As a matter of fact, I have been studying the economics of open access publishing. It's important to distinguish the price of open access publishing from the cost of open access publishing. Commercial publishers are hopeless because they are of course trying to make the most profit they can by obfuscating costs, practicing price discrimination, and shifting licensing fees through transitional models. ACM, IEEE, and others use their revenue from publishing to fund various other activities (like lobbying or outreach). There is a very interesting recent article about the _cost_ of publishing here: https://f1000research.com/articles/10-20/v2
Arxiv is useful for making stuff available, but peer review and professional publishing are still necessary for academics to advance and enhance their reputation. The peer review process is what typically establishes the quality of scientific work.
One thing that software people often overlook is the cost and value of human copy editing. Scholarly work often benefits from having a skilled editor correct grammar and formatting. Metadata and citations are incredibly important, and are usually mangled badly by lazy authors. If a journal accepts Microsoft Word (which is very common outside math and CS), then it has to be typeset to produce consistent PDF. All of this human effort costs money; perhaps a few hundred dollars per article.
In practice, however, I don't think much will change. In astronomy, and my subfield in particular, all papers are free on arXiv, and the publishing and referee process are almost more of an afterthought: the threat that you better produce a high-quality paper to get it officially published and usable in a job application.
But for research, arXiv is king. (There are even reports of some people no longer bothering submitting to a journal once they got tenure...)
If you can't pay the publication charges (usually paid by your grant), then there are other reputable journals in astronomy like MNRAS and Physical Review D. Physical review even let's you submit by importing from arXiv.
if reviewers work free, where does the bulk of the money go?
there is so much publicly-funded research bottled up in journals like science. how do we break this model so that taxpayer-funded research is more like wikipedia and available to all?
It's worth noting that the AAS is a nonprofit scientific society, and so has different incentives than a for-profit publisher like Springer. You can take a look at the AAS tax returns here: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/210...
In 2019 the Journals division reported $7.3M revenue against $5.6M expenses. Direct-paid salaries appear to be a minority of expenses; the AAS journals are hosted by IOP publishing (https://iopscience.iop.org/), so presumably IOP charges for its journal hosting platform are a significant proportion of the remaining expenses.
The estimated cost structure is 1% webserver operation, 1% indian editing team worsening submitted papers, 1% printing stuff that still is delivered on paper, 2% office staff, 25% advertising, 30% legal cost to harass and prosecute students, researchers and universities, 20% executive compensation, 20% dividends.
Publication charges for authors and students will probably rise for a factor of 2 or more... open access journals in technical fields are approaching $500 per page.
This will basically lock out people in the developing world from publishing in these journals.
That is a new round of FUD from the predatory publishing industry.
On balance, open access helps the developing world far more and costs less: Because access to journal and conference articles is now possible. Before open access, article fees around $50 for reading a single article meant, that to write an article you had to spend the $500 on the roughly 10 (usually more) related articles you needed to research and reference. To even get to the stage of writing an article, you need to read quite a few, impossible with the sky-high subscription fees that even rich western institutions balk at. And as everywhere, university libraries reimburse publishing fees out of the subscription cost they saved.
Open Access is cheaper, fairer and especially beneficial to education in the developing world.
Of course reading articles costs nothing on SciHub, but I guess the people you are working for don't want that to be known, eh?
I disagree. Most open access journals offer lower, and sometimes free pricing, for researchers from developing countries. For example PloS One (one of the main open access journals) offer free publishing to ~100 countries <https://plos.org/publish/fees/group-1-countries/>)
This does not affect the open access business model: Only a small fraction of papers is submitted by researchers in developing countries.
> Publication charges for authors and students will probably rise for a factor of 2 or more... open access journals in technical fields are approaching $500 per page.
There's a charge comparison table[0]. Prices are going up, but they'll be lower than the previous AAS Journals Open Access premium. Their sample paper prices are $60-225 per page (because AAS journals have "quanta" charges, where a quanta is a set number of words, a figure, etc.).
