[HN Gopher] Editors quit top neuroscience journal to protest aga...
___________________________________________________________________
Editors quit top neuroscience journal to protest against open-
access charges
Author : pseudolus
Score : 139 points
Date : 2023-04-21 14:59 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| alexb_ wrote:
| Why do we even need publishers? What is stopping the scientific
| community from saying "Fuck this" and simply posting their PDFs
| on their own websites, or on an archival site? Is it simply
| bureaucratic inertia?
| steppi wrote:
| Researchers do post PDFs on their websites, and on preprint
| servers like the arXiv, bioaRxiv, etc. Unfortunately,
| publishers act like gatekeepers towards career progress in
| academia. Climbing the ladder depends on getting publications
| in high impact journals and getting your papers cited by other
| publications. Competition for academic jobs and funding is
| already very high, and anyone who refuses to play the game will
| most likely fall behind.
| drbwaa wrote:
| The culture doesn't allow it. If you don't publish enough, in
| prestigious enough journals, instead of tenure you get
| replaced. That's one reason this is a pretty interesting move -
| by providing an alternative publishing location based on
| principles that the universities supposedly value, this sort of
| departure _could_ help push the academic culture toward a less-
| abusive publishing model. Institutional change is hard.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I keep trying to organize my academic friends to join unions
| and engage in organizational sabotage of administrators, who
| have completely taken over the academy and left most faculty
| in a state of abject misery. Huge endowments seem like part
| of the problem, universities are essentially run as financial
| concerns with a vestigial teaching staff attached that many
| regents would rather do away with completely.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| When big donors say to Big U:
|
| "I'll donate again when you reduce your ratio of admins to
| faculty to what it was in the 60's"
|
| Then we might see some change.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| True, but in the meantime faculty need to find ways
| around the power of the administrators rather than
| waiting for fairy godparents to intervene, especially
| given that administrators control all the budgets and
| have entire departments devoted to flattering donors.
| robg wrote:
| Peer review is still a good way to ensure some semblance of
| quality. But there are clearly better ways.
| alexb_ wrote:
| Peer review is a recent development in science that has
| slowed scientific progress immensly, as well as making all
| papers read for _reviewers_ and not actually be
| understandable for other people to read them. If you 've ever
| seen a scientific paper before peer review, you can see that
| they were actually made to be understandable (unlike papers
| today). There's a reason Einstein hated peer review. Peer
| review is an experiment on the scientific method, one that
| has failed spectacularly.
| mjburgess wrote:
| metareviews & literature reviews can serve the same functions
|
| it's quite reasonable to have a policy not to cite an
| original source without a literature review attached
| ska wrote:
| > metareviews & literature reviews can serve the same
| functions
|
| these are not the same functions.
| db48x wrote:
| Archiving, especially of scientific data sets, can already be
| done for free too. Researchers could simply upload them to
| archive.org.
|
| With suitable metadata linking the data back to the published
| article, and links to archive.org included in the article,
| there's little risk that the data would get lost. Authors
| putting things on their own websites won't have the same
| success rate.
| AraceliHarker wrote:
| This is because academics are assessed on their achievements
| based on how many articles they have published in prestigious
| journals.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _is because academics are assessed on their achievements
| based on how many articles they have published in prestigious
| journals_
|
| Why have these companies been so successful at curating
| prestigious journals?
|
| I hate our academic publishing model. But I'm careful
| dismissing the journals as pure rent seekers. Their is a
| source to their staying power beyond merely habit.
| ska wrote:
| Part of it is momentum, they date back from when a)
| everything was on paper, and b) producing and distributing
| the paper was hard.
|
| However, I suspect much of the staying power is that
| organizing and executing on a top tier journal, or
| equivalently replacing it, is real work - and it is real
| work with no model for getting paid for or otherwise
| compensated for in an academic career.
|
| There is also some value to being arms-length. A few top
| universities could gang together to pay for a flight of
| journals, but there would understandably be concerns about
| acceptance policies, etc.
| bena wrote:
| You mean self-publishing or finding another publisher.
|
| Probably cost and reach.
