This is an interesting related letter [0] from Don Knuth in 2003. Don Knuth was part of an editorial board that resigned from a journal out of protest to the pricing policies of the publisher. The letter gives detailed arguments.
Not unreasonable maybe, assuming of course that the taxpayers nation's public will additionally pay their dues for all research ever funded in other nations on which the present research built.
On a balance I think it simplifies a lot if most that information is just shared generously and openly. The funders can often get a head start on gains from technical applications anyway, though better access to the researchers and infrastructure built up for the purpose.
Some economically strong nations have a habit of recruiting researchers away from their original setting around the point in time when it becomes obvious that their work is valuable though. Maybe that shouldn't always be happening without restrictions?
A lot of big research is funded through philanthropy. For example, surgeons and medical oncologist can receive some large donations from their patients.
To this day, I still do not understand what can be a reasonable cause for a paper to cost >$50 just to read it. Besides greed of course. Editors review paper for free, authors pay to get paper published, taxpayers fund the research. What do the journal's staff actually do that worth that kind of money?
All those "publisher" middlemen can go eat dirt and I would be happy to shovel more dirt on them until they are 6 feet under. They do no work, take all the profit, and obstruct research and the spread of knowledge. Those are some of the worst scums of capitalism.
I'm honestly confused why researchers in one or a few fields haven't already gotten together and said e.g. "okay, instead of considering publishing in 'Cell' to be the most prestigious for biology, let start an open-source co-op journal called 'Flagella' that by design has exactly the same level of publication pickiness, and works with exactly the same peer-reviewers, as 'Cell'; and then let's all walk around getting signatures on these threshold trigger agreements at our field's conventions, where those agreements would say that that once we have enough people behind this, we'll all switch over to publishing in 'Flagella' at once, considering it to be just as prestigious as 'Cell'; and after that point, we will all be contractually bound to never publish in 'Cell' again."
(We see particular fields switching over to focusing on paper distribution through preprint archives rather than journals; but just using preprints for distribution doesn't solve the problem that journals solve — which is having a sports-like "hierarchy of prestigious competitions" where a paper can either "make it" to being published in the journal that's that field's equivalent to the Olympics, or it can "get stuck" publishing in some "bush league" journal; where this informs, as a first-gloss heuristic, how much attention you should pay to trying to understand the point the paper is making.)
A big issue is funding bodies/grant reviewers are mostly old guard who are happy with the status quo. Recently, a big journal was changing in a way that upset a large swath of such people. Unfortunately i can't remember what journal. But it was obvious they benefited substantially as they're more established.
> I'm honestly confused why researchers in one or a few fields haven't already gotten together and said e.g. "okay, instead of considering publishing in 'Cell' to be the most prestigious for biology, let start an open-source co-op journal called 'Flagella' that by design has exactly the same level of publication pickiness, and works with exactly the same peer-reviewers, as 'Cell'; and then let's all walk around getting signatures on these threshold trigger agreements at our field's conventions, where those agreements would say that that once we have enough people behind this, we'll all switch over to publishing in 'Flagella' at once, considering it to be just as prestigious as 'Cell'; and after that point, we will all be contractually bound to never publish in 'Cell' again."
There are several reasons why this has not happened.
1. The most important, researchers are not publishers and are already completely overloaded with other work (most academics typically work 60h+ a week). They neither have the time not expertise to get this started and make no mistake there would be a significant effort required to get this started.
2. There is a certain percentage of researchers who are quite happy with the status quo. These are typically the very successful researchers which don't lack funding so don't see a problem with this (obviously there are exceptions) . Unfortunately they are often also the ones who have a disproportionate influence so if they are not on board the effort is much harder.
3. The vast majority of researchers highly depends on publications in high impact journals for their grants, careers, jobs... (for younger researchers a publication in e.g. Nature can really set off your career). For a new journal to get a high impact takes at least several years, so this is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Before the journal has the high impact most can't afford to send their best work there, but without that work you don't get the impact.
