[HN Gopher] Journal of Functional Programming moving to open access
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Journal of Functional Programming moving to open access
Author : matt_d
Score : 112 points
Date : 2021-11-14 16:31 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cambridge.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cambridge.org)
| mjn wrote:
| I'm normally skeptical of journals funded by article processing
| charges (APCs), but this policy is pretty good:
|
| > no author of an accepted paper will be denied publication due
| to lack of funds
|
| Most APC-charging journals (like the Nature family) have a weaker
| waiver policy, where they only promise waivers to authors from
| developing countries, and say they may consider others "on a
| case-by-case basis" but with no guarantees.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Question: I'm not in the academic world, but I assume the idea
| of the APC is that the individual author won't be paying it,
| and it's not expensive enough that the institutions they're
| affiliated with will balk at the cost, right? So, in that
| respect it's sort of like that pricing sweet spot that results
| in $50/user/mo software licenses, $3000 2-day conference
| tickets, etc.
|
| Not to say that $1700 (roughly the number they list in their
| FAQ) is an unreasonable amount given the work that goes into
| reviewing, editing, and publishing an article. Indeed, I wonder
| if they couldn't raise the cost a bit.
| grahamlee wrote:
| Typically you would pay for it out of grant money. So Dr.
| Smith doesn't pay the APC, Stanvard University doesn't pay,
| the NSF pays. Or to cut a long story short, the taxpayer.
| adamcstephens wrote:
| If the taxpayer is paying for the grant, I have zero
| problems with them paying for publishing of the research.
| mjn wrote:
| It really varies. Normally the author themselves has to come
| up with the money somehow though. At least where I've been,
| you can't just bill it to the university. If you have
| research grants, you can often pay out of those (this is
| common in the natural sciences). If you have some kind of
| general research budget you could pay out of that (e.g. I get
| $2k/yr unrestricted research money from my university... but
| I'm definitely not going to spend it on an APC!). Some
| universities do have an internal OA fund you can apply to,
| but those are often limited. For example, MIT will cover up
| to $1k per article for papers written by its
| faculty/staff/students:
| https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/oa-
| publishing...
| xupybd wrote:
| I don't understand what value traditional publishers of
| scientific journals offer?
|
| With the current web it's so easy to setup the required
| infrastructure. No way can the cost of articles be justified.
| threatofrain wrote:
| The infrastructure to replace is not the publication part but
| the peer review and institutional credibility.
| tux3 wrote:
| Isn't peer review performed by authors, not by journals?
| coldacid wrote:
| Peer review is performed by other experts in the same
| field, and the journal has to arrange that for the authors.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| as a complete outsider to peer reviewing and academic
| journals, this sounds like that scene from "office
| space", the "what is it you'd you do here?", one.
| threatofrain wrote:
| [Deleted for inaccuracy.]
| [deleted]
| adminprof wrote:
| This comes up every time there's an article about academic
| publishing. Yes peer reviewers do the reviewing, but it's
| the long-term infrastructure and coordination that the
| journal provides.
|
| AirBnB's content is generated by users, but AirBnB itself
| requires software development, legal, customer support, HR,
| program managers, quality control, etc. Same with
| publishers.
|
| Note that this journal now has a publishing fee for authors
| to cover these costs, rather than a fee for the reader as
| before. The 2022 fee for each author is $1,705 according to
| the FAQ. So moving to open access it not about removing the
| costs (which many people on Hacker News seems to always
| assume), but changing who pays for it.
| geofft wrote:
| Before Airbnb there was Couchsurfing. I think academic
| publishers are a better argument against the unnecessity
| of Airbnb than Airbnb is an argument for the necessity of
| academic publishers.
| Vinnl wrote:
| They offer publishing authors the credentials of having
| published with then, which is useful for e.g. getting tenure.
| And since they have a monopoly on those credentials, they can
| charge good money for that.
| [deleted]
| globalise83 wrote:
| The most prestigious journals are the place where researchers
| find the most impactful research, and therefore academic
| libraries are willing to pay for expensive subscriptions. For
| researchers with high-impact research results, the publication
| venue which will maximise their own personal prestige and
| attract future funding streams are the most prestigious
| journals. And so their position is continually reinforced in
| perpetuity. It has nothing to do with the underlying
| technology, but is rooted in academic network effects.
| mjn wrote:
| You can break out of the network effects with some effort.
| One of the top journals in machine learning nowadays is a
| community-run open-access journal that does not charge
| authors, JMLR (https://www.jmlr.org/). There's a bit about
| its model here:
| https://blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-
| efficient-j... (previously discussed:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15280736)
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