| jfoutz wrote:
| My academic career is checkered at best. I think about this [1]
| from time to time. For a long time, it seems like, university
| was a place to hide the weirdos and occasionally neat stuff
| would pop out that changed the world. That institution mostly
| survived industrialization. but I'm pretty skeptical it'll
| survive monetization.
|
| 1. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/dijkstra.html
| crote wrote:
| It's not about the publishing itself, it is all about the
| _review_.
|
| Anyone with an internet connection can write a "paper" and
| publish it, but that doesn't mean it is useful to the
| scientific community. Peer review allows the community to
| filter out quack papers, research which is inherently flawed,
| or research which has been done before.
|
| This leaves the journals filled with novel research meeting a
| minimum quality standard, allowing other scientists to build
| upon them. If you can't get your research published it
| ostensibly isn't worth anything, so a lot of institutions use
| the number of papers published and the citations they get as a
| measurement of a researcher's output. There is nothing wrong
| with this process.
|
| However, the issue is that journals have been captured by rent-
| seeking publishers who charge exorbitant fees. This is made
| even worse because some journals have historically been more
| strict than others, so getting a paper published in a strict
| one leads to a higher valuation - and of course the publishers
| charge higher fees for the more prestigious journals.
|
| Changing this entire model is difficult. Publishing in one of
| those journals is _literally_ how your worth is valued.
| Breaking this circle _can_ be done, but it won 't be easy.
| foven wrote:
| It's not even about the review. If it was, people who have
| Nature papers retracted would be in very dire straits
| (despite the fact, they tend to do very well anyway).
|
| It's a metric that you _need_ to advance your career. A line
| on your CV, a reference in your next grant proposal or
| facility proposal. It shows that people are invested in your
| work and think it is worthwhile to carry out (regardless of
| the verifiability of it).
| iceIX wrote:
| This is why we're building OpenReview. We provide the
| algorithms and UI to match papers with qualified reviewers
| for peer review, host the discussion forums, and archive the
| data after the conference/journal is over. Many of the top ML
| conferences like ICML, NeurIPS, and ICLR have already
| switched to OpenReview.
| pklausler wrote:
| The value is mostly in the peer review, yes, but peer
| reviewers aren't the ones being paid for it.
| dimal wrote:
| There are a lot of good arguments [0] that peer review
| doesn't work, and leads to worse outcomes than just
| publishing openly and letting the marketplace of ideas decide
| which papers are actually worthwhile. Think about it. A small
| group of gatekeepers decides what research is worthwhile and
| what is not. How well does that kind of gatekeeping work in
| other areas? For example, Einstein only had one paper peer
| reviewed (which was rejected) and things turned out well for
| him. What if his papers had gone through a committee?
|
| [0] https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-
| of-...
| jltsiren wrote:
| The group of gatekeepers is not small. When Science Twitter
| was still a thing, two common topics were editors
| complaining about how difficult it is to find peer
| reviewers and academics complaining how many review
| requests they get. Pretty much every established researcher
| is involved in the gatekeeping, and they can devote as much
| time to it as they want.
|
| In many fields, preprints have been an established practice
| for a long time. That allows us to see the alternative to
| peer review. The main variables that predict how much
| attention your preprint gets are your name and the topic.
| With all its imperfections, peer review at least gives a
| second chance for less known researchers working on less
| fashionable topics.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| There's also an argument to be made that Peer Review is
| absolutely failing, because of the replication crisis
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
| galoisscobi wrote:
| Academia is addicted to pedigree and prestige. People in
| academia could very well create their own publishing and peer
| review platforms that they all use, cutting out the middle men
| but there's an obsession with top journals/conferences and how
| that is tied to career progression that stands in the way.
| [deleted]
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| No. Its just that we are all very very busy doing science.
| galoisscobi wrote:
| Then what's stopping very very busy scientists from
| submitting to open access and "less prestigious" journals?
| Those journals exist today.
