As @JonS pointed out, if Elsevier didn’t make an absurd profit putting articles behind paywalls, these wouldn’t be needed. In one of the journals in my field that is served by Elsevier, papers go to associate editors, who (unpaid, or paid in vouchers) make a first pass on whether or not to send them to handling editors, who (unpaid, or paid in voucher) send them to peer review. The peer reviewers (unpaid) then review them. There are multiple levels of unpaid labor before Elsevier even has to spend money on labor associated with a paper. Very little paid labor goes into adding any value to a paper by Elsevier.
As a result, they have huge profit margins. If they want me to appreciate their charity, they can get me to do that by phasing out the need for such charity.
Yes, many journals do have their own copyright policies but you can’t seriously claim that authors are not generally forced to sign over their copyright if they want to publish there. (This does not set them apart from other publishers though; they’re pricing policy neither, but they’re certainly among the most vicious in negotiating them).
And yes, they do offer open access but you as an author have to pay for that, and it’s not cheap. Yes, after already having signed over your copyright. Well, in some cases the money actually comes from your institution (and thus, in most cases, from taxpayers) that has already paid you for doing the research and writing the report.
I get that Cory’s post sometimes come across as needlessly alarmist or click-baity, but in this case I really think he has a point.
Access issues in low- and middle-income countries are not strictly a result of paywalls. Please do a little reading about programs like HINARI before you simply dismiss them out of hand.
I don’t know of any associate editors who are unpaid. They all receive some sort of honorarium. None of them manage day-to-day peer review. Our editor-in-chief is certainly compensated, so we’re on the hook for .5 FTE for a Distinguished Professor. I have a full-time editorial analyst managing our peer review process, and my journal only receives about 1800 manuscripts a year. It’s a huge amount of work.
Moreover, of those 1800 manuscripts, only about 10% actually get published. So our work on 90% of the manuscripts submitted to our journal generates zero dollars in revenue.
Then those accepted manuscripts need to be copyedited and typeset. This is the standard nuts and bolts of publishing that everyone conveniently ignores when when they’re moralizing about academic publishing. We have to maintain a web site, so we’re paying web developers. And then we print the journal, which yes, costs money.
My experience (I am not an editor but my boss and other contacts in the community certainly are) as well as this post for example tell very different stories.
Yeah, as I said, it is a lot of work, so it’s no wonder many people turn them down. And, depending on your field, you are probably lucky to be getting paid for it, if indeed you are. Most people aren’t, at least not by the publishers, who profit from it.
Do you suppose that sending 7,000 review invitations over the course of a year might be somewhat time-consuming? Do you think the person who does that work earns a salary? What about the people who respond to the thousands of author queries that a journal receives? Do you think they earn a salary? Do you think the people who convert an academic paper to legible English earn a salary? Do you think typesetters get paid? Archivists? Printers?
“When I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service.” Theodore Roosevelt (1910)
taking apart RELX’s segments make Elsevier look even worse. The segment STM had in 2015 37 % profit rate, RELX 28 % (and I can show my sources: it’s the 2015 report I linked above)
Interesting. I like browsing a journal in my field. You never know when something, that on the surface seems irrelevant, might be relevant. When they switched my society’s journal from paper to print it really pissed me off. So now I have to download each and every article just to scan it for something useful, which takes a much longer time. And you have to print it out yourself if you want to, say, take it into the Men’s Library.
I am not sure what you are implying. What I am saying is that most of the positions you mention are indeed not being paid for that work, at least not by the publisher. Look, I am not sure about your field. Mine is psychology so I know about that as well as communication science and education, and a little about linguistics (but that’s different because books are more important there).
Of all the positions that you mention, only the last three or four (typesetters, printers, copy-editors) are being paid by the publishers of the journals I read or publish in the most. As about “legible English”: The copy-editing done by the publisher is of course valuable but minimal. If my manuscript has any gross grammatical or spelling errors, the editors or reviewers will reject it and tell me to resubmit a copy-edited version. That’s why almost all researchers I know that are non-native English speakers pay a professional translator to correct their papers. Again, money that in most cases originally comes from the authors’ institutions, not the publishers.
That’s another small reason why open access is so great: The html versions that most journals have now are really nicely browsable - if it’s behind a paywall, you usually only get the pdf that you have to download first.
I know what HINARI is. HINARI’s main goal is to provide access to content without paywalls. Which, if paywalls weren’t so high in the first place, wouldn’t be necessary.
To the rest of your comment, you’ve not provided any justification for why you need to make a 35-40% profit margin, why you can’t pay any of the people actually adding value to science, and why I should be impressed that you give pocket change to efforts to help poorer countries afford access to your products.
The condescending, smarmy attitude about your corporate ‘charity’ is exactly why I stopped reviewing for your publications. There are other publishers who do better charitable activities, and more charitable activities with their profits, and they deserve my efforts.
Yeah, like the journal editor, who is paid by her university, and the peer review people, who are paid by their universities, and the author who is paid by his university. The important part, the content is all done by the authors, who are paid nothing by Elsevier. Everything else is window dressing.
It’s like there’s this enormous, complicated, beautiful toll-bridge made out of gold, that costs a fortune to use, when the stream it crosses is only an inch deep and a foot wide, and you can just step across.
