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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

#151

Post by matthewdgreen »

dash2 wrote: post #140
cheonic8492 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Universities often limit what you can spend on OA, and even if there isn’t a hard limit, that money comes at the expense of other research items like student salaries and equipment. Funding agencies don’t write a blank check for publication costs.

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

#152

Post by CrazyCatDog »

meling wrote: post #96
kragen wrote: post #60

Earlier 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,…

Whoa! Best advice I ever received: accept everything. Here’s why:

(1) Editors will not send you garbage, but they will try at first

(2) You, in turn, torture yourself to find a path for the worst papers in your field (see “garbage” above) to make it through to publication—as in you do sooner of the work for the authors—anonymously of course, and you package it nicely in your review letter

(3) Editors still think: wow, that’s incredible—still going to reject this paper but this referee has skills

(4) Letter writing time you say? Good news, there’s a stack of editors that think you walk on water

(5) Tenure earned

(6) QED?

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

#153

Post by zibzab »

ma2rten wrote: post #87
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…

In Machine Learning the top journal JMLR is also completely free and open access. Nature tried to introduce a machine learning journal but it is being boycotted by many researchers.

Someone on HN should compile a big list of top free-open journals for various fields.

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

#155

Post by CrazyCatDog »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #83
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.

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.

I think you mean Nature is capturing some of the rents bestowed upon authors for publishing in Nature.

Honestly, I wish more journals mandated open for a fee—I want my work open, but the choice makes it easy for universities to decline to pay—if mandatory, they would gladly pay 3x to have their researchers publish in top outlets (I’m in administration for a large R1)

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

#156

Post by zibzab »

daxuak wrote: post #68
robwwilliams wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go JOSS! Yes, the cost is excruciating and beyond excessive. Given that every submission can be preceded by multiple bioRxiv versions and followed by a definitive PubMed Central version that was reviewed (perhaps embargoed for 6-12 months), who actually pays these charges? I suspect this is a theoretical charge in most cases. The exception might be for those who are compelled to provide immediate unfettered access to…

I have seen publisher making open access mandatory, with an outrageous fee attached to it. Also,iirc the pubmed central thing only apply to works with certain funds (i.e. NIH), many articles do not get to there.

Some grants require open access, which unfortunately often translates to tax money being transferred to big publishers.

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

#157

Post by j7ake »

oefrha wrote: post #84
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…

I'll point you to Fields medalist Tim Gowers, who is kind of a leader in the free academic publishing movement against Elsevier and co. and has launched new journals himself: https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an... His journals can manage at a whopping $10 per submission, and that's with a SaaS platform in the middle. Throw in a few bucks for arXiv hosting costs too if you will. So what the he…

The prestige provides access to jobs/promotions, invitations to talks, and higher scores on grants. The tangible benefits are more than $10k.

Not saying this is right, but nothing will change until scientists stop ranking other scientists by the number of publications in prestigious journals/conferences.

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

#158

Post by jkhdigital »

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.

As an aside, apparently there is a technical difference between “candidate” and “student”. A PhD candidate is one who has passed the qualifying exam, which occurs 2-3 years into the process. This usually coincides with the point at which all required coursework is complete, so “student” is probably a suitable label during that initial period.

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

#159

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#160

Post by throwawayarnty »

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…

Yes. And academia is made up of fellow researchers. We are putting the blame on a private company putting a price on a product that researchers will still continue to pay.

The hate should be against other fellow researchers and hiring/grant/tenure committees. They cannot judge the work of a researcher without counting the number of Nature papers they have in their CV.

I can guarantee you that if these committees did not care about the number of Nature papers a researcher has, nobody would pay that price or even go through the brutal review process of publishing in the top journals (or in CompSci: the top conferences).

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