|
| I'm not saying the onus is on scientists to fix the entire
| issue but the progress has to start by committees that hire
| and promote people in academia and to stop looking at
| publications in prestigious journals as a marker of career
| progression and differentiation.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Is Elsevier generally considered the Walmart of academic
| publishers, or is this just some random misperception I've had?
| I'm really bad at the who's-who bit of academics.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I've never heard of that. They have many very reputable
| journals in neuroscience. I don't like the company, but many of
| the journals are solid.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| They say their charge is going to be about half of the Elsevier
| fee, but Elsevier's net profit margin is 19%. So basically they
| are saying they can be more efficient than Elsevier, but they're
| still going to have a fee to publish as open access.
| drb493 wrote:
| Kudos to the editors for taking a stand.
|
| Absurd cost for publications was a major reason I left academia
| as a postdoc. Senior scientists with large grants and salaries
| write it off as a business expense but paying 2-3k for a paper is
| insane for junior staff that are already being underpaid.
|
| Arxiv and opensource publishing options exist. But for
| neuroscience, the funding and direction of research is implicitly
| governed by the reviewers and chief editors whom are embedded in
| these journals. Thus for your work to get exposure and citations
| it is critical to publish in the given journal for your domain.
|
| Journals have a reciprocal relationship with chief editors in
| that journals will publish "special" editions essentially
| allowing the editors to publish their work with their
| collaborators carte blanche. Switching to an open source model is
| objectively a better option, but there are entrenched incentives
| that prohibit this change.
| kelipso wrote:
| Salaries and underpaid? Not relevant since no one pays open-
| access charges with their own money. It always comes from the
| funding.
| statusfailed wrote:
| I (as a Ph.D student) paid open access fees with my own
| money. Not grant money, my own salary.
| kelipso wrote:
| That was a huge mistake on your part. You should never do
| that. If it's required by your grant, then get them to pay
| for it. If it's not required, then publish non open-access.
| foven wrote:
| Absolutely relevant. Had a huge issue with the University
| recently about being able to publish in a journal because
| they wouldn't pay the fees - every point at which there can
| be a problem, there will be.
| kelipso wrote:
| So you had issues using your funding to pay for open-access
| fees. Are you going to use your own money to pay the fees?
| You are not. You'll just submit the paper as non open-
| access. So your salary is not relevant here.
| foven wrote:
| No, the funding body specifies that all work has to be
| published as open-access. So if you publish without open
| access, you are getting yourself into trouble with the
| funding bodies which is a bad idea.
| kelipso wrote:
| Sure I get all that but you are literally never in any
| situation going to use your own money to pay for open-
| access fees. If you actually did that, sure, let me know
| lol.
| infogulch wrote:
| I'm struggling to understand what happened from your
| comments.
|
| So your funding source requires publishing as open
| access. (This is generally good imo, but details matter
| and challenges may remain.) But when you tried to publish
| in your selected journal the university objected... to
| what exactly? Allocating funds from the grant to pay for
| the publishing fee? Or did they have to pay out of
| pocket?
| chkgk wrote:
| A funding body grants you money and demands open-access.
| They often state very clearly that costs for publications
| (submission or publication fees, open access fees etc)
| cannot be paid from grant money. Thus, you need another
| source. The first address is your institute / department
| / faculty / university. If they decline to pay the open
| access fee, you are in trouble.
|
| That's actually common practice in a lot of fields.
| humanistbot wrote:
| > They often state very clearly that costs for
| publications (submission or publication fees, open access
| fees etc) cannot be paid from grant money.
