Any decent journal does a fair amount of copyediting even when the paper is submitted in the journal format. My journal provides a LaTeX class file and a detailed style manual, and the copyediting can still take as long as 20-30 man-hours on a paper (though usually more like 4-8).
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Or they work at top-tier research institutions which do not have tenure!
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GOT US!
New Scientist writes: Its profit margins are vast, reportedly in the region of 40 per cent
I believe their margins are kept down to the region of 40% only by financial engineering. I have spoken with an ex-editor for a major journal publisher who claimed that many journals had internal margins of more than 90%. Their greatest cost was care and feeding of the editorial board members. Much of the opposition to open access among academics comes from senior researchers who enjoy the perks showered upon editorial board members of significant journals.
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It’s New Scientific American now. The two had to merge because their respective paywalls kept getting hacked. The CEO of Sears and KMart bought them out.
Almost every day I and my colleagues get solicitations from popup journals (most in China) that offer me teaser rates to publish in their poof-doink journal or lend my name to their editorial masthead. It is truly scandalous, but Big Biz and the Right Wing love it because it is easier for them to publish junk science that reassures people that drinking, smoking, polluting, etc. is healthy for you. See, there are scientists who deny humans cause climate change.
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Problem is that almost all conversations about journal costs lump both groups together. I work for a non-profit publisher, and we keep prices as low as possible. We even offer student pricing for $25 a year, gives you 50 article downloads, and charge even less for developing nations.
And we provide free access to more articles for those who participate in peer review process, and keep our library subscription costs low.
But it still costs money to maintain 80+ years worth of articles online, indexable, and available from anywhere in the world. Managing thousands of volunteer peer reviewers is not easy, and publishing quality journals requires a lot of people to keep things working.
Remember, not all publishers are out for money, we strive to make as much information as possible available to as many people as possible for as little as possible where we can.
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In many cases, the article itself is usually part of a larger project that will eventually become a book.
Well, depends on the field. In my field (public health / medicine at an R1 in the US) a book counts for basically the same as an article for the purposes of both tenure and pay rises post-tenure, so literally the only reason to write a book is because you have a burning and possibly career-ending desire to write a book. My department chair, a full professor with an endowed chairship to her name, has over 300 publications, and is only just getting around to writing her first book (which has almost nothing to do with any of those 300 previous publications).
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Seems unlikely to me. My journal was with a major publisher before we went OA, the “perks” consisted of them picking up the bill for an occasional working dinner for the Board. Food was pretty good, I must admit.
The biggest thing we miss going OA is the advertising; our publisher used to include us as part of their regular advertising at meetings and with libraries. That is too expensive for us to do on our current income.
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… back in the '70s when the likes of Robert Maxwell were running around (successfully) attempting to vacuum academic societies and their attendant journals into the gigantic academic publishing monopolies that we now hate with such passion. Today? No, not so much. We’re just stuck with shitty long term contracts and a complete sneering disregard.
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If all else fails, and as somebody who’s published his fair share of stuff over the years I’ll just add that a polite email to the corresponding author of a paper (contact details available in the abstract, which is always freely available) will usually result in a copy of the paper.
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It does not really if you release copyright, for example to permit hosting on Archive.org or to Sci-Hub.
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The actual hosting part is cheap, the system that manages it is not. Especially one designed to give readers multiple tools to enhance the experience, and find the information they want quickly and easily. Someone always has to pay for those resources, nothing is truly free.
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Reposting some thoughts from a previous time this came up:
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I’m a biologist. All peers I ever worked with have the same way of working with literature. They use a web service like Thompson’s ISI Web of Science/Knowledge or (increasingly) Google Scholar, check the abstract, if possible scroll quickly through the online version for further indication of relevance and then download the PDF.
Everything branded as “enhancing the experience” I’ve come across during the last 20 years was distracting at least.
So, what exactly are you talking about?
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The ISI indexing services are currently a part of Clarivate Analytics, a private company that spent $3 billion for it. I’m not sure how Clarivate chooses to support it (eg, whether they use Endnote revenue to subsidize it). Scopus is owned by Elsevier, which subsidizes it through their journal revenue.
My guess is that the move to “diamond” OA will ultimately kill their business model, which is probably a good thing, but at the same time it will affect how researchers in some fields keep current.
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Yes, and I was talking about history. Please read my entire comment, and you’ll see I was discussing MY field of history.
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Certainly when compared to back in the day when articles would arrive as a typescript with hand written equations. I imagine that hand setting equations was a very specialized task.
And that is not a particularly cheap service. Of course if you compare that to the cost of accessing the old Science Citation Index over Dialog (About a buck a minute and around a buck per abstract) it is pretty cheap.
The costs of production in both cases has gone down. But the price has only gone down for the Abstracing and Indexing service. The journals have gotten significantly more expensive, although they are publishing far more papers these days.
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Honestly, not my field, I handle IT, not our web systems. The big thing we’ve done is on the author management system, handling a the peer review system. And features we’ve added have been community driven, so it’s not a feature for features’ sake.
My big point has been lumping all publishers in the same pot, especially ones that are non-profits that work to keep costs low and quality high.
I agree with your point.
When I rant about publishers, I am talking about the few very big players left.
Fuck their oligopoly.
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