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

141–150 of 213 posts

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

#141

Post by blagie »

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…

The costs are exaggerated. For example, it is not possible to replicably develop that software infrastructure for $50k. It is possible as a one-off if you're an engineer working on your own project, but for example, a biology journal couldn't drop $50k on that infrastructure. A lot of these things rely on individual heroics. I appreciate heroics, but they don't scale to an industry.

I'm glad for the good work they're doing.

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

#142

Post by dash2 »

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…

It’s not a good analogy. Gigs and stand-up comedy have big audiences. Academic conferences don’t. Hiring a venue, paying for dinner, these things have cost. $600 isn’t unreasonable. By contrast $12,000 to publish a PDF on a website is criminal.

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

#143

Post by MagnumOpus »

refurb wrote: post #137

I’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 w…

The current shareholders and editors of the prestigious journals contribute nothing to it being prestigious. It is historical accident and network effects that now let some journals charge $10k for $100 of work, which many rightly perceive as unjust profiteering.

Moving away from Elsevier and Springer Nature is a coordination problem just as difficult and just as desireable as moving everyone in your school off WhatsApp or iMessage or Facebook towards some less odious alternative...

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

#144

Post by dash2 »

asperous wrote: post #33
jryb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I get that but also consider that people are free to publish in other journals. Although it does make me uncomfortable that its a for-profit company, they only print 7-10 articles a month, so I can understand the financials mathematics of needing to make it this amount per article if they want to continue to have a full staff maintain the journal the way they want to run it. I am just grateful these articles are now…

By contrast, another Springer journal, Scientific Reports, charges about $2000 per article… and publishes about 23,000 articles per year. So it’s not all down to high fixed costs. It’s rent-seeking.

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

#145

Post by op00to »

michaelerule wrote: post #128
frayesto wrote: post #2

Not sure what other people do, but I always publish at a journal then put my manuscript on arxiv, or whatever field equivalent, and then on my personal website. Then I submit it to scihub. Best we can do these days

How do you submit your papers to scihub?

Submit manuscripts as e-mail attachment to the Editorial Office at ajmds@scihub.org, A manuscript number will be mailed to the corresponding author same day or within 72 hours

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

#147

Post by amcoastal »

einpoklum wrote: post #123
cblconfederate wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 en…

> 11000 is the paycheck of a Phd student in southern europe, A Ph.D. candidate (don't call them students please, they're researchers more than students) in southern Europe does _not_ get 11,000 USD / month. Something between 2,000 and 4,500 AFAICT.

He means per year. Your estimates are generous. For my graduate studies I was paid 8000 a year.

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

#148

Post by jaystraw »

einpoklum wrote: post #124
dibujante wrote: post #64

Earlier 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.

1. There is no such thing as a "well-functioning market", that's an ideological construct. 2. In a market of commodities, prices are determined by multiple aspects of the surrounding social power relations. 3. In a market, there tends to be a concentration of capital leading to an oligopoly or monopoly; this is more likely than a shrinking of prices to the cost of production.

"social power relations" are an ideological construct too, that's the idea, that we use ideologies to ideate better explanations, simpler explanations for things. No shit, in other words. Nice try, though.

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

#149

Post by a3_nm »

ramraj07 wrote: post #103
a3_nm wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, but academic journals usually try to maintain some sort of acceptance ratio, and avoid accepting every submitted article. (If they do, they will have the reputation of not being selective, which will harm their rankings and will make people try submitting their work to more selective venues first.)

Of course, for commercial publishers, there is an incentive to publish more -- so there is tension between taking more articles (more revenue in APCs, more volume, easier to attract subscriptions, more perceived impact for extensive properties like h-index) and being more selective (more prestige).

So worse reviews probably doesn't mean more papers accepted but a more random selection of accepted articles.

Assuming that articles have some intrinsic "quality" that most researchers would agree on, and that good reviews are better correlated to this quality than bad reviews, one would expect that getting worse reviews would make the journal selection process (even) more noisy. This can harm the prestige of commercial journals (if they start rejecting articles perceived as "good" and publish articles perceived as "bad").

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

#150

Post by jaystraw »

Aeolun wrote: post #114
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 you hit it on the head. Value is subjective, and they'll charge whatever they can get away with. People will stop paying when it's no longer worth it to them (which will hopefully be soon as other models are embraced)
Post reply on HN