"Academic Journals Doing Crime"
Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article
101–110 of 213 posts
Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article
#102Let’s stop reviewing for publishers that profit from research! Join the strike! https://josephpcohen.com/w/reviewerstrike/
I wish this would work but it won’t. They’ll just get shittier reviewers who’re willing to do it. ImmigrNt researchers use reviews as evidence of expertise so there’s at least one group of folk who are incentivized to review for anyone.
Yes, there is a career incentive to review, but it's much weaker than the one to publish, and comes later in career, so hopefully more people can afford it.
And yes, there will probably always be people willing to do reviews for free. But if the quality/delay/expertise of reviews from commercial publishers starts to degrade, it encourages authors to look for alternatives.
Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish this would work but it won’t. They’ll just get shittier reviewers who’re willing to do it. ImmigrNt researchers use reviews as evidence of expertise so there’s at least one group of folk who are incentivized to review for anyone.
Yes, there is a career incentive to review, but it's much weaker than the one to publish, and comes later in career, so hopefully more people can afford it. And yes, there will probably always be people willing to do reviews for free. But if the quality/delay/expertise of reviews from commercial publishers starts to degrade, it encourages authors to look for alternatives.
The issue is as a semi disingenuous researcher (which honestly most are) you actually want reviewers who are not experts because they won’t ask the hard questions and do a thorough review. So if you can get your nat neur submission reviewed by a bunch of desperate postdocs aiming to please then you’re hitting jackpot.
Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article
#104What 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…
Sure, in most cases, you can ask authors for a copy of their paper.
However, that's not a reasonable way to distribute science. Most research requires you to skim through many different articles, so introducing a latency of a few hours/days each time you want to open an article makes the process unreasonable.
See also: Sci-Hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Were the reviewers paid?
As an academic (unrelated to this journal and field), I’ve more or less stopped accepting to review papers because of the low reward… that is, there are virtually no incentives to me as a professor to do this and it takes a lot of time to do proper reviews. I have better things to do with my time. I attended an ACM webinar some years ago on the topic of open access, and while the OA fees weren’t as high as this one,…
I think the ACM should support young and female researchers by making all their papers open access, publicly endorsing Sci-hub, and committing to send Sci-hub some money every month. That would have a much bigger impact than scholarships and workshops.
Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? I hope this isn't a critique of the form "Why does Dropbox have 3,000 employees, I could build it in a weekend." There are a lot of costs to producing an issue of Nature.
The bulk of the heavy lifting for any scholarly journal is done by unpaid volunteers. JOSS calculates their cost of publishing a paper at around $100. What additional expenses does Nature incur that justify charging two orders of magnitude more? https://blog.joss.theoj.org/2019/06/cost-models-for-running-...
Not every journal has the same selective standards
Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The point is that by publishing in nature, one of the things you're paying for is prestige. Prestige has a very high market value.
Another point is who pays. If the paper is submitted by a huge Consortium that received more than 2 millions for a given research, all the interests are aligned to pay 10K in publishing fees: Nature is very interested in publishing a less-than-perfect work if they pay 10K. The Consortium is very interested in publishing in Nature and Open Access to give the work a maybe undeserved push. And the money comes from other pockets.
Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article
#108Earlier 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…
Reviewers are selected not picked out of a hat....
> ... we pay 10000 in case of a mistake ...
Now please apply the same standard to software.
> reasonable effort
for many hours/days/weeks. Otherwise known as "work". Why is it absurd to pay for work?
Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bulk of the heavy lifting for any scholarly journal is done by unpaid volunteers. JOSS calculates their cost of publishing a paper at around $100. What additional expenses does Nature incur that justify charging two orders of magnitude more? https://blog.joss.theoj.org/2019/06/cost-models-for-running-...
Not every journal has the same selective standards
Again, the vetting of papers is done by unpaid volunteers.
Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not every journal has the same selective standards
Again, the vetting of papers is done by unpaid volunteers.
> All submitted manuscripts are read by the editorial staff
> Editorial decisions are not a matter of counting votes or numerical rank assessments, and we do not always follow the majority recommendation
https://www.nature.com/nature-portfolio/editorial-policies/p...