Eleven years ago I shared a fairly heavily researched summary of the state of academic publishing. I mostly argued that OA (aka author pays) was a red herring and that we should really pay attention to the profit motives (or not) of the publisher. I would argue that analysis mostly still holds, but a lot has changed. Here are three new data graphs, five major trends I see since then, followed by some of my reflections on what this all means and briefly, what we should do.
Figure 1 – the growth of # of papers published in total and broken out by publisher 2011-2021. Green are for-profit publishers. Yellow/Gold are newer OA only publishers (for profit except PLOS). Blue are not-for-profit publishers. Colored region indicates papers in ISI. White block indicates additional papers in Scopus. There are probably some different proportions among publishers for in-Scopus-not-in-ISI papers, but I don’t think the fundamental story changes much.Sources https://www.stm-assoc.org/oa-dashboard/uptake-of-open-access/ provides total publications in Scopus; Table 1 of https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-022-04586-1/tables/1 for ISI journals by publisher.
Figure 2 – increasing fraction of papers published Gold OA (pay to publish). Source https://www.stm-assoc.org/oa-dashboard/uptake-of-open-access/
Figure 3 – brand extension of Nature journals – from the one core Nature journal in 2009 to 34 in 2024. I did not track years 2019-2022. Note that Nature was bought by Springer in 2015 which appears to have induced a step change in behavior. This is just Nature branding peer reviewed journals – it doesn’t include npg journals, Nature-branded news letters, or many others. Source Nature web pages (https://www.nature.com/nature/history-of-nature and https://partnerships.nature.com/blog/celebrating-a-decade-of-growth-nature-new-journal-launches/)
Five trends
- Publishing is growing exponentially – While the number of scientists is also growing exponentially, it is at a slower rate than papers. We are producing more papers per scientist every year. This is a profoundly important fact. Every ecologist knows the power and unsustainability of exponential growth. This also makes it abundantly clear that the publishers only deserve half the blame. Scientists have created a Red Queen situation in which we’re aggressively chasing opportunities to publish. Do we really need 1,000,000 (about +40%) more publications than 10 years ago! (Figure 1).
- Publishing is highly concentrated with monopoly profits and still concentrating – Five for profit publishers (Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor Francis and MDPI) publish over 50% of all publications. In economics this is called an oligopoly, where a small number of companies control the market. Worse, because scientists “have” to publish in top journals, publishers have even more power than the oligopoly nature suggests. One can measure the degree of concentration and power by the profit margins. The 20-30% profit margins are among the highest in all industries. Pharmaceuticals, computers, and tobacco are really the only other industries that comes close (10-25%), and most other industries fall at 10% or lower. From Figure 1, you can see that the for profit publishers, and specifically the big 2 traditional, Elsevier and Springer Nature, and the new OA for profits, especially MDPI but also Hindawi, Frontiers, BMJ etc, are still gaining share. Nearly everybody else (Wiley, society, university, PLOS) are holding share but not gaining meaningfully (note that not gaining ground in an exponentially growing market place is tantamount to losing share).
- Growth of Gold OA – the movement towards Open Access (I think it is more accurately called “pay to publish”) is clearly the future (Figure 2). Its share of papers published is on a trend to pass traditional subscription-funded publications soon. Green OA (author shares their paper on a website) has flatlined. Gold OA remains a mix of hybrid OA journals (author pays extra for OA on top of subscriber revenues) and pure 100% author pays OA journals (new OA publishers like MDPI, but also, increasingly, “flipping” previously subscription journals like Oikos and Ecography).
- Society journals are outsourcing – although it looks in Figure 1 like society journals are holding steady these are some very old, very big societies like the American Chemical Society and the American Geophysical Union and IEEE. The AAAS (publisher of Science) and the British Royal Society are the only societies still self-publishing with any relevance to ecology and evolution that I can think of. Nearly every other society journal has outsourced publishing to a company. In most cases in ecology this is Wiley (ESA, BES and Nordic Society). Evolution recently left Wiley to go to Oxford University Press and the American Naturalist Society remains with University of Chicago Press, but they are the notable exceptions that have remained free of the for profit world. This should probably be taken as a hint to people that think publishing is easy or cheap. It’s not. And there are economies of scale.
