the bizzaro world of journal publishers, edition #427
Another reason for professors to take back the night. As I was getting an article ready for final publication through the journal publisher website, I was given the option of offering the article as “Open Access”:
I acknowledge that publishing my article with open access costs € 2000 / US $3000 and that this choice is final and cannot be cancelled later.
Whoa. First, any normal publishing industry pays the authors! Second, as the person who authored the work (and is giving it away for free) I am quite frankly appalled by the fact that I would be paying a large sum for free distribution. Sure, I have no beef with a for-profit firm providing a service for a fee, but the crazy price indicates that they are exploiting a monopoly that we have voluntarily given them. In a world with cheap self-publishing alternatives, this is not tolerable. Until we actively come up with an alternative, publishers will continue these extreme pricing practices.
Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz
“Another reason for professors to *take back the night*.”
I don’t think monopoly pricing and the threat of rape warrant the same turn of phrase.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Back_the_Night
Anonymous
December 19, 2011 at 7:58 am
it is also worth noting that some funding agencies (the EC for example) require publications from funded work to be provided as open access. the decision was made to help break the monopoly publishing market in the long term, but seems to be providing them a funding model in the short term.
cc eddie
December 19, 2011 at 9:18 am
This is also a way to ensure that only faculty who already work at elite institutions or have substantial research grant budgets can have open-access research published.
Mikaila
December 19, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Well, how much would you charge for typesetting, copy-editing, and database hosting for the article, plus paying the managing editor to run the nuts and bolts of peer review on ten or twenty articles to get a yield of one? Maybe $3000 is a bit much, but I think it’s fair to estimate that the publisher contributed at least $1000 to the screening and value-added process. Maybe some of that is gratuitous. For instance, I could imagine the discipline as a whole saving on typesetting by migrating from Ms Word to Latex and/or accepting less fancy layout. Likewise, many of other expenses (sales, the added complexity of a gated dbase) are a byproduct of the for-profit model. However at a minimum we need managing editors and I think copy editors are a pretty good idea too (especially for authors who aren’t native English speakers). This all costs many and I’d bet that even a much humbler version run on a nonprofit basis would cost at least $500 or $1000 per article.
gabriel rossman
December 19, 2011 at 5:47 pm
Gabriel: Let’s assume that the editorial/referee process is free and we’re just talking production costs.
1. Copy editing a 40 page article costs maybe, $250 dollars. I know, because I had a private copy editor do my book. That’s about $5 a page, which is on the high end.
2. Type setting 40 pages might be an hour or two of time. Let’s call it $100 for the article.
3. Add in an hour of labor ($100) for final corrections.
So far, we have $550 in production costs. Max.
Now, the Internet is already built and has many free document storage/distribution options. Smashwords.com, the self-publishing website I use, charges zero and gives you the option of free distribution. Considering the tends of thousands of authors within a single publishing company, the marginal cost should be very, very low. A $2500 (500% mark up) is simply not competitive. That’s crazy.
fabiorojas
December 19, 2011 at 5:57 pm
On a related note, I am actually curious as to why scholars (especially sociologists on social movements) would still pay so little attention to the free software (as well as open source) movement (http://www.fsf.org/) in the IT world or the open access (free education) movement in academic publishing and academia (e.g., http://www.openintro.org/). I am also curious why such supposedly very “sociologist” practices actually first appeared in those very “capitalist” fields. I predict that this would become some blockbuster project, but you are more than welcome to steal my ideas here :)
LowSociologist
December 19, 2011 at 6:27 pm
Should we assume that the referee process is free? Yes, the peer reviewers are free but the managing editor often is not. If we assume $40,000 total compensation for the managing editor of a journal that publishes 50 articles a year that’s $800 per published article. I have no idea how much managing editors get paid, but my point is that it’s probably a non-trivial expense and one that is closely related to the main value-added of journals (ie, screening/certification).
gabriel rossman
December 19, 2011 at 6:29 pm
Lowsociologist,
ahem
It’s always a dangerous statement to say “nobody has looked at X!”
gabriel rossman
December 19, 2011 at 6:32 pm
Gabriel:
I was the managing editor of Soc Meth, and I can assure you, I did *not* get $40,000 a year (in either 2002 or 2012 dollars). And that was in the age when managing editors did a lot more – like physically mail decision letters and use phones to call type setters and copy editors. Basically, the only people who get that kind of money are the managing editors of a few major journals that get hundreds of submissions a year, such as the AJS. That’s a full time job. Most journals, I assure you, require much less work than that. With modern software, managing journals is actually now very, very low cost.