|
| I think you've been misinformed. At least in the US, EU,
| Canada, and Australia, that's just not true. Public or
| private funders are telling grant writers to put open
| access publication costs in their budget or have other
| funds to pay for them. I only speak English, I'm so
| unsure of other non-EU countries. But this took just a
| few minutes of searching to find each agency's official
| policy or advice to grantwriters on this:
|
| US NSF: "The proposal budget may request funds for the
| costs of documenting, preparing, publishing or otherwise
| making available to others the findings and products of
| the work conducted under the grant. This generally
| includes the following types of activities: reports,
| reprints, page charges or other journal costs" [1]
|
| US NIH: "NIH continues its practice of allowing
| publication costs, including author fees, to be
| reimbursed from NIH awards." [2]
|
| EU ERC: "publishing costs (including open access fees)
| and costs associated to research data management may be
| eligible costs that can be charged against ERC grants,
| provided they are incurred during the duration of the
| project and the specific eligibility conditions of the
| applicable Model Grant Agreement are fulfilled" [3]
|
| All Canadian government research funding: "Some journals
| may require researchers to pay article processing charges
| (APCs) to make articles freely available. Costs
| associated with open access publishing are considered by
| the Agencies to be eligible grant expenses" [4]
|
| Australia National Health and Medical Research Council
| "over the grant lifetime, funds can be used to support
| costs associated with publications and open access such
| as article processing charges, which are the result of
| the research activity and which are in accordance with
| the DRC Principles." [5]
|
| Gates Foundation: "The Foundation Will Pay Necessary
| Fees. The foundation shall pay reasonable fees required
| by a publisher or repository to effect immediate, open
| access to the accepted article. This includes article
| processing charges and other publisher fees. " [6]
|
| Howard Hughes Medical Institute: "May use their HHMI
| budget to pay publication fees charged by open access
| journals" [7]
|
| [1] https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappg18_1/pappg_2
| .jsp#II...
|
| [2] https://publicaccess.nih.gov/faq.htm
|
| [3] https://erc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/document/fi
| le/ERC_...
|
| [4] https://science.gc.ca/site/science/en/interagency-
| research-f...
|
| [5] https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/file/18478/download?token=xC
| agap4H
|
| [6] https://openaccess.gatesfoundation.org/open-access-
| policy/
|
| [7] https://hhmicdn.blob.core.windows.net/policies/Open-
| Access-T...
| kelipso wrote:
| > A funding body grants you money and demands open-
| access. They often state very clearly that costs for
| publications (submission or publication fees, open access
| fees etc) cannot be paid from grant money.
|
| I don't believe you. Show me one source for this, and
| from a decently sized funding body if it's such common
| practice.
| not2b wrote:
| It comes out of the grant that also pays salaries, so
| excessive paper costs might mean that a research group can't
| afford to pay as many postdocs and grad students.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Or can't afford to pay the postdocs and grad students they
| do have what they are worth.
| kevviiinn wrote:
| They already don't
| robg wrote:
| 20 years ago Neuroimage was the journal researchers went to when
| their results were borderline unpublishable. Amazing how these
| publications manage to stay in business, no surprise they are
| raising publication fees paid by authors. While it's good to see
| editors vote with their feet, there are plenty of academics who
| will line up to take their place to burnish their CVs.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Neuroimage has been , ever since I've been in the field (let's
| say 2010), a very reputable, and definitely not the journal of
| last resort.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| > "Elsevier, based in Amsterdam, says that the APCs cover the
| costs associated with publishing an article in an open-access
| journal, including editorial and peer-review services,
| copyediting, typesetting, archiving, indexing, marketing and
| administrative costs."
|
| Taking Elsevier claims at face value is a bad idea, but an
| obvious solution would be make the authors responsible for all of
| the above. Which is basically the arxiv publishing model:
|
| https://info.arxiv.org/help/submit/index.html
| cpncrunch wrote:
| You can look at their financial results. Net profit margin is
| 19%:
|
| https://www.google.com/finance/quote/REN:AMS
| ska wrote:
| arxiv is a pre-print model, which is super useful but not the
| same thing.
| alecco wrote:
| I think a foundation with open accounting and paid reviewers
| would be a better trade-off.
| crote wrote:
| The arxiv publishing model does not do peer review, though. The
| papers on there aren't validated beyond a _very_ cursory look
| into whether it is basically spam or not.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| "copyediting and typesetting"? Ah, that would be where they
| take your article, already formatted using the LaTeX template
| _they_ made available, and completely change the formatting so
| that all the formulae and all the tables become unreadable.
|
| In CS you get this service for free. Neuroscientists have to
| pay for the privilege? Wow.
