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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

#111

Post by Fomite »

gumby wrote: post #36
sgillen wrote: post #5

Who is the target audience here? And who exactly is paying for this? Researchers who care about open access can and do already upload their work to arxiv and/ or scihub in addition to publishing their work in formal venues.

Politicians who want to require open access journals for govt funded work? Researchers who need “gold plated name” journals for tenure? Just speculation.

"Politicians who want to require open access journals for govt funded work?"

Not this one. The open access requirements tend to be a year's delay and then it's open access at no cost.

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

#112

Post by gujak »

Back in 2010 or 2011 I was offered a job typesetting similar articles (in the field of physics of chemistry), involving e.g. converting a Word draft into a final Latex document and communicating with the article's authors. The pay was... 40 PLN or 10 USD per article before tax.

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

#113

Post by hyperbovine »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #51
torbTurret wrote: post #25

I’ll never forget getting my first paper accepted to a conference, only to learn that presenting will cost a mere $600. Work paid for it but still - what an absolute racket academia is.

Conferences cost money. You have to rent an appropriate venue, people tend to expect refreshments, etc. Why would it be free just because you are presenting there? So are most of the attendees.

Also, they are fundraising mechanisms for the professional societies that put them on. The pandemic killing conference attendance no doubt put a lot of them in a budget crunch.

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

#114

Post by Aeolun »

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…

> Do they pay their editors?

Yes

> Their reviewers?

No, not as far as I’m aware.

> The authors?

No, not as far as I’m aware.

> Do they pay their typesetters?

Yes

> Do they offer their print journal for free?

No, but in most of the world it is pretty cheap.

> Do they have expensive contracts for cloud hosting?

Yes. Well, yes and no. They mostly have a lot of expensive on-premise servers. At least as of 3.5 years ago.

I think partially it’s that they can get away with it, but there’s certainly a lot of work going into this on the Nature side as well (mostly for print publishing). And these articles are never going away. They stay online forever.

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

#115

Post by netizen-936824 »

guerrilla wrote: post #34
sometimeshuman wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 hobbyist, I just email the author, thank them for their work, maybe ask a question about or comment on their work and ask if they have the specific paper I can't get. Nobody's ever said no and I've asked dozens if times in CS, linguistics and for some climate and geography stuff. Academics are pretty accessible and even willing to chat about their work as long as you're not a crank.

This works in almost any field. Researchers generally love to hear from people, will usually answer whatever questions you might have about their work, and will happily give you a copy for free

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

#116

Post by czzr »

unmole wrote: post #95
spoonjim wrote: post #93

Earlier 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-...

PLoS biology charges $5300 per article. PLoS was explicitly set up to provide a non-profit, open access alternative to commercial publishers - and it just about breaks even.

So I don’t think that JOSS calculation is anything close to correct for any mid to high quality journal operating at a reasonable scale.

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

#117

Post by mnd999 »

kragen wrote: post #105
meling wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean sure, making papers by underrepresented groups open access to increase their reach is actually a nice idea. Not sure what this has to do with sci-hub though, publishers are not going to fund sci-hub in the same way that the RIAA is not going to fund the pirate bay.

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

#118

Post by [deleted] »

kristopolous wrote: post #54
SubiculumCode wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conferences cost money. You have to rent an appropriate venue, people tend to expect refreshments, etc. Why would it be free just because you are presenting there? So are most of the attendees.

Two things. The person walks away after this $600 poorer. We've found ways to do things of arguably far less social value then say, a new medical discovery, such as stand up comedy or say a club dj without them having to fork over $600 to do what they're being advertised for. In fact, they actually get paid. Second, the enterprise for expanding human knowledge shouldn't come with a door fee, full stop. If we want to…

[deleted]

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

#119

Post by cblconfederate »

cossatot wrote: post #42
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…

To be clear: they pay their own editors, the ones who do the coordination, not the authors (who actually edit the paper) or the reviewers.

11000 is the annual pay of a Phd student in southern europe, it's incredibly high amount. the $5000 that elsevier asks is already enough. prestigious EU grants run for > $1m. National grants may be $100000.

As an EU citizen i hate the fact that even more EU money is siphoned to enrich the NPG. We ve had enough and this must stop. I hope both them and elsevier get outright banned, because clearly open access is another revenue stream for them

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

#120

Post by lultimouomo »

cossatot wrote: post #42
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…

> The expected lifetime value of any article in Nature Neuroscience for the authors is well above $11,390

This. Authors are the customers of the journals; the service they are buying is a push towards tenure and more funding. This has been true for a long time; open access only makes it more explicit.

When readers are the ones paying, you can argue that they are paying the journal so that it makes sure that they are reading serious, properly reviewed articles.

When authors are the ones paying, how do incentives align?

I think journals are now in a situation similar to the one of rating agencies and accounting firms. I don't think it will work out very well.

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