Let me be blunt. A lot of academics have this idea that journal publishing costs bazillions of dollars. It didn’t back then and it doesn’t now.
Most editorial and refereeing services are donated. Modern computer technology makes paper intake and management very, very easy. if you drop the paper copy of the journal, you save an astronomical amount of money.The major work is copy editing, type setting and print/e-publishing management. It costs about $500 per article, roughly speaking.
Think about this: why is academia the only industry where everyone does the work for free and yet they get charged above market rates for the output?
Hint: We’re too lazy to do anything about it.
fabiorojas
December 19, 2011 at 6:37 pm
Why can’t sociology consider turning some mainstream sociology journals into open-access ones without involving publishers? Probably we can turn some armchair criticisms of social inequalities into practice in our own discipline
LowSociologist
December 19, 2011 at 6:39 pm
LowSociologist: I think the reason is that people aren’t terribly invested in the problem. Some think that publishers are needed for publication, but they are not.
fabiorojas
December 19, 2011 at 6:41 pm
Fabio,
Thanks for the clarification, like I said I don’t know much about managing editors.
Lowsociologist + Fabio,
Another issue is that professional societies get income from selling journals to publishers. Switching to open access would mean going from a profit center to a cost which would mean higher dues or lower services. I think it’s well worth considering this trade-off, but there’s your answer as to why it doesn’t happen very often.
gabriel rossman
December 19, 2011 at 6:46 pm
Once again, Gabriel, I don’t think this has to be the case. Yes, the old model is that associations get income from journal sales. But that doesn’t mean the alternative is worse. I can easily imagine a model where the professional association charges a fee for the annual meeting plus journals. Instead of outsourcing journal production, they would just internalize everything. In a really big association, they could absorb costs. A smaller association may charge a fee. Or, you could have subscription fees and ads subsidize productions … like any other publication.
fabiorojas
December 19, 2011 at 6:50 pm
Or we could do the PloS model – get a grant to create a non-profit site for the distribution of science.
fabiorojas
December 19, 2011 at 6:53 pm
To be fair, information science has published a lot on this, but much less so in sociology. Along the similar line of open access in academic publishing, the rise of R and its almost take-over of the statistical field (not yet in sociology) probably reflects some scholars’ resentment of the (over-)commodification of knowledge and its distribution.
LowSociologist
December 19, 2011 at 6:59 pm
Fabio,
You’re overlooking that a lot of income comes from library subscriptions, probably more than personal subscriptions. However as you suggested in your PloS example this is income that could be covered by foundations, especially since it’s cheaper to run an open dbase than a gated one.
gabriel rossman
December 19, 2011 at 7:00 pm
Gabriel: Once again, be careful. The journal publishers are getting income, but how much is the association getting back? Furthermore, how much is filtered back to sociologists?
If our dues (ahem) are any indication, the trickle down theory of journal fees doesn’t hold much water.
fabiorojas
December 19, 2011 at 7:02 pm
Fabio,
Kate’s report puts this income at about a third of ASA’s revenues. Note that for these purposes the personal subscriptions of members count as dues, not journals. So ballpark, we’re talking about $2 million going to the association from publishers, most of which ultimately comes from university libraries.
gabriel rossman
December 19, 2011 at 7:12 pm
The PLoS example supports Gabriel’s point that journal costs are often offset “invisibly” by library subscription revenues, association fees, donated labor, etc. PLoS publication fees range from $1350 to $2900 for the “elite” journals: http://www.plos.org/publish/pricing-policy/publication-fees/#pubquesthttp://www.plos.org/about/faq.html.
If you really want to avoid fees, send your papers to SSRN.com, which avoids the pesky review process and makes available all kinds of things, in all kinds of formats. If you prefer LaTeX format, or color, or if your paper doesn’t make any sense, they will not discriminate against you at SSRN. Otherwise, bow down, er, *submit* to legit journals.
jerrydavisumich
December 20, 2011 at 3:30 am
[...] I’m talkin bout this. [...]