| seydor wrote:
| Not only that, i ve noticed they now charge more for reprinting
| an old picture in a new article. Years ago, in Rightslink the
| reuse rights for almost all the images was $0 , now it's $70-90
| and everybody has to pay, including students, nonprofits etc. The
| whole thing is just insane and the needle doesnt seem to move
| UhUhUhUh wrote:
| Will take one seminal paper to be published on Arxiv for the
| house of cards to collapse.
| Qem wrote:
| The publishers are working hard to give the term "open-access" a
| bad reputation in the scientific community, by charging
| researchers extortionate fees.
| YuriNiyazov wrote:
| I work for an academic publisher, so I'm deeply biased, but I'll
| say this: criticism usually consists of something like "it
| doesn't cost $6300 to publish one article", and that's true, but,
| it does cost that much to receive 15 articles for submission,
| peer review all of them, reject 14 and then publish 1. Remember:
| publishers don't charge for a rejected submission, but incurs
| costs with all of them.
| mattwest wrote:
| Remind me again how much the reviewers get paid.
| YuriNiyazov wrote:
| Nothing. Nice gotcha, bro. I never said reviewers get paid. I
| mean the internal machinery that needs to get 15 articles
| reviewed costs money - employees that search lists of
| potential reviewers for people with expertise in the relevant
| subfield, email the potential reviewers, wait for them to
| accept or reject a review request, coordinate the entire
| thing, etc. etc.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Yeah, emailing a handful of reviewers from a fixed list and
| following up via email definitely sounds like it costs
| $6300. What are the net profits of your employer? How much
| did the CEO make last year?
|
| Look, I understand that your livelihood depends on this but
| I encourage you to consider the possibility that the vast
| majority of academics who think journals like yours are
| leeches might have a point.
| YuriNiyazov wrote:
| Like I said in the very beginning, "I am deeply biased",
| which means that I have deeply considered this
| possibility, and I have heard many, many academics. This
| thread is a replay of something that has happened
| multiple times already.
|
| In my view, the arguments are much weaker than the people
| making them believe they are. I don't mean to say they
| hold no water. I just mean that they are not made from
| people who stare at financial spreadsheets day in/day out
| trying to make a red number become black.
| chairhairair wrote:
| [flagged]
| YuriNiyazov wrote:
| Yes, I'm sure that that @dang will be coming by shortly
| to tell you that you broke
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| lozenge wrote:
| You said it costs to peer review them. But they aren't
| reviewing them. If that's worth $6,000, the reviewers
| deserve $60,000/
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I don't agree with OP here but they are reviewing and
| rejecting some submissions.
| strangeloops85 wrote:
| As an academic editor for a society journal this is
| ridiculous. Most of this process is automated and takes a
| grand total of 15 mins of time. Also, Nature charging $10k
| for open access while PLOS charges more like $2k should
| tell you what's going on here
| YuriNiyazov wrote:
| Most publishers do not have this process automated, I
| assure you. Even so, the theory that an automated process
| requires no maintenance does not hold water.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > Most publishers do not have this process automated
|
| This kind of points to rent-seeking or cartel behavior,
| doesn't it? If this was a competitive market a publisher
| could get an upper hand by automating and offering their
| services at a lower rate.
| [deleted]
| glofish wrote:
| First the argument that we failed to automate it hence it
| is expensive is feels specious.
|
| But let's accept it at face value. And now take it all
| the way. Suppose you reject 15 papers for every single
| one accepted.
|
| And suppose that accepted pays $3K
|
| So what costs $200 per rejection?
|
| What is that work that you need to put in that adds up to
| costing $200 per rejection? Or $300 or $500?
|
| In my experience at least half (if not more) of the
| rejections come right from the editorial desk ... someone
| spending 5 minutes with the paper.
| YuriNiyazov wrote:
| For a high-prestige journal, you get 50 submissions per 1
| published article.
|
| Let's reject 80% of them right off the bat from the
| editorial desk.
|
| We now have twenty articles left to properly peer review.
| I had originally said 15, so let's make it 15.
