While I’m pursuing my degree in planning I actually work in printing, so I’m aware of the typesetting, printing and associated costs. It is actively difficult to get those costs above $10 an issue for even the lowest volume publications. Call it 100% profit and another 100% for administrative costs beyond the print and postage side and it is actually hard to get above 30 bucks an issue. So you’ve got a clearly ludicrous price structure paired with the mammoth social damage caused by restrictive access and it is hard to imagine a better set of circumstances for backlash.
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That’s the print cost. The online cost is a bit lower.
It’s 7,500 pages a year,
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I’m seeing a more agreement than disagreement in this thread.
To sum:
- “Free” isn’t a thing.
- “Reasonable” is what is desired.
- This is important.
- Fuck Elsevier.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you get it in a package with 60 journals you don’t want it’s even cheaper.
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Excerpta Medica Full Set Series: $133412
Pharmacology Package: $73808
Yeah, those are packages. seems that $20,000 per title is a line that won’t be crossed until next year.
https://www.elsevier.com/books-and-journals/journal-pricing/print-price-list
While I’m on board with the venom directed at Elsevier it’s not just the pricing that’s the problem at Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley. It’s also the byzantine license agreements for package deals that allegedly save libraries money by capping the subscription price increase of most journals for a set period.
There is of course the old, “We added this journal last year and as a new addition to your package it’s not covered by the agreement so we’re increasing the price 25%.”
I understand publishing is a costly business but I also wonder where most of that money goes since large publishers have such minuscule customer service departments to deal with problems. I remember having trouble getting the library’s online access to a Springer title activated because the one person who handled that was out of the office.
Finally someone at a higher administrative level contacted Springer and said, bluntly, “We’re paying you $1 million per year. How is it you only have one person who handles online access?”
Cornell University has been doing their sticker shock exhibits since at least 2001 and the problem has only gotten worse.
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Social alchemy…haha. Don’t think I’ve heard that one before. I actually studied literature, not social science (and wrote my thesis on a video game, of all things). I then ran screaming from academia and got into organizing (what most academics would call praxis, which still gives me a case of the lol’s).
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I’m jealous that somebody has an article with that title on their resume.
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The same groups who pay for the research in the first place: Universities and funding agencies, public and private. You can add professional societies in as well.
There’s no reason we can’t have, say, a Journal of the Department of Agriculture or a Journal of the NIH.
Many professional societies do have journals, some quite good. Universities are already subsidizing most journals in the sense that content and refereeing is done on faculty salary. I’m not sure there is so much money floating around that they can afford more.
This doesn’t solve the problem that the currently-most-prestigious journals are mainly private and that young faculty need to publish in the most prestigious journals they can since journal ranking is used as a measure of research quality by hiring and tenure committees.
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Believe me, as a young faculty member, I know. It’s all about impact factor. (Which is a pretty damn lazy way of evaluating research and is kind of poisoned by a few big money disciplines having a cite-everything-under-the-sun style.)
The funding by universities I was actually thinking of would be direct. Have more in-house journals. (Maybe twist the arms of senior faculty into publishing in them. Eh, maybe that’s impossible.) I’m thinking of a number which are already quite prestigious. A few of them even have my stuff in them.
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What “more” needs to be afforded? One database per institution, or one global database maintained collectively.
The concept of the limited-pages paper journal is obsolete. Virtually nobody “reads journals” these days; researchers use database queries and google alerts to access pdfs. We don’t need to recreate and duplicate all of the unnecessary cruft of traditional journal production; streamline the publication process as much as possible while maintaining/improving peer review standards. Bits and bytes are cheap, and the mutual-volunteer review structure is already established.
The artificial scarcity of there only being room for X number of papers to be published each month is no longer necessary. There is no good reason why we should not be publishing every bit of research that is of acceptable academic quality, regardless of how exciting the subject matter may appear to an editorial board. The marginal cost of adding one more pdf to a collective academic database is trivial.
This would be key to defeating the anti-replication and positive result biases. The history of science teaches us that journal editors tend to have been somewhat unreliable in judging the long-term importance of research; better to publish it all and let hindsight make the editorial decisions.
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Tangential thought: why the hell are we still paying attention to journal-based “impact factor”? You can easily calculate impact factor for individual researchers these days.
