one employee. That's £25/hour. At an 80% rejection rate that's actually £125/hour, at 90% it's £250/hour and 95% that's £500/hour on accepted papers (not quite, but useful for the comparison). For only a single employee, and only their direct salary.

Of course now we need to add things like the HR costs, hiring costs, building rent, computer equipment, management, etc. Double? How much time of their day actually goes to the core task and not other meetings/etc. All these things multiply up and I'm really not that surprised that the costs go up to these amounts.

I have absolutely no doubt that if the other editors were paid and the reviewers were paid then this would go up dramatically, but that's a different issue.

[denzil_correa]

> I think is ~95% in the case of Nature, you're paying for those other 19 papers to be checked.

All those 95% of papers checked are done by reviewers for free. I don't see any reviewers being paid. I know because I have reviewed papers across multiple conferences and journals.

[IanCal]

The free reviewer work is not really relevant for this calculation though, unless there is no work done by the journal for those papers. Since papers are not submitted directly to the peer reviewers, there is at least some work happening.

Free peer review mostly only tells us that the total cost could go up significantly if they were paid.

[ghaff]

>$5k though? That still seems a bit much.

Maybe. As someone who has done quite a bit of editing of relatively technical material and coordinated review and rework cycles, I wouldn't be surprised if you're looking at a couple of days of work for a paper. Certainly a lot more than for a quick copyedit of an online article. So you're into the more than $1K range pretty quickly.

[StreamBright]

Why do you need to pay for? What is the service being rendered? I do not think that Elsevier provides any value here.

[majewsky]

Advocates of the existing system say that they provide a) the good name of their journal which stems from b) the selection that they're doing, i.e. prestigious papers pride themselves with only publishing the best works of their field.

EDIT: If I had to build a publishing system for research papers, I'd probably have something like Arxiv as a basis, i.e. a site with huge storage capacity where everyone can upload papers given that some basic quality criteria are met (formatting etc.). Then, the role of journals would be performed by reviewers that curate a collection of interesting papers for their readers. It could be integrated right into the same site, similar to how reviewers work e.g. on Steam.

[jasode]

>Then, the role of journals would be performed by reviewers that curate a collection of interesting papers for their readers.

You're skipping a step. The journals' editorial staff performs a quality filter on the submissions before any reviewers/referees even see it. E.g. see the process of a prestigious journal like Nature.[1]

With your proposal, the reviewers with specialized knowledge (e.g. theoretical physicist that understands the bleeding edge of string theory) would have to wade through 1000 papers about "aliens from outer space prove that flat Earth is real." Or mathematicians would waste time with endless crackpot papers that supposedly proved "P=NP".

Since no rational referee with limited time would suffer through that for free, the platform would inevitably require a filter of some sort. Since it's human nature to not want to do something for free ... voila ... you end up recreating another "Elsevier" as middleman again. If an intermediary becomes good at filtering papers for referees and sets a consistent quality bar for readers (subscribers), its human nature to want to be paid for that effort.

Some people wonder why journals exist. They exist because people want them to exist even though they don't realize it. The accumulation of prestige and reputation for curating quality is not free.

Instead of questioning the legitimacy of intermediaries, it's more productive to accept them as a natural emergence of humans' finite time that prevents both reviewers & readers from slogging through an infinite sea of worthless material.

If we acknowledge that something like Elsevier must exist in some form, this lets us concentrate on the recreating the curation platform in a more cost-efficient manner. (You can't do it for free... because charging $0 will not work for the reviewers nor the readers -- even though some in this thread think it does. Sturgeon's Law is applicable here.[2])

[1] e.g. Nature's submission and approval process: http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/get_published/index.htm...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

[enriquto]

This pre-filtering before the review is done by the editors (editorial board and section editors), who are fellow scientists just like the reviewers.

The only task done directly by Elsevier staff is the copy-editing once the article is accepted.

[jasode]

>The only task done directly by Elsevier staff is the copy-editing once the article is accepted.

Elsevier is looking to fill salaried positions for their editorial staff. This qualifications are scientists with PhDs. Examples:

https://www.glassdoor.com/partner/jobListing.htm?&jobListing...

https://www.glassdoor.com/partner/jobListing.htm?&jobListing...

Either the meme that Elsevier employees "do nothing but spell-check LaTeX markup files" is wrong ... or ... it depends on the particular journals in question. For the job listing examples above, one of the job duties is curation of content (e.g. "assessing submitted research papers") and not just copy-editing. So for that Elsevier imprint (Cell Reports), if you submit a paper about "GMO foods proves Darwin Theory of Evolution is Wrong", their unpaid reviewers won't even see it. One of Elsevier's editorial functions is to filter that crap out.

[SilasX]

Right. We can have a much finer granularity now than "accepted/not accepted". With modern tagging and rating systems, you can have different levels of filtering and store papers at many different stages while preserving your ability to sift through junk.

Of course, no private journal wants to be just a signed tag in some broader system...

[tome]

Are you talking about an overlay journal?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlay_journal

[upvotinglurker]

I'm guessing GP meant the publishing fees to the author (which some, not all, open access journals have). The prestigious PLOS STEM journals have fees ranging from $1495-$2900:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/publication-fees

[Vinnl]

I happen to be investigating how best to transition to Open Access, and coincidentally just today concerned myself with potential business models that does not involve individual authors paying thousands of dollars to publish. If anyone reading this has ideas or remarks, I'd love to hear them: https://medium.com/flockademic/towards-sustainable-funding-f...

[mirimir]

That's the next stage in the war. First we need to prevent Elsevier etc from extorting readers. So that forces them to extort authors. And it's authors who can choose where to publish. Eventually, Elsevier etc will be forced out of the academic publishing sector. And good riddance to them!

[denzil_correa]

> First we need to prevent Elsevier etc from extorting readers. So that forces them to extort authors.

The extortion will ultimately be of the tax payer money. Authors will ask for more money during research grants citing this "open access" policy.

[mirimir]

I have considerable experience with this issue. For large requests, the granting entity will send a team. They check out the facilities, interview staff, and interactively dig through budgets. I suspect that there will be pushback about paying inflated amounts to publishers. Maybe the amounts are relatively small, but wouldn't PIs rather spend $50K or whatever on productive resources?

[gglitch]

I don't presume to be aware of all the implementation details, but in the abstract, is this not a pretty excellent use of tax payer money? To support universal access to research, data, and educational materials?

[denzil_correa]

Tax payer money is already funded to conduct research. Why do we need to pay 2000$ to host a PDF article?

[scientist]

You do not need to pay to host a PDF article, there are platforms such as arxiv.org or zenodo.org that do this for free for you.

[mirimir]

Yes, but as others have said, professional advancement typically depends on publishing in the expensive journals. And that's no accident, in that predatory for-profit publishers have targeted prestigious journals for acquisition. It's the same game that drug makers play with top-selling drugs.

Eventually, authors will migrate to the not-for-profit open access journals and platforms. But that will take time. Top-ranked PIs must lead the way, given that their reputations are well established, and they have tenure.

[mirimir]

Supporting research is an excellent use of tax payer money. But paying monopoly rents to publish? Not so much, I think.

[wastedhours]

AFAIK this is already happening in some fields, or is actually an individual line item in some grant applications.