Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 213 posts

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

#71

Post by Fomite »

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…

As a researcher, someone writing me to say they're interested in my work and would like a copy of my paper will:

1) Result in a PDF attachment with a short note.

2) Probably be the highlight of my day.

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

#72

Post by Fomite »

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.

I always build one open access publication into my grant budgets - but $11K is way above what's normal.

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

#73

Post by Fomite »

asperous wrote: post #14

The article says "Our aim is to ensure that lack of funds is never a barrier to publishing with us." As in they will provide funding if someone can't afford it. Isn't this a really good thing? What is the average budget for an research project that ends up with an article published in this journal? Clinical trials are in the millions, and research grants are often 6 figures. I know people see this as rent seeking, bu…

While I normally defend publishing fees fairly actively, $11K is uncalled for.

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

#74

Post by Fomite »

jryb wrote: post #21
asperous wrote: post #14

The article says "Our aim is to ensure that lack of funds is never a barrier to publishing with us." As in they will provide funding if someone can't afford it. Isn't this a really good thing? What is the average budget for an research project that ends up with an article published in this journal? Clinical trials are in the millions, and research grants are often 6 figures. I know people see this as rent seeking, bu…

Some smaller labs at my tier 1 research institution have their grad students TA (so the university pays their salary) because they don't have the ability to pay them the $30k salary. $11k for one paper is a meaningful amount of money, and other journals can publish for an order of magnitude less. It doesn't cost $11k to read a paper, send a few emails and do some typesetting. People pay for this kind of thing because…

This. 11K would be a full tenth of the discretionary money I got for my startup package. The paper would be a sweet get, but this is definitely a "Rich labs get papers in Nature journals, get better grants and become richer labs..." problem.

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

#75

Post by oceliker »

namlem wrote: post #59
cossatot wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is the typical grant for a Nature Neuroscience study really over $1.1 million?

Graduate student in a neuroscience lab at a tier 1 institution in the US here. $1.1 million for a grant is very normal. I cost my advisor over $100k per year in tuition and stipend, not including the costs of any equipment and reagents that I use.

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

#77

Post by refurb »

dibujante wrote: post #64
jrockway wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In a well-functioning market, the price of goods should eventually shrink to their cost of production. If they do not, that's a monopoly.

Only for undifferentiated goods or commodities. Differentiated products can certainly command a premium to the cost of production. Those aren’t monopolies.

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

#78

Post by canjobear »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #65
dilawar wrote: post #7

https://blog.joss.theoj.org/2019/06/cost-models-for-running-... "The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) is a free, open-access online journal, with no article processing charge (APC). We are committed to operating as a free service to our community, and we do so thanks to the volunteer labor of editors and reviewers, and by taking advantage of existing infrastructure. In this post, we examine the true costs of ru…

PNAS, in case anyone is not aware, is the journal where members of the Academy of Sciences publish research they can't publish anywhere else for various reasons. It's a dumping ground for PIs desperate to get something published.

PNAS has two tracks. One is extremely selective, with thorough review. The other, which is marked with “communicated by” in the byline on the papers, is as you describe: NAS members can send in more or less anything they want.

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

#79

Post by rvnx »

kragen wrote: post #60
robwwilliams wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note: Are we sure this is a mandatory charge or just the charge if the authors must publish an immediate open access article. I just published in Nature Metabolism and there was no charge at all. The quality of the review and editing was EXTRAORDINARY! I wanted to thank all of the reviewers for doing a superb job. Had I required immediate open access then it would have cost! But with both full versions in bioRxiv and…

Were the reviewers paid?

To me it sounds absurd to have to pay reviewers, when you have nothing guaranteed in return. If the publication would give insurance "we pay back 10'000 USD to the buyer of the paper in case we did a mistake because that's our guarantee of quality", then yes, but here, nothing guarantees you the quality / result, only that they tried to do reasonable efforts to somehow review and exfiltrate some of the most obviouses scams.

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

#80

Post by kragen »

rvnx wrote: post #79
kragen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were the reviewers paid?

To me it sounds absurd to have to pay reviewers, when you have nothing guaranteed in return. If the publication would give insurance "we pay back 10'000 USD to the buyer of the paper in case we did a mistake because that's our guarantee of quality", then yes, but here, nothing guarantees you the quality / result, only that they tried to do reasonable efforts to somehow review and exfiltrate some of the most obviouses…

I'm just thinking that if Nature didn't pay the reviewers (and I agree it is very unlikely that they did) then the quality of the reviewing probably is not a result of money flowing into Nature, whether from the authors or from the readers.
Post reply on HN