About 90% of the time when I’m reading research I’m not even aware of what journal it was published in. I only look at the journal name when I’m writing a citation or if something seems sketchy about the paper.
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I certainly agree with this in principle, but it does allow for some objectivity. If I am on a tenure committee at the campus level looking at tenure applications, how do I judge the quality of the candidate’s research? There will be outside letters, but the department might manipulate this either for or against the candidate by the choice of who they solicited the letters from. Journal quality allows some kind of objective validation of the more careful evaluation. Likewise, in many governments money is allocated to public universities based on research quality, and while journal rank is arguably an inaccurate measure it is better than just giving the money based on common prejudice as to the department’s prestige (eg, only to Russell Group institutions in the UK).
This might work if money could be diverted from library budgets, and if the load could be distributed fairly across universities. However, as a couple of us have tried to point out, there are expenses in producing a journal beyond the simple printing costs. The $2000/article PLOS uses is not an unreasonable estimate of these expenses for an online journal.
Management time, copyediting, charges by the DOI and index companies, archive costs, publicity. Other things I’m not thinking of because it is late on a Friday and I am tired.
There are already journals for nearly everything; the reason people decide to publish in the Annals of Mathematics rather than the Antarctica Journal of Mathematics is that everyone respects the care with which papers in the former have been vetted, and while there might be a gem hiding in the latter…no, honestly, there isn’t. If you’re an active researcher it is hard enough to keep up with important research without it being unfiltered.
Even the ArXiv, which started as a general repository, now has filters in place, hence the existence of ViXra.
Hence the need for good search engines…which would be easier to do if the research was all in one place instead of scattered across hundreds of low-quality paywalled private sites.
My background is behavioural neuroscience and psychopharmacology; there isn’t really an ArXiv equivalent in the Life Sciences, and there are major issues surrounding what can and can’t get published. “Sexy” papers get the top spots (whatever illegal drug is in the news that week, whichever medical drug the pharmas are promoting…), while replications get bottom-drawered (especially failed replications).
High-variability research targets such as are common in the life sciences need reliable publication of replication testing. Burying the failed tests and negative findings completely breaks the logic of the inferential statistics that the life sciences rely upon.
Apart from that, my experience has been that the top journals vet for news appeal rather than quality. The standards of peer review that I experienced were not impressive [1], regardless of the impact factor of the journal.
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[1] Obvious self-promotion (“why haven’t you cited my paper that isn’t even published yet?”), critique of things not actually in the paper, demands for things already done, a preference for discredited but traditional statistical methods rather than modern more reliable methods, etc.
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Which can’t replace expert evaluation and filtration.
The standards of peer review that I experienced were not impressive
I agree that this is an issue, and part of the problem is that (a) there is little positive incentive to do review, (b) many active researchers don’t do their fair share of peer review (which should probably be around 3 papers for every paper you submit), (c) editors don’t earn enough (often nothing at all) to devote enough time to do a good job of weighing the reviews, but mainly (d) there is so much junk submitted that it is sensible to default to “reject” rather than “accept”. Pressures to publish in quantity, including pressures to publish even in parts of academia (like community colleges) that were traditionally free of such pressure, has created more traffic than the industry can handle, as well as a tendency to slipshod authorship. (Jesus Christ people, at the very least spell-check your manuscript before you submit it.)
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I’m not suggesting we remove expert evaluation and filtration (i.e. peer review, preferably done better than at present).
I’m suggesting that this review should be based solely upon the degree to which the science was conducted and communicated competently, rather than publication being determined by the desire of journal editors to attract advertisers and news coverage.
It doesn’t immediately require the review of any more papers; just stop rejecting things on the grounds of “not newsworthy”. The only significant increased workload is in having to typeset and copyedit it, and the journals have already palmed 90% of that onto the authors anyway.
Most fields of research are not in immediate danger of being buried in irrelevant literature. For the drug that was my major research topic, the entire corpus at the start of the investigation consisted of one decades-old brief synthesis note. Many “accepted facts” in biology and medicine are based upon a single research paper of questionable reliability.
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I made it up recently. Feel free to use it. Someday the bits of the humanities which aspire to be sciences might get there but for now alchemy is really the best way to describe them.
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