Elsivier alone siphons more money per year out of public funded science than ITER, the most expensive experiment ever.
Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article
131–140 of 213 posts
Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article
#132The University world is so insanely broken.
There is so much money flowing in, and yet, all we hear about is students who are poor, and teachers who can't live off their salaries.
The whole thing seems to be setup so that young academics are constantly at war with each other, so that they have to write papers after papers for free and send them to these prestigious journals, which they actually pay for reading through their universities.
Honestly, from the outside it looks like a weird servitude system.
Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article
#133Earlier 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?
There's a lot of funny maths with grants. It's a lot like taking money from one pocket and putting it in another. So a $1M grant is actually a fraction of that when it comes to actual money that a prof gets to use.
Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article
#134I’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.
doesn't it cost to go to the conference?
I would expect the people who are listening to the presentation to be the ones paying, not the one giving the presentation.
Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article
#135The 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…
> I know people see this as rent seeking, but journals DO provide a service which costs money.
I don't know the specifics of Nature, but the main service provided by journals (peer-review and selection) is usually done by other researchers that are unpaid. Most journals will do little or nothing about typesetting and edition of articles.
What journals do is stand in the middle of a system where researchers need to publish in high quality journals in order to advance their career and also need to access the same journals in order to gain knowledge.
> Clinical trials are in the millions, and research grants are often 6 figures.
Maybe for Nature, but other journals have high open access fees and publish research from groups with lower budgets. You could very well find journals for which the open access fees are in the order of four, five months of salary of the main researcher, just for sending the article to reviewers and hosting the PDF in a website at zero marginal cost.
Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article
#136Earlier 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…
> 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…
> I think journals are now in a situation similar to the one of app stores [only without the costs, and with all the benefits].
Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article
#137I’ve never quite understood the hate against journals. Sure, they might be charging too much for subscriptions based on the effort, but plenty of products do that.
My understanding of positions are:
Researcher: I want to publish in your journal because it’s prestigious.
Academia: You better publish in prestigious journals or you won’t get tenure.
Journal: My journal is expensive, but very prestigious.
Researcher: I want what you offer (prestige) but don’t want to pay your price.
Seems like the researcher should be pissed at academia not the journals? If researchers just published elsewhere, these journals would have no choice but to change.
Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article
#138Holding humanity and progress at ransom
Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article
#139Earlier 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.
doesn't it cost to go to the conference? I would expect the people who are listening to the presentation to be the ones paying, not the one giving the presentation.
Usually, most listeners are presenters too.
Re: Nature Neuroscience offers open access publishing for $11k per article
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> 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. Students aren’t paying for college, the government is. The researchers aren’t paying Nature, the government is.
This is absolutely true in many cases. If I had myself to pay £2000 for journal submission, no way. But it comes out of research funds. And that in turn comes from whoever funds the University – government, or student fees.