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Comment by hectorr1 | Hacker News Reader

The practice of charging for subscriptions to information that benefits the public good seems silly. Publishing fees make sense, researchers would work the costs into their grant proposals and taxpayers would ultimately bear the cost there instead of in university departmental budgets.

But I also know nothing about running a journal. Can someone explain the cost structure of an academic journal, and why a model like publishing fees wouldn't work?

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Most of the work is done by academics who receive no compensation from the publisher. Most importantly, it is expected that one participate in peer review. Fundamentally, there's nothing wrong with a reciprocal model of review, but why should publishers get to enjoy enormous profit margins on said work when they're not the ones doing it? Authors don't receive any money from subscriptions or access fees, either. Editors sometimes receive some compensation, but very little. There's just not a lot that the publishers do. It seems unfair that they should be the only ones to profit monetarily from academics' work.

It's not that publishers do little (there's a lot that you don't usually see, but it's not the peer review), just that not all of it is that necessary, and that it still pales in comparison to the prices they charge.

In physics at least you need to write and typeset your own papers for the most part.

Look at arxiv.org, that papers there are made purely by academics from start to finish and are already publication grade (if not better).

Yes, physics (and most disciplines on arXiv) is relatively special. Although for some reason physicists still mostly submit there work to the journals in addition to placing them on arXiv...

(That said, typesetting and writing are more and more often offloaded to academics, but there's also things like e.g. making HTML versions and system-readable versions [1] available, which is a cumbersome manual process.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_for_Metadata_Harvesti...

It depends on the field, but you're forgetting that arXiv does not do peer-review. Just because publishing is broken and yes peer-review has issues doesn't mean peer-review isn't needed.

On the one hand that's an important point, but on the other hand, the formal process of peer review as currently arranged by journals has many flaws, and the reason arXiv is so popular in fields like physics is that they want their results "out there" for others to use as soon as possible - i.e. people start to use it before it's been peer reviewed. In fact, the comments one receives after publishing it in arXiv often make its way into the submitted manuscript.

So yes, peer review is useful, but it also often happens after publication at arXiv, outside of the journal submission.

Reviewers certainly shouldn't be the ones profiting from it, that would be an absurd conflict-of-interest. Publishers do some work, but I think it's mostly the long-tail problem. The popular stuff is subsidizing the large number of very very esoteric. Unbundling might help.

You're mistaken. Paying reviewers would only cause a conflict of interest if it biases reviewers in a particular direction. Which direction would that be?

Paying the reviewer doesn't incentivise them to accept or reject only to actually do the review. As it stands, in many fields reviewers are far from experts in the area they're reviewing but only in the same general discipline. Papers sail through review without proper statistical oversight, because what statistics expert is going to spend their time reviewing psych or bio articles when that's not their discipline?

Well if we paid people to do what amounts to some of the most important work in science, maybe we'd get actual experts to do it!

Or, you get charlatans who review for money.

That's a danger, for sure, but once you're paying people you can generally be more choosy. CVs can be reviewed as can previous review work.

No one suggests that paying programmers to program results in shoddier work. There just needs to be an accountability and feedback system just like in any other industry.

I'd have to think of it, but I think reviewers would have a conflict-of-interest if they were paid based on the result of their reviews. If they are compensated to just review a paper either way I don't see the issue.

Depends on what they believe the purpose of the review is. They'll be incented to do whatever gets them more reviews.

Can you explain the conflict you see?

The editor would still pick reviewers based on reputation, they'd just get a lump sum along with the work.

That's actually how the UK and the Netherlands have been pushing for Open Access: by paying the publishers for publishing an article.

The problem is that this keeps the barrier to participate high - instead of paying to read research, you're paying to publish it.

Now, this isn't necessarily a problem: research costs money, and publishing that research is just part of that. However, the prices are widely considered disproportionate: ranging from $3000 to $5000 per article in the traditional journals (that researchers feel obliged to publish in because that helps their careers), with profit margins of 30% to 40% (comparable to Apple's, which sells luxury products).

Considering how technology has drastically lowered the prices of most other types of media publishing, it's suspicious that prices of academic articles have only risen.

There's a huge movement to improve this situation, but it's a pretty difficult market with many different actors with different incentives. I've written some about why it is difficult to change this at [1].

[1] https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...

Publishing fees could introduce a perverse incentive for publishers to accept any paper regardless of quality. Although maybe making it a "review fee" may be better. Publishers get more money the more submissions, but quality would still be maintained. Otherwise, I agree with you.

All things being equal, a journal that charges a subscription will out-compete a journal that charges publishing fees because it shifts fees from the researcher to a bunch of schools.

The schools are relatively cost insensitive as long as the journal is high impact.

Researchers will always be highly cost sensitive.

Not to say whether they are a good idea or bad idea in general, but on thing worth considering is that publishing fees also act as a barrier to entry for less well-funded groups. Some journals even charge fees to submit (even if you are rejected in the end). This can be especially problematic for interdiscinplinary work -- in my field (applied math) grants are generally smaller, and if I submitting a paper to a biology journal that charges a submission fee up front is not always a triial decision.

That fee is called a "page charge", and many journals have them. Some are mostly supported by page charges, some open-access journals are entirely supported by them.

As far as I understand it, page charges are actually often charged for subscription journals as well upon publishing. The publication fees sometimes (but not always!) charged by Open Access journals are called Article Processing Charges.

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