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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

#171

Post by evancoop »

The easy response is to dunk on Nature for rent-seeking. (And it most definitely IS just that). However, the best target for ire is not necessarily the journals (even if they charge a lot and provide nothing more than unpaid editors whose value-add is dubious).

The proper target of anger is those who allocate grant money and use the number of publications in a few top-tier journals as the primary credential. Not only does this exclude early-career researchers implicitly (hard to have 50 publications before age 30), but it then forces the payments to a cartel of elite journals.

It ends when grant-writing allows for ANY other assessment of worthiness.

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

#172

Post by kragen »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #169
kragen wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those events usually aren't the ones where most of the attendees are presenting, though sometimes things like Bar Camps can get the venue etc. sponsored. Finding sponsors to foot the bill can be harder for conferences for academics who aren't interested in leaving their tenure-track position to configure Kubernetes at a hot new Uber for Guinea Pigs startup. Still, church picnics, potluck dinners, and wedding parties…

I like your style. We should start StateFairCon someday

Ooh, that's an excellent point! State fairs never cost US$600 per person, even when you include all the funnel cakes and donut-bun hamburger sandwiches bought from the concessionnaires. Typical admission prices in the US are maybe US$20 per day? But they have plenty of space, lots of conference rooms, bathroom facilities, handicapped accessibility, folding chairs, and so on. I bet you could hold an academic conference at a state fair fairgrounds for under US$100 a person. But I've never heard of a sci-fi con doing this, so maybe there's a fatal flaw in this idea I'm not seeing.

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

#173

Post by JCM9 »

The pricing is like medical billing. There’s no logic to it. A number is just made up and the insurers (in this case the finding agencies) are willing to foot the bill. Once the insurers (funding agencies) decide they no longer like that number the billers will try a new made up number and the cycle continues.

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

#174

Post by oefrha »

j7ake wrote: post #157
oefrha wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Other than inertia and prisoner’s dilemma, there’s zero reason a cheap journal can’t be equally prestigious. The bloodsucking big academic publishers contribute approximately zero to science for what they charge compared to a Gowers-style journal run by the same editors and reviewers.

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

#175

Post by einpoklum »

dariosalvi78 wrote: post #126
einpoklum wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 meant per year...

What, less than 1000 USD per month? But that's a joke. In the Netherlands it's something like... 2800 EUR or 3000 EUR per month, so let's say 3000 - 3300 USD / month. I know the Netherlands PhD candidates have it relatively well (in relative, not absolute, terms), but I find it hard to believe people are expected to live off of 900 EUR / month. Is it really that bad these days?

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

#176

Post by bell-cot »

evancoop wrote: post #171

The easy response is to dunk on Nature for rent-seeking. (And it most definitely IS just that). However, the best target for ire is not necessarily the journals (even if they charge a lot and provide nothing more than unpaid editors whose value-add is dubious). The proper target of anger is those who allocate grant money and use the number of publications in a few top-tier journals as the primary credential. Not only…

This +10 (if I could). Also target (for anger) those who rank universities by how many "top tier" journal articles their professors have published.

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

#177

Post by ineedasername »

zibzab wrote: post #156
daxuak wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Without it, tax money still transfers to publishers, only via a less direct route. It funds the research that produces content, without which the publishers would have nothing of value to sell. I really don't like the high APC practice, but if tax money is going to the publishers anyway then I have a little bit of tolerance for slightly more going there to add significant value with open access.

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

#179

Post by ta988 »

AmazThrowAway wrote: post #168
ma2rten wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But not all! In fact lots of people, to my surprise, are publishing in Nature: Machine Intelligence

Because they can brag annd say "I published in Nature". I've seen that so often, same thing with the various "Science something" journals that get transformed as "In my Science article..."

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

#180

Post by ta988 »

blagie wrote: post #141
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…

Publication and diffusion software can be Free there are a lot of options. Often university libraries even provide them with support for you.
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