#2 and #3 are arguments against the naive strawman version of this that I didn't say, where people just try to start a new journal and get people to publish in it. A threshold trigger agreement entirely short-circuits these problems: the journal doesn't exist at all, until enough people sign onto it; and then suddenly, after the threshold passes, the journal is immediately not just existent but pre-eminent in its field, and the old journal immediately kneecapped by a majority of the field being legally obligated to no longer publish in it, or subscribe to it. The "researchers happy with the status quo" would be left behind in a world where their comfy old journal suddenly stops publishing before the next issue comes out, due to an effective bank-run of churn; at which point they'll have to either raise their heads and look around to find out what's replaced it, or become irrelevant.
(This is a not an obscure technique — it's the bit of game-theory that Groupon is based on.)
Several governments have lists of "good" journals that "count" (tenure, grant considerations, etc), and those lists take into account things like impact factor over the past several years. Needless to say, there is a lot of inertia in the system beyond the authors themselves.
You're right, and many/most researchers want to publish in Nature, or Cell, or a handful of journals. They don't want the cheaper and well-regarded journal that's perfectly tailored to their research. Part of it is ego, part of it is funding requirements, part of it is academia's requirements. Publishers know that pay-to-read's days are counted, but it's actually a mission to convince researchers to use open access.
It's like recruiting the "best" faculty together and creating a new school. People would still not view the degree from it the same way they do one from Harvard. History and brand matter more than you would think.
It's not just that. I had only two articles published in well known journals, but in both cases the reviewers main criticism was that I didn't cite the reviewer's own article. It's an utterly corrupt system, something you learn to live with it when you decide to choose academic life.
> They do no work, take all the profit, and obstruct research and the spread of knowledge. Those are some of the worst scums of capitalism.
People like naking comparison to natural selection, hierarchies and food chains.
However they mistakenly believe that Lion is at the top of the food chain. Then they start discussing irrelevant issues, like if lion is being too mean to the herbivores.
Their understanding is fundamentally wrong - the lion is not at the top. The parasites that live in the lion are at the top.
The punlishers are parasites. They are at the top.
How does nature remove parasites, say tapeworms? It doesn't, only extenral intervention like surgery can remove them.
Most journal reviewers and editors are academics who do the work as public service, i.e. free. Even top spots like editor in chief only get an honorarium of maybe 10k a year. Considering these people are the top of their field and can easily command 6-7 figures salary at minimum, that amount is nothing. Only very few journals have full time editors and even those end up relying on the volunteers to vet and review articles.
A full time professor is expected to be an editor for some journals. And these academics make up the bulk of "journal editors". But they would not list it as their jobs. I suspect that is why if you look for "editor jobs" you will get lobsided salary ranges that doesn't reflect reality.
We are talking here about the (net) profit margin, not the operating margin. The link you gives confirms the net margin is 19%. Please delete or edit the unfounded personal attack in your comment, as it is uncivil and inappropriate for this forum.
So now we are hiding behind semantics? If 942M is 37% operating profit then with a tax rate of 22% the net profit is still 29% for the publishing arm. Still way higher than 19%.
You are confusing the parent company with the publishing part for that 19%, which is the main subject here. You are uninformed.
No, the difference between operating profit and net profit is not simply tax. It is not "semantics". The net profit is the actual profit of the company. I see you haven't removed your personal attack above, so this is the end of the discussion. You clearly cannot argue logically and civilly, so it's a waste of time.
Whatever, it does not imply that any part of that expense is editorial. In fact it could be lobbying costs, marketing and sales. Or the cost of maintaining the paywalled system, and copyright lawyers.
The www was quite literally designed for sharing scientific papers. Hosting them is a 1990s problem. The real cost is in building a paywall and enforcing it
Yes, peer reviewers tend to work for free. Can you give an example of an editor who works for free? I asked in the parent comment, but nobody has provided any examples (although they have downvoted it, oddly). I'm not aware of any editors who work for free for top tier journals.