|
| In order to get three peer reviews in an article, you
| have to email thirty people, because the conversion from
| "request to peer review" to "get a review" is 10%. So, to
| get 3 peer reviews, you have to email 30 people, and then
| maintain a funnel (some people dont respond, some people
| say maybe, some people say yes, but in a month, etc. etc.
| then reminders, follow-ups, etc.) until the peer review
| is done.
|
| $200. Let's say the total cost of an employee is $50 /
| hour (salary + insurance + taxes). Surely it's plausible
| that it takes a total of 4 hours, spread across multiple
| months, to maintain multiple (start at 30 and then drop)
| threads of communication that eventually get a review to
| completion.
|
| And I did not include in that calculation anything that
| even remotely includes any other administrative costs,
| or, heaven forbid, "how much the CEO makes"
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> In order to get three peer reviews in an article, you
| have to email thirty people, because the conversion from
| "request to peer review" to "get a review" is 10%. So, to
| get 3 peer reviews, you have to email 30 people, and then
| maintain a funnel (some people dont respond, some people
| say maybe, some people say yes, but in a month, etc. etc.
| then reminders, follow-ups, etc.) until the peer review
| is done.
|
| All that is either handled automatically -sending emails
| to people who submitted articles on online submission
| systems- or performed by unpaid editors -soliciting
| reviews, desk rejection or communicating with authors to
| request clarifications or respond to questions, chasing
| reviewers, and so on, and so forth.
|
| But, hey, if the editors in your journal get paid for all
| this drudgery, then please let me know where to apply.
| YuriNiyazov wrote:
| As I've already pasted elsewhere, you can apply to a
| publisher that pays its editors at
| https://www.mdpi.com/editors
| dalai wrote:
| I used to be an editor in a journal from one of the big
| publishers (not Elsevier). We searched for reviewers,
| invited them, reminded them when they were late in
| responding, evaluated their submissions, send the
| approvals, etc. And I didn't get paid a dime. All the
| publisher had to do was maintain the platform. And sure
| that costs money too, but the costs are shared between
| multiple journals and papers.
| YuriNiyazov wrote:
| Yea, that's not a good model. Better publishers have
| publishing managers, internal employees assigned to work
| with editors to get this done.
|
| From https://www.mdpi.com/editors "MDPI is headquartered
| in Basel, Switzerland. The in-house staff consists of
| Managing Editors, Assistant Editors, Production Editors,
| English Editors, Copyeditors, Data Specialists, Software
| Engineers and Administrative Specialists. Except for most
| English Editors, all are employed by MDPI and its
| subsidiaries and work at the MDPI offices. Our
| collaborating editors on our Editorial Boards are
| typically employed at academic institutions or corporate
| research facilities located all over the world.
|
| ...
|
| Assistant Editors process manuscripts through the peer-
| review and production procedures..."
| justeleblanc wrote:
| They're just people running the peer review and
| production systems (think the online submission system,
| solving technical issues, writing emails, etc). It's in
| the name: assistant. They're not the people looking for
| peer reviewers or doing anything scientific.
| YuriNiyazov wrote:
| As I point out in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35657036 the costs
| of having employees that "write emails" scales linearly
| with the number of submissions that are eligible for peer
| review, not with the number of papers that are
| successfully published.
| justeleblanc wrote:
| I'm sorry, have you ever been involved in the process of
| publishing a scientific paper as an author or editor?
| Because it clearly doesn't sound like it from your
| description in that linked comment. The numbers you write
| are just nonsense. The assistant editors also don't
| interact with submitters - that's typically handled by
| the online platform. They interact with authors when it's
| time for reviewing proofs, signing documents, etc. But
| all that only occurs after papers are already accepted.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| Maybe that's the problem? The cost should be for submission not
| for publishing? Dropping the cost by a factor of 15 sounds game
| changing.
| tgv wrote:
| I did my share of peer reviews. Mostly conferences, but that
| doesn't make a difference in this case: peer review doesn't
| pay. Those $6300 do not end up in the pockets of academics or
| institutes. Many journals even have a board of unpaid editors.
| YuriNiyazov wrote:
| Nowhere here do I claim that editors or reviewers get paid.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Didn't you say that it costs money to peer review 15
| articles, and reject 14? It's unpaid reviewers and editors
| who do virtually all the work to peer review and accept or
| reject articles, so why does it cost money to do all that?
| Where does the money go?
|
| I mean, I'm interested to know. I peer review for a few
| journals and I never make a dime, so where does all the
| money go?
|
| Come to that, why don't I get paid? It takes _days_ to
| review one journal article. Why is Springer or Elsevier
| making money from my toil and I make jack shit?
| YuriNiyazov wrote:
| For greater detail, see my responses at
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35657217
|
| and
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35657036
|
| I don't know specifically about Springer and Elsevier.
| From elsewhere in this thread, I learned that they expect
| the editors to do all the work recruiting reviewers and
| do it for free. I don't support that model. For
| publishers that assign internal staff that get paid a
| salary to help Editors recruit reviewers, it is far from
| unreasonable to spend $3K recruiting reviewers for 15
| papers, even while the actual work of reviewing is
| unpaid.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Sorry but I just don't believe that. Why would you pay
| people to do all that job when you can get an automated
| system to do it, or a researcher? That just sounds like
| trying to sell services that nobody needs and demanding
| to be paid for it.
| YuriNiyazov wrote:
| I am pretty sure we very quickly in this discussion
| jumped from "what the state of the industry is" to "what
| the state of the industry ought to be", a very common
| debate failure point. I am just telling you what the case
| is. When you say you don't believe me, you don't present
| an argument that demolishes my case and says why I am
| wrong, you are just telling me that the industry is not
| doing what it could be doing. But what you originally
| asked me is "I mean, I'm interested to know. I peer
| review for a few journals and I never make a dime, so
| where does all the money go?"
|
| I told you exactly where the money goes. You are entitled
| to an opinion that it's a bad way to spend the money, and
| that's fine. I happen to think that it's a suboptimal way
| to spend the money as well. But your question of "where
| does all the money go?" has been answered properly.
| tgv wrote:
| By Grice's maxims, you do.
| YuriNiyazov wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| I've now read
| https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html
| and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle
| and am curious how exactly I've claimed that; I am sure
| you are correct but it's not obvious to me.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I just don't see how this is possible. Most journals have
| volunteer editors, that need to find and send the article to
| volunteer peer reviewers all by themselves. I don't see how
| that would cost anything at all. At most, there is software
| that handles all of this, but there are numerous competing
| companies that offer complete off the shelf already hosted
| solutions for this, so I really doubt this software costs more
| than $10 per paper. Most journals seem to use Aries Editorial
| Manager, which doesn't list prices online.
|
| It's hard for me to see what journals are actually doing or
| offering other than web hosting, the $6300 seems like just rent
| seeking with the journals name.
| YuriNiyazov wrote:
| https://www.mdpi.com/editors
|
| "MDPI is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. The in-house
| staff consists of Managing Editors, Assistant Editors,
| Production Editors, English Editors, Copyeditors, Data
| Specialists, Software Engineers and Administrative
| Specialists. Except for most English Editors, all are
| employed by MDPI and its subsidiaries and work at the MDPI
| offices. Our collaborating editors on our Editorial Boards
| are typically employed at academic institutions or corporate
| research facilities located all over the world...
|
| Assistant Editors process manuscripts through the peer-review
| and production procedures..."
| speedgoose wrote:
| I would be curious to see the cost breakdown.
| YuriNiyazov wrote:
| I posted one in a different comment in this same discussion
| tree
| strangeloops85 wrote:
| The costs are minimal to handle rejected submissions. Most of
| the work is done by reviewers.
|
| And no it doesn't cost that much.. that's the rate with a fat
| 50% margin, corresponding to the massive profits Elsevier rakes
| in. It's just a tax on the system
| mattwest wrote:
| If you are a US taxpayer, you should be highly critical of
| exorbitant publishing fees of major journals. Grant money is
| automatically reduced by the rent seeking behavior of firms like
| Elsevier i.e. you are not getting your money's worth out of taxes
| which make their way through NSF et al.
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