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Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article

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Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article

#41

Post by orforforof »

epberry wrote: post #23

I’ve worked on a couple NSF grants and I believe this cost could be covered by the grant. Whether the granting institution is okay with this I don’t know but if I had to guess they probably see an $11K spend to distribute the results of the research in a (the?) prestigious journal as reasonable. To me $11K seems pretty steep. But I might go for $5K to put Nature’s stamp on my work and have it open access.

Agree. Academics are now going to write an extra $11k into their grants (=$15k if you count uni indirect costs), with the justification "I plan to produce Nature quality results". If your article doesn't get accepted by Nature, all the better there's now an extra $9k in your budget to play with. Let's just keep in mind, these grants are funded by taxpayers.

Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article

#42

Post by cossatot »

tomrod wrote: post #9

What in the world? I have a hard time seeing this as anything but a racket, or possibly a legal maneuver to increase standing to sue Sci-Hub or something ("Look, we've offered free access already!") How much did Nature Neuroscience pay to produce these articles? Do they pay their editors? Their reviewers? The authors? Do they pay their typesetters? Do they offer their print journal for free? Do they have expensive co…

Nature pays their editors, unlike most society journals. But they are a for-profit business, and are clearly just looking for more profit.

The expected lifetime value of any article in Nature Neuroscience for the authors is well above $11,390, as that is probably 1% of the typical grant that will produce the article, and getting published in this venue makes it much easier to continue to get grants funded, to get top PhD students and postdocs, and to get promoted.

To be clear, though, the authors are not paying for this out of pocket. The funding agencies (i.e. the national government that supports the authors' research) is paying for it. Because many funding agencies now require authors to publish open-acess, Nature can more or less ask whatever price they want.

Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article

#43

Post by jinto36 »

sometimeshuman wrote: post #27
tomrod wrote: post #9

What in the world? I have a hard time seeing this as anything but a racket, or possibly a legal maneuver to increase standing to sue Sci-Hub or something ("Look, we've offered free access already!") How much did Nature Neuroscience pay to produce these articles? Do they pay their editors? Their reviewers? The authors? Do they pay their typesetters? Do they offer their print journal for free? Do they have expensive co…

"Most journals already allow authors to distribute copies by request." Does anyone know how this works in practice ? I'd like to ask a few of my favorite researchers for a copy of their papers but I am a hobbyist and don't want to take their time and add to their likely overflowing inbox. BTW, "this is nuts" isn't a claim you can make if you don't know the answer to questions you posted. From their website: "an artic…

Peer reviewers are all volunteers, the journal only pays the staff that coordinate the reviews- email a bunch of people and ask if they'll do a review (and often that's semi-automated now), and the editor that makes the decision after looking briefly at the feedback from the reviewers. The editors don't actually even do any proofreading or anything like that anymore, they just make executive decisions as to what articles to accept.

Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article

#46

Post by esyir »

sometimeshuman wrote: post #27
tomrod wrote: post #9

What in the world? I have a hard time seeing this as anything but a racket, or possibly a legal maneuver to increase standing to sue Sci-Hub or something ("Look, we've offered free access already!") How much did Nature Neuroscience pay to produce these articles? Do they pay their editors? Their reviewers? The authors? Do they pay their typesetters? Do they offer their print journal for free? Do they have expensive co…

"Most journals already allow authors to distribute copies by request." Does anyone know how this works in practice ? I'd like to ask a few of my favorite researchers for a copy of their papers but I am a hobbyist and don't want to take their time and add to their likely overflowing inbox. BTW, "this is nuts" isn't a claim you can make if you don't know the answer to questions you posted. From their website: "an artic…

Hahahahaha. I'm sorry, but that was a pretty incredible claim. The journals sure as hell aren't paying for peer review, or at least nobody I know has gotten paid for it. Peer review is basically a gratis service done by other researchers in the same field.

Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article

#47

Post by jrockway »

tomrod wrote: post #9

What in the world? I have a hard time seeing this as anything but a racket, or possibly a legal maneuver to increase standing to sue Sci-Hub or something ("Look, we've offered free access already!") How much did Nature Neuroscience pay to produce these articles? Do they pay their editors? Their reviewers? The authors? Do they pay their typesetters? Do they offer their print journal for free? Do they have expensive co…

I am not sure there is any requirement that your price be based on the cost of your bill of materials. Would shut down a lot of companies that are like "$30,000 per year for SSO". It probably costs them less to let you log in with Google than it does to store your password hashes, and yet it's always the "no, you have to pay us more" option.

The thing with these journals is that they have name recognition that makes people want their research to be published in them. Getting published is good for their career. Combine that with a desire to support open access, and you have a product that you can charge for.

It's doubly good, because it's not like authors are using their own personal funds to pay this fee. It just comes out of their grant. Whenever someone buys something with someone else's money, you know you're going to be ripped off. See also, Wifi at businessey hotels.

Anyway, if the taxpayers are paying for this, we should ask authors to just host the papers on their websites. If you need the $5 for a VPS or whatever, I'll give you the $5 personally.

Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article

#48

Post by cossatot »

chaps wrote: post #8
yed wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The catch is it’s $11000

I mean, I'm coming at this from the perspective of a freelance journalist where sometimes the best rate I can get for a story that took three months to research is $250. Not talking just interviews and finding expert sourcing, but deeply involved work with code, data analysis, data cleanup, etc etc etc, often that nobody else is doing. So, that's pretty fucking good in my book, man.

Like the rest of the comments say, this is a fee that the authors pay to publish, not a commission that is paid to the authors.

However, if they're Chinese, the authors may get paid quite a bit (~$50-100,000) as a reward for publishing in a top journal: https://www.enago.com/academy/paid-to-publish-the-chinese-ca...

Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article

#49

Post by Mathnerd314 »

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/11/24/nature-add-op... gives some background:

> Someone must read and evaluate submissions regardless of whether they are accepted or rejected. That means under an open-access model where revenue is only collected from authors whose work is published, costs per published article are much higher at very selective journals than they are at less selective journals.

But mostly it seems that this is the price that Nature and Max Planck Digital Library negotiated, and Nature decided it was high enough that they could offer it to everyone.

Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article

#50

Post by chaps »

cossatot wrote: post #48
chaps wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I'm coming at this from the perspective of a freelance journalist where sometimes the best rate I can get for a story that took three months to research is $250. Not talking just interviews and finding expert sourcing, but deeply involved work with code, data analysis, data cleanup, etc etc etc, often that nobody else is doing. So, that's pretty fucking good in my book, man.

Like the rest of the comments say, this is a fee that the authors pay to publish, not a commission that is paid to the authors. However, if they're Chinese, the authors may get paid quite a bit (~$50-100,000) as a reward for publishing in a top journal: https://www.enago.com/academy/paid-to-publish-the-chinese-ca...

Oh wow. Yeah, that's absolutely disgusting.
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