I got one of these letters once and was so irritated that I wrote back to the journal withdrawing my paper « Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
December 20, 2011 at 4:05 am
Academic publishing in some fields is still largely a volunteer effort. Scholars get credit in their home institutions for publishing, so they are not paid. (They are paid for textbooks and trade books, and these don’t get much credit in the places I know.) Reviewers are unpaid. Editors and associate editors for most of the journals I know are unpaid. I edit and produce an open-access journal, which is hosted on my university’s servers and several similar mirror sites. I enjoy doing the production (most of the time), and I get no credit for it. It is on the low side of the estimates in earlier comments, because I use entirely open-source software. (It would take even less time if I required all authors to use LaTeX, as some journals do, but in psychology that won’t work. I’ve gotten so good at converting doc to tex that I almost prefer doc at this point.) The journal, Judgment and Decision Making, is quite successful, to the point where the glut of new submissions is now causing delays, simply because I can’t keep up. (But I’m trying to fix this by getting more help.)
In sum, I think that academics need to do things. First, become computer literate (in fields where they aren’t already). Second, fight back.
Part of fighting back involves looking at the papers themselves rather than the prestige of where they are published when people come up for tenure, promotion, and jobs. The use of things like impact factors rather than actually reading the papers is what allows the traditional publishers to maintain their monopoly.
Jon Baron
December 20, 2011 at 12:19 pm
@fabiorojas: the journal Survey Research Methods works exactly in this way. The journal is open access and also free to publish in; the funding comes from conferences organized by the European Survey Research Association.
daniel
December 20, 2011 at 12:23 pm
Jon: I haven’t submitted to Judgment and Decision Making – but I’m absolutely thrilled to see that there are journals like this (from the journal web site): “This process is designed to insure speedy rejection when rejection seems warranted. The review process itself should take AT MOST A FEW WEEKS, depending on the length of the article. Authors may remove their names if they wish, and reviewers may reveal theirs.”
@teppofelin
December 20, 2011 at 5:37 pm
The Open Access fees charged by commercial publishers are nothing compared to what they extort from libraries, e.g.:
http://www.bibliothek.kit.edu/cms/english/most-expensive-journals%20.php
See here for a graph of subscription price increase:
http://www.slideshare.net/brembs/whats-wrong-with-scholarly-publishing-today-ii
slide 28.
It’s no wonder publishers like Elsevier make in excess of 1b US$ per year in adjusted operating profit.
You are dead on about the monopoly situation and it must stop.
This sort of radical publishing reform needs money. I suggest we take the money the commercial publishers are making, that’s around US$ 4b per year. Whenever I talk to librarians, I tell them to cut all their subscriptions and invest the money they save into a single, distributed science library for papers and data. All university libraries in the world cooperating on a venture for the benefit of science.
See for instance these recent posts/articles:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v480/n7378/full/480449a.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist
http://www.frontiersin.org/computational_neuroscience/10.3389/fncom.2011.00056/abstract
http://neurodojo.blogspot.com/2011/12/occupy-science-journal.html
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2011/12/19/impact-factor-citations-retractions/
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2011/11/09/functionality-academic-publishing/
There is a real push for publishing reform, it’s just still in statu nacendi – fragmented.
Bjoern Brembs
December 22, 2011 at 2:54 pm
I think most of these comments are missing the point entirely. Researchers need to publish papers, leading to a demand, in the economic sense, for article acceptance. Publishers “supply” this acceptance and they set a price that the market will bear. I used to think open access was a good idea. Now I think we are moving from a model in which papers could be published only if publishers thought somebody was willing to pay to read them, to a model in which papers will be published if the author is willing to pay the price. The first model promotes quality (I know it doesn’t guarantee it!), the second model does not. I predict the amount of complete garbage published in the scientific literature will increase.
Eric
December 23, 2011 at 7:17 pm
Eric,
that’s a fair point. I recently received an email CFP that was one step away from saying “we’ll print anything for $2000.”
gabrielrossman
December 23, 2011 at 7:42 pm
[...] An increasing, and disconcerting, trend in academic publishing is so-called “open access”. In simple terms, the author pays the publisher for the privilege of having the paper made available. The upside-down nature of this model is well-captured here. [...]
In the twinkling of an eye » Blog Archive » “Open Access”
December 30, 2011 at 5:25 pm