[dan-robertson]

It seems slightly weird to me that university presses and learned society journals aren’t generally open access. I thought the point was to aid the university’s research. Surely it helps the name of the university to have important widely accessible journals with the university’s name on them. Maybe the presses tend to have been spun off as commercial enterprises, or maybe the university really loves the income. Or maybe they are really expensive to run for some reason. I know the press at my university has a pretty large building but I’d figured a lot of it was a warehouse. Maybe it’s full of salespeople negotiating with librarians.

I don’t think there’s much hope of the commercial journals owned by Elsevier or Springer opening up, but I do hope that the trend of journals flipping (where the entire editorial board resigns and forms a similarly named open access journal) will increase.

Perhaps another problem is that in those fields that are already closest to open access (say because they use the arxiv), there is less incentive for people to jot publish in commercial journals as everyone who matters will have already read the preprint in the arxiv.

[azinman2]

“Or maybe they are really expensive to run for some reason”

That reason is people. Journals don’t just create themselves. Lots more happens to make it so than just having an email inbox to accept submissions.

You need to be able to fund the enterprise, and often you want bigger/popular journals to subsidize the really esoteric stuff that’s important intellectually to humanity but still requires a base number of people to run it independent of the sales. It would also be nice for these people to make real money for their time so people who are good at it could make a career of it.

Elsiver etc are a different beast as they’re companies disconnected from a larger university. So their self-preservation goals are quite different, and accordingly, their appetite for organizational profit versus covering expenses.

[dan-robertson]

I know of open access journals which are run very cheaply. Basically they need web hosting, a web site, and some hosting of papers. There are even arxiv overlay journals which host the papers on the arxiv. Obviously they can be more expensive if papers are printed and distributed.

I don’t know about other fields but in mathematics the editors and reviewers are not paid (and I think this is the norm in science but not sure about medicine. I think sometimes the chief editor gets some relatively small payment). But it seems to me that these are the most valuable parts of the journal. So where is all the money going?

The journals don’t do copy-editing (anymore?) or if they do they are not very good at it. The journals also don’t do the formerly technical work of typesetting anymore, mostly just bunging papers into some kind of template and requiring authors to do half the work of following journal style.

I think the journals aren’t acting as some kind of spam filter before papers get to the (unpaid) editors, except maybe for the biggest journals.

I don’t really buy the argument that big journals fund the little ones because the little journals are given large price tags and libraries do not get the option to exclude them from subscriptions.

FWIW my theory about the large university press building for my university is that it contains a lot of printed material waiting for shipping, possibly contains (or was designed to contain) printing presses, and is enlarged by a business printing some (high school level) examination papers that are used by many schools internationally, though I’m not sure the press prints them and not some other business.

[Fomite]

In contrast, having submitted to a number of biomedical journals recently:

- The EIC is paid - not a huge amount, but a non-trivial amount. - Graphics work may be done to make figures conform to "house styles" - There is absolutely copy-editing done. Heck, I usually end up fighting with them about copy editing. - We don't use LaTeX, so papers need formatting (and generally, IMO, end up superior to those formatted via LaTeX templates)

Finally, for university presses for books, there are people who evaluate whether a book is worth pursuing, who coordinate peer review, who hound faculty who haven't turned their chapters in yet (something I'm guilty of), etc.

[jzebedee]

This hurts your point more than it helps. Why should anyone care about propping up a journal composed of glorified copyeditors and graphic designers, quibbling over Word formatting to fit their preferred in-house look and feel?

So this is the heavy-hitting work that's supposed to justify closing off knowledge except to those who can pay: because someone might see a paper that had insufficient formatting?

No wonder the reputation for closed-access journals is so thorougly poisoned, when this is exactly the kind of misdirected attention and gatekeeping that's killing it.

[Fomite]

They improved the clarity of the manuscript considerably, and they did the formatting themselves - there was no "quibbling" over it.

And ironically, I was discussing differences in field. The journal in question is open access.

[kkylin]

Also, libraries can and do exclude journals for cost reasons. My university is starting to do more and more of this. They haven't gotten rid of anything critical to what I do, yet, but there are certainly journals I don't have access to (thank goodness for arxiv).

[dan-robertson]

A major complaint about Elsevier is that they would do ‘big deals’ bundling in lots of journals that libraries didn’t really want along with the journals they did.

But I don’t know how much they still do this.

[kkylin]

At least in my area of mathematics, journals still do some copy-editing, mostly to conform to journal style and fix obvious grammar / spelling mistakes.

Journals do sometimes advertise, and that can be expensive. It's also one way to get a large impact factor etc.

About university presses: I don't know how they're funded internally (despite being faculty at a university), but I would not be surprised if they have to fund themselves. It's hard to see student tuition dollars supporting a university press, nor can research dollars flow that way. It's possible some public funds (at state universities, at least) can be used to support university presses, I guess.

[MaxBarraclough]

> Obviously they can be more expensive if papers are printed and distributed.

As someone who knows absolutely nothing about this: isn't that the kind of thing that can be easily outsourced? Today, even books can be printed and delivered in low volumes. Online printing shops compete for such jobs.

[sideshowb]

As long as universities keep evaluating academics based on the journals they publish in, then the top journals are going to keep charging big bucks.

There is a significant movement against this now https://sfdora.org/read/ - and I hope it succeeds, but it's an uphill battle against a lot of systemic pressures.

[MaxBarraclough]

The solution is for funding bodies to insist on open access publication. This isn't just a pipe dream. [0][1] All government funding should have this requirement.

[0] https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/research/digitalresearch/openac...

[1] https://www.openaire.eu/how-to-comply-to-h2020-mandates-for-...

[sideshowb]

Much of it does, but that doesn't solve the problem that the top open access journals charge thousands of pounds/dollars for the privilege.

[MaxBarraclough]

I think it does. If all publicly funded research is published open-access, and none of it is published in traditional paywalled journals, the signalling value of publishing in traditional journals will go away by necessity.

As less and less high quality modern research ends up behind paywalls, the bargaining power of traditional journals diminishes.

[sideshowb]

Why wouldn't the signalling value just be replaced by publishing in top (read: expensive to publish in) open access journals?

[canjobear]

> Lots more happens to make it so than just having an email inbox to accept submissions.

Not really, and what work has to be done is typically done on a volunteer basis by academics.

[Fomite]

Depends on the field and the journal. I've had several papers that have had a lot of work put in on the publisher's end.

[Fomite]

Two reasons that often come up:

- Occasionally, society-level journals are being expected to subsidize the society itself, in terms of the annual meeting, student scholarships, etc. They're often also outsourced to commercial publishers, because even fairly substantial societies are run on shoe-string staff.

- If you're NIH, Wellcome Trust or some other organization funded, there's a mandate that the manuscripts become open access after (typically) 12 months. That lessens the pressure somewhat to open up journals.