Prestige journals with paid editors are the rare exception. Academic journals typically have active researchers volunteering as editors, because the prestige of a journal largely comes from the people in the editorial board.
It depends on the journal, but we're talking here about the journals such as Nature and Elsevier which charge large fees, and those journals do indeed pay their editors.
Elsevier literally has thousands of journals. They charge large fees but that goes to Elsevier for essentially hosting a website and gatekeeping. Maybe some of the really big journals like Nature pay but not those like "Journal of Algebra" or "Journal of Cleaner Production".
I'm sure they have people employed called "editors" but they are not the same as academic editors who decide what gets sent to reviewers.
There are tiers of editors - including both administrative and academic editors. The latter are rarely paid.
For example, I'm on the editorial boards of three journals: Epidemiology, PLoS Computational Biology, and Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology. I am compensated for none of them as an academic editor.
Disingenuous comparison. We are talking about Elsevier the journal publisher, not the parent conglomerate that also deal with legal, analytics, software and a bunch of other businesses.
You are confusing net profit margin with operating margin. The 37% figure is operating margin, whereas the net profit margin is 19%. From your link, it looks like the Scientific, Technical & Medical arm has identical margin to the parent corporation.
Frankly I dislike the situation as well but I like to play devil's advocate for a bit.
In some sense attaching a high cost to a paper is a crude way of proving the quality of the paper. Putting all of the cost with the authors is clearly not ideal, because you'd only measure how much someone is willing to pay to get it published. By placing the cost with the people reading the article you ensure that the publisher must ensure their articles are actually worth reading.
The fact that getting incentives to align requires a random party to get large profits without actually doing much is a quirk of capitalism. If you ignore the concept of private property for a bit you'll see that the obvious solution is to simply burn up the excess money (capitalists would attempt to sustain the illusion that money is indelible and privately owned by viewing this as a tax).
Cost =/= quality on papers, almost all of the "best writings of all time" are public domain, and many of the best papers absolutely free.
And most researchers want their papers to be free, to the point where you can email them and they will give you a free copy, and they post the preprints on arXiv and their personal website to get around publishing requirements.
The journals aren't there to help spread their content they're there to give the content a seal of authenticity. As long as they can show researchers/universities are willing to pay high fees they can claim that their contents must be worth that much.
Having free copies of the papers available doesn't actually hurt them much, provided they're still the source for 'authentic' copies.
(sidenote: not sure what field you're talking about where the best writings of all time are public domain but I've had to pluck quite a few famous papers of scihub instead)
You are interested in say a subset of research on morel mushrooms.
You know who the reputed people who publish are so you "follow" them and their profile. They did a new peer review of a newcomer and you get alerted. You check their work and are impressed so you follow them too.
Your favourite researcher Also curates "his" favorite researches and researchers on their blog so you are one click away from their opinions on what is good or bad.
Compare that with a "reputed journal". The way the system is designed, the journals work of sorting and filtering, the reader is expected to trust their research of choosing the work so you trust their judgment and you auto assume the work is good.
Why don't you democratize that work to domain experts itself and everyone helps everyone else. Isn't that the case with everything online?
That's not playing devil's advocate, that is playing clueless. It's the institutions paying for paper access, and not on a "per paper" basis; no ones incentives are being aligned, no one is actually paying $50 to read a paper.
If (as I claimed) it's just a token cost, I don't think it matters much who is paying it. In fact it is almost better if they get to claim universities find it worth an expensive subscription, it's not like they're trying to cover costs they're putting up a barrier to show it is worth the trouble.
Scientific publishers have high profit margins, but the prices are still within the right order of magnitude. Most research papers have a very narrow target audience. Publishers do a nontrivial amount of typesetting and administrative work for each paper, and that must be covered by a small number of downloads.