> JOSS (Journal of Open Source Software) has managed to get articles indexed by Google Scholar [rescience_gscholar]. They publish their costs [joss_costs]: $275 Crossref membership, DOIs: $1/paper:
>> Assuming a publication rate of 200 papers per year this works out at ~$4.75 per paper
Generally open-access charges the author. $1000-$2000 an article is typical. Research grant applications include modest conference and publication costs.
[+] [-] istillwritecode|4 years ago|reply
Arxiv is useful for making stuff available, but peer review and professional publishing are still necessary for academics to advance and enhance their reputation. The peer review process is what typically establishes the quality of scientific work.
One thing that software people often overlook is the cost and value of human copy editing. Scholarly work often benefits from having a skilled editor correct grammar and formatting. Metadata and citations are incredibly important, and are usually mangled badly by lazy authors. If a journal accepts Microsoft Word (which is very common outside math and CS), then it has to be typeset to produce consistent PDF. All of this human effort costs money; perhaps a few hundred dollars per article.
[+] [-] JuettnerDistrib|4 years ago|reply
In practice, however, I don't think much will change. In astronomy, and my subfield in particular, all papers are free on arXiv, and the publishing and referee process are almost more of an afterthought: the threat that you better produce a high-quality paper to get it officially published and usable in a job application.
But for research, arXiv is king. (There are even reports of some people no longer bothering submitting to a journal once they got tenure...)
If you can't pay the publication charges (usually paid by your grant), then there are other reputable journals in astronomy like MNRAS and Physical Review D. Physical review even let's you submit by importing from arXiv.
[+] [-] yawnxyz|4 years ago|reply
Covid certainly helped push the field in that direction, and eLife is going to only publish articles from preprints going forward: https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/e5f8f1f7/what-we-have...
[+] [-] panabee|4 years ago|reply
if reviewers work free, where does the bulk of the money go?
there is so much publicly-funded research bottled up in journals like science. how do we break this model so that taxpayer-funded research is more like wikipedia and available to all?
[+] [-] gammarator|4 years ago|reply
In 2019 the Journals division reported $7.3M revenue against $5.6M expenses. Direct-paid salaries appear to be a minority of expenses; the AAS journals are hosted by IOP publishing (https://iopscience.iop.org/), so presumably IOP charges for its journal hosting platform are a significant proportion of the remaining expenses.
[+] [-] corty|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] resoluteteeth|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yawnxyz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xqcgrek2|4 years ago|reply
This will basically lock out people in the developing world from publishing in these journals.
[+] [-] corty|4 years ago|reply
On balance, open access helps the developing world far more and costs less: Because access to journal and conference articles is now possible. Before open access, article fees around $50 for reading a single article meant, that to write an article you had to spend the $500 on the roughly 10 (usually more) related articles you needed to research and reference. To even get to the stage of writing an article, you need to read quite a few, impossible with the sky-high subscription fees that even rich western institutions balk at. And as everywhere, university libraries reimburse publishing fees out of the subscription cost they saved.
Open Access is cheaper, fairer and especially beneficial to education in the developing world.
Of course reading articles costs nothing on SciHub, but I guess the people you are working for don't want that to be known, eh?
[+] [-] resiros|4 years ago|reply
This does not affect the open access business model: Only a small fraction of papers is submitted by researchers in developing countries.
[+] [-] privong|4 years ago|reply
There's a charge comparison table[0]. Prices are going up, but they'll be lower than the previous AAS Journals Open Access premium. Their sample paper prices are $60-225 per page (because AAS journals have "quanta" charges, where a quanta is a set number of words, a figure, etc.).
https://journals.aas.org/oa/#charge_comparison
[+] [-] westurner|4 years ago|reply
>> Assuming a publication rate of 200 papers per year this works out at ~$4.75 per paper
> [joss_costs]: https://joss.theoj.org/about#costs
^^ from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24517711 & this log of my non- markdown non- W3C Web Annotation threaded comments with URIs: https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-24517711
[+] [-] elefanten|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] di4na|4 years ago|reply
I hope the ACM got the memo, cause i would really like to see them follow suit...
[+] [-] jrochkind1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gammarator|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peter303|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raincom|4 years ago|reply