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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

It's surprising what a big deal "author fees" are. A historian told me recently that when submitting articles to one major journal, there's a checkbox saying "I want this work to be in the public domain". If you select it, the system automatically adds $5,432 to your bill. That wasn't the exact number, but it was about $5k. In his field, and surely for most academics, that's prohibitive, and an odd way to treat people who are already effectively giving their work away. Yes, journal economics and so on, etc., but something's got to give here.

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$5k is about the top of the scale. Nature, Cell, etc can get that. More typical is the $1,500 range (OA publisher PLoS One is about that). One of the most interesting things to see is that the big winner of the APC (article processing charge) landrush is Elsevier. The Wellcome Trust published data about who they are paying APCs to, and the biggest player was Elsevier: http://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2014/03/28/the-cost-of-open-acces... So it's interesting to see the (at least short-term) winners in the rise of APC-based open access are still the same big publishers, at least for now.

Can you imagine if every scientist sent Wikipedia 20% of their journal fees? What would they do with that much money?

Wikipedia is notoriously poor on science, particularly cutting edge. That's the wrong model.

That's surprising, since their math and CS stuff is usually pretty good.

The thing with math (and abstract CS) is that it's generally purely logic. In principal you should be able to write (at least verify) an entire article with no outside references as it is all logical deductions, it's armchair science in that sense (no negative connotations meant).

But if you're going to write an article on say quantum computing or confocal microscopy, to name random things, you are going to need outside references to experimental work, history, best practices, open debates, etc. And that is usually where the errors slip in, how many people actually check the sources properly?

They're also usually pretty terrible when it comes to modern science things, but I suppose that can be attributed to a small group of people actually knowing about those things in the first place.

This is for a very narrow definition of maths. Also it's rare that a paper is completely comprehensive. Some proofs are usually defered to other papers.

Wikipedia - and encyclopedias in general - are good sources for established works, not the cutting edge. I think this applies to computer science as well. The CS material on Wikipedia that you would expect to find in an undergrad curriculum is excellent. But the treatment for the research areas I am familiar with is not good. That, however, is to be expected - we're still figuring it out!

I think the open data approach, where readers do not pay, but authors do, shows who really is the customer in the academic publishing business: the authors who must publish to advance in their career.

It used to be that the reader, as someone who needs reliable information in a field, payed a journal so that the people could work for guaranteeing the quality of the articles. Now the authors pay the journals to rubber stamp their articles with an often cargo-culted peer review, so that they can keep receiving grants.

I am all for giving free access to information; but if you want reliable information in a competitive field such as academia, where people have all incentives to cut corners, cook data, embellish results etc., you have to pay someone to do it.

You think that's nuts, consider that I just did a review and got paid nothing!

$5k is surely high, but from a researcher/professor point of view I don't think it's prohibitive, especially if you compare it with papers accepted to conferences where you need to cover travel and staying, sometimes maybe for 2 people. It's just sad that you have to pay for openness.

It depends on the country. In many countries funding agencies will just not give you $5K to pay for open access fees. Conferences that involve intercontinental travel are already prohibitive for many academics, by the way, and more than two people going is quite a luxury. In my university, the most normal thing to do if we get several papers at a conference is that a single person goes and presents them all, and many research groups don't do conferences in other continents (or only when they have some international coauthor that can go).

I totally agree, I'm just saying that often the cost for conferences is also high/comparable. Here $5k is intended for a major journal. Similarly is for conferences, I remember traveling from Italy to the US only for ACM CCS (one of the top conferences in security). For "standard" conferences the budget was "standard" :) Again, I won't repeat it enough, I'm not saying is good paying for openness.

> $5k is surely high, but from a researcher/professor point of view I don't think it's prohibitive

This is not true, $5k is a lot of money. It is certainly more than what traveling to a conference cost! I'm in France, and even going to California for a week, including plane tickets, accommodation, food, and conference registration is less than $5k. The thing is we are sometimes told to target journals rather than conferences because "there is no more budget this year" for instance. If we had to pay $5k to publish in journals we would just be told not to publish in these journals.

But those are not the fees the Gates foundation are going to pay. They are talking about the somewhat lower fees payable to open-access journals. E.g., some $2000 for PLOS journals, if I remember correctly.

What you describe appears to be the opt-in open-access option provided by commercial academic publishers such as Springer or Elsevier. If you ask me, this option is probably there so that they can say they accommodate open access; they don't really expect many researchers to pay them.

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