Publishing scientific papers should not be profitable or even financially sustainable on its own.
The activity we need to fund is the research itself. If we don’t allow profiteering from publishers, let’s not pretend would ever see the papers or that the research wouldn’t happen.
Uh, they don't fund the research, they don't pay the reviewers, and they charge money to publish. They provide exact formatting rules and documents for all submissions, and reject if improperly formatted.
I'm not sure where you get this idea that they are doing any significant typesetting, or that their administrative costs are anything remotely reasonable - even the journal editors are also largely unpaid (because being the editor of a journal can be helpful when trying to get a job in academia).
I think it depends on the field. In Computer Science, all of the points you make are hilariously wrong. They are true in older fields (though those are slowly catching up with technology).
If anything, CS journals are more old-fashioned than those in natural sciences.
My least favorite part of publishing a CS journal paper is checking the proofs (in typesetting sense). I have already typeset the paper using LaTeX with the journal's template, but the journal almost always wants to typeset it again using another system. That apparently involves a lot of manual work by their staff. In the process, they introduce many errors into the paper, some of which are random and others which are consistently wrong. I have to compare my PDF to the publisher's version visually to spot the errors. And there is usually only 48 hours allocated for that part, despite the publication process taking 1-2 years.
Covered by downloads? Definitely not, they're more than covered by the contracts that they have with academic libraries to sell back the published papers to the institutions
Of course most of the money comes from subscription fees, and of course both the publisher and university monitor the number of paper downloads. While the actual numbers are not public, it's reasonable to assume that the subscription fee divided by the number of paper downloads covered by it is within an order of magnitude of the price of an individual paper.
My point was that it's covered irrespective of the number of times a paper gets downloaded or read. The papers could get read 0 times but they're still making bank as long as they have those library contracts
And my point was that the average number of times a research paper gets read is low, regardless of whether it's behind a paywall or freely accessible. Given the costs of commercial publishing, the average cost of reading a paper must be high, no matter who pays for it and how.
This is amazing. Some types of industries should not operate under capitalism and research is probably one of those industries, at least for life-saving research.
I’d argue that intellectual property is not capitalism (or real property). The government can’t give you the right to an idea, nobody is stealing from you by copying your book or painting.
"In most cases the copyright term is the life of the author plus 50 years, but for cinematographic and photographic works and works created by a company or organization the term is 50 years after first publication."
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.
“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.
Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?
Publishing, editing and the prestige assigned to certain journals can't me done completely for free. But it sure has gotten a lot more cheap and convenient to read papers on a computer via arxiv or even a PDF than in a physical printed journal. I do look forward when we have a well run open source SCIence HUB.
Apparently PubMed Central, which has a very large repository of articles (millions), costs about US$ 3 million per year to provide free-to-user access. They only provide what publishers allow, however.
What needs to change is the whole “exclusivity” thing. The large publishers have the entire market captive, efffectively forcing exclusivity agreements on authors by means of a rights transfer. This prevents any competition.
There are a lot of smart people who do research and write papers about what they discover. But sometimes, these papers are not easily available for everyone to read. They might be behind a paywall or take a long time to become available. Well, now the European Union (EU) wants to change that. They want all research papers that are paid for with public money to be available right away for everyone to read, without any fees. They also want to support ways of publishing these papers that don't cost money. This could be a big change for how research papers are shared with the world!
Publication fees are like, #982 on the list of things driving tuition. You want to solve the student loan crisis, the first place I'd look is the evaporation of state funding for higher education from the 2008 crisis that was never restored, and will be cut again the next time the economy takes a hit.
I don't think I was being particularly hostile, but honestly? Because I'm tired of seeing another round of programs meant to help students succeed and remain in college, having to sort through lists of journals that are going to be slashed to see if there's any I need to make an appeal for, and having more and more administrative work shifted to faculty in the name of budget cuts while the state economy booms.
[0]: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf