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Comment by sgt101 | Hacker News Reader

Getting papers refereed and distributed does cost. I think many journals are now charging more than £1k for accepting papers for open access, conferences charge fees ~£.5k or more (+ travel). Of course you can submit to arXiv, but that's moderated - not refereed and is sponsored by wonderful people - but what if one day the people paying for it stop being so wonderful.

In the past the cost of papers was paid on the demand side and borne communally, now the cost is paid on the supply side. Science still values paper counts and citation counts - but it seems to me that folks who can afford publication now have an unhealthy advantage that they didn't used to!

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In most fields, referees are volunteers, and the editors who coordinate them are volunteers or get some trivially tiny recompensation. Distribution costs of a paper should be about as high as those of a blog post.

There's more to running a journal than that - you have formatting editors who make the PDF look good and give it a thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never found - missing or switched references, for example). The actual per-paper costs seem to be a few hundred dollars, as written in this article:

http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie...

Profit margins are amazing though, it really pays to get into publishing. Elsevier (not all open access, and rather dodgy to many) is one of the most profitable businesses in the world: https://medium.com/@jasonschmitt/can-t-disrupt-this-elsevier...

make the PDF look good

Yeah, as in forcing you to submit in an artificially crappy template with horrible double spacing (which is awful as a reviewer) to then apply their standard template and voilà! The paper looks good.

give it a thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never found - missing or switched references, for example)

They do that (with varying quality) but it's quite aggravating that they charge thousands of dollars mostly for that, while peer review, which is much harder, is done for free.

https://cr.yp.to/bib/20050504-copyediting.txt

> you have formatting editors who make the PDF look good and give it a thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never found - missing or switched references, for example).

This may depend on the field, but in CS I have never seen this. There is essentially no change made by the publisher to papers, and when they do make changes, more often than not it is to introduce errors.

In any case, the huge profit margins of publishers indicate that the cost of this dubious service is much lower than the charge.

But the most important point is this: doing minor copyediting shouldn't be grounds to own the journal and own copyright on the published articles. The journals should be owned by scientists, or by a nonprofit scientific society. Even assuming that research needs to pay for copyediting services, these should be contractors of the nonprofit (with competition among them), not owners of the journal and articles.

In the biomedical fields, many articles have to be deposited on PubMed Central, which requires them to be reformatted in their archival JATS XML format. Since articles are typically written in Word in those fields, this process involves a lot of manual tagging of references and figures and such, only partially aided by scripts. The process must incur a fairly hefty cost in maintaining warehouses full of people to do the tagging.

In principle it's great that articles are uniformly in XML -- you could easily write reader software for tablets or phones, data-mine the text, extract references, whatever -- but I haven't seen much software taking advantage of it.

Typically there is a "script", not the code kind, that is followed for every dodgy Word document received, and following the script is outsourced. The production team is in charge of coordination with the outsourced team and final proofing of the XML and all the vagaries of pre publication that comes from 90s era processes and software and interactions with other ancient systems.

However! Once published and out the door, the shiny XML is available for scraping and transformation, and, if OA, there is no reason the XML can't be made public: https://github.com/elifesciences/elife-article-xml

An excellent bit of software that takes advantage of it is Lens: https://github.com/elifesciences/lens

So... require that the scientists submit the articles in JATS instead of Word files or PDFs? LaTeX already knows about the stuff you mentioned, so it shouldn't be too hard to make it output JATS directly. In fact, that already seems to exist[1].

[1]: https://github.com/mfenner/pandoc-jats

In geophysics I also see lots of polishing, and that helps the quality a lot (though you have to be vigilant as author and always check the new version lest some fix to an assumed typo changes the meaning of a sentence in a subtle-but-important way).

You must be joking. There is a lot in the line for an academic journal and its website. First one need an submission and review system, after a paper accepted there is proofreading and art department, and editors also need to decide whether to invite someone write a commentary on which paper, and subsequent comment and response section if a paper raise questions/interest, then billing department and production for the physical magazines who also handle the preprints(EDIT: should be "reprints"). Finally the website platform which keeps all those digital versions of current and previous publications. I am just talking about this from an end user point of view, and I believe there are other things behind curtain we are not familiar such as deciding the future directions of a journal, writing press release, etc. Also journals do promote themselves, which inevitable incur costs.

As already pointed out, the costs of peer review and distribution are tiny in comparison to what is actually charged. The $1000 cost thing looks like an improvement but isn't, really. It asks authors to pay so that the publisher can claim to support open access but without impacting their fatcat bottom line.

Elsevier et al are nothing but leeches on the back of the academic community. They provide zero benefit and need go to the fuck away.

The yearly budget of arXiv is ~$1M.

I don't see a reason why science couldn't flourish on a non-anonymous message board such as reddit or twitter in place of peer review. This is all matter of momentum. And of fear of open criticism.

And a fear to introduce accountability for reviews: what if the review is technically wrong?

With the anonymous system we have today, there are no wrong reviews.

Ouch, you would be amazed at the trickery involved in refereeing.

Drop a couple of citations and you end up with a 90% probability of getting your desired reviewer...

And many more.

Ok my statement wasn't completely clear: in the current system there are by definition no wrong reviews

OK: I thought you night mean this, and that is right, and a problem, a big one.

I dare you when you use your real name to criticize a recent paper of top guru in field is total garbage and never has a moment worrying about subsequent funding application which the guru usually serves the reviewing board.

A professor of mine (of philosophy of economics and scientific methodology) was effectively banned from several major journals in his field for roughly ten years because he made an argument about labourers' stock ownership in a Marxist economist conference—and one of the audience members was an influential chairman in those journals.

People seem to think that there is no politics in academia and science, and that everybody is automaton-rational people with no ulterior motives. Very, very wrong...

Most Open Access journals have special exemptions for poor scientists, institutions, and countries. On Elsevier and Hindawi and IEEE, if you are from a low income country, Open Access publishing is free.

> I think many journals are now charging more than £1k for accepting papers for open access

How about papers in the public domain?

Could you clarify?

Public domain concept does not exist in a lot of countries so what would be the legal frames there?

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