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Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

“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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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-...

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.

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.

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

That would be preferable to the current norm, but I agree it wouldn't be ideal. With further terms attached to government research funding, that could be addressed too. The resulting work shall not be published in an outlet where fees exceed $X. That would also close the door on researchers being tempted to spend their own money on publishing in a more impressive publication.

A similar approach could be taken to prohibit publication in journals with embargo periods, i.e. paywalling for a couple of years before permitting open access. [0] For publicly funded research, that isn't acceptable either.

If such rules are applied consistently from all funding sources, the game would change quickly, by necessity. Collective bargaining where the government holds all the cards, essentially.

That's how I see it, at least. I'm not a researcher, and I'm not an expert on open access.

The current norm strikes me as plainly outrageous. Huge sums of tax money being handed over to publishers who make it their business to withhold tax-funded research from the people who funded it. It also strikes me as fixable. It's a tragedy of the commons, and the government has the power to force the matter and resolve the problem.

On the plus side, it looks like there's a real push to do this kind of thing. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access#Embargo_periods

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

In my world (I am a researcher btw) I think expensive open access already is the current norm. But you're right, funders could start to impose limits. (Though I'm sure someone would raise an objection if they did, and I'd be interested to see what that was: your move, publishers!)

On a related note, reviewing work is highly skilled and usually unpaid. If (and that's a big if) we wanted to fix that, we'd have to make fees higher again.

> reviewing work is highly skilled and usually unpaid. If (and that's a big if) we wanted to fix that, we'd have to make fees higher again

I'd be ok with that. Off the cuff, the way I see it there are a few options:

1. [Perhaps acceptable] The party behind the submitted paper pays the reviewers for their efforts. This might be done via the publisher, but that's just detail. The reviewers' employers do not treat reviewing as a work activity, i.e. reviewing work is done out of hours.

2. [Acceptable] The reviewers' employers pay the reviewers, treating review work as a routine part of their scientific duties.

3. [Acceptable, likely preferable] (Combining 1 and 2) The reviewers' employers pay the reviewers, treating review work as part of their scientific duties. The party behind the submitted paper pays the reviewers' employers, in compensation for the time spent on reviewing. This has the advantage that reviewing work can be neatly accounted for by all parties, and that, ideally, reviewing work need not be viewed as an additional professional burden atop ordinary working hours. (Whether that's likely to really work out given general academic career pressures, I'm not qualified to say.)

4. [Unacceptable] The reviewers go unpaid for their efforts, and only do the work out of an economically perverse sense of noblesse oblige

> 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.

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.

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