- Capture and brand extension – Such corporate words show the degree of corporatization we live in for publishing. Capture is my term that refers to the fact that big publishers increasingly make it very easy to slide from one of their journals to another by not requiring resubmission and often by sharing reviews between journals. It’s really just a less extreme version of gyms that make it hard to quit. Of course these transfers are never to another company. This is all about increasing their market share by making it easy for the author to stay with them. Brand extension (Figure 3) is the related phenomenon of having more and more journals that interlink. Nature is the extreme of this (Figure 3). The core journal Nature has extended to include Nature Communications, Nature Ecology and Evolution, Nature Sustainability, Nature Climate Change (and those are just the journals relevant to ecology – nature reports 34, and that doesn’t include the npg series or a bunch of others!). Brand extension and capture go hand-in-hand. And when a top brand extends, it can have devastating ripple effects. Notably, the creation of Nature Ecology and Evolution (NEE) coupled with the willingness of authors to stroke their egos by getting in a Nature journal is probably single-handedly responsible for the declining impact factors of most of the upper tier ecology journals such as Ecology Letters and Ecology. Note that one can now argue to pursue NEE based on impact factor (to the extent that is a credible argument), but initially that wasn’t even valid. As a new journal NEE had no then a low impact factor. It was literally the brand name that drew people in at first.
- Read and publish (aka transformative agreements) are the future – As I have discussed previously it is theoretically possible that if you could take all the money in academic publishing that was spent on “pay to read” (i.e. journal subscriptions) and instantly and globally flip it to author pays (aka Open Access), it should in theory work. The hard part is how a multiplayer society makes that transition. I think the answer is now clear. Libraries are signing “read and publish” (previously called transformative agreements) which are just what they sound like. The library pays a sum of money and its academics and students can read journals/papers from that publisher and they can publish without additional charge with that publisher (essentially no per paper Article Processing charge or APC). These agreements have taken off. Much of Europe now has these agreements with many publishers. And some good actor publishers have entered into these agreements with many, many institutions (e.g. Cambridge University Press even has one with my mid-level American university, University of Maine). Many bad actors are being much more calculating. They are starting off with big players (whole countries in Germany, large systems like the University of Calfornia system in the US) and negotiating very hard and including non-disclosure agreements so that nobody knows how much is being paid. And progress is slow with few institutions having them (e.g. Elsevier). So my low priority, literally poor university may not get one for a decade at the rate things are going.
Four thoughts
Here are a few of my main thoughts:
- Things are continuing to get worse and scientists are a lot to blame. We’re still growing publications exponentially. The industry is still consolidating even after 30+ years of consolidation. And it is consolidating into the hands of giant for-profit-companies. Academics are seriously complicit in this. China pays cash to scientists for publishing in big journals. Europe and North America it’s much more indirect, but clearly potent. I’m willing to bet the fraction of scientists who walk away from Nature Ecology and Evolution to go to a society journal is under 20-30%. Early career people might or might not have little choice, but that’s a lot of senior academics who arguably have a lot of choice making arguably bad choices.
- Open access has turned into a great way for companies to extract more money – This is more speculative. For sure in the early part of the transition, in hybrid journals, large APC charges (often $3000 and up) were charged on top of the subscription prices of the journals that were also going up. That’s a lot of extra cash! It is harder to tell as we transition to Read and Publish since those deals, at least with the large for profits, are all secret. But given the stories about how hard those negotiations are, I’d bet a lot of money that we are not in the world where a fixed amount of money flips from pay to read to pay to publish. Corporations are exploiting the change in rules to claw out even more earnings. Academics are not united or savvy enough to use this same change in rules to extract anything.
- Open access has been a disaster. Scientists never really wanted it. We have ended up here for two reasons. First, pipe dreaming academics who believed in the mirage of “Diamond OA” (nobody pays and it is free to publish). Guess what – publishing a paper costs money – $500-$2000 depending on how much it is subsidized by volunteer scientists. We don’t really want Bill Gates etc. to pay for diamond OA. And universities and especially libraries are already overextended. There is no free publishing. The second and, in my opinion most to blame, are the European science grant funders who banded together and came up with Plan S and other schemes to force their scientists to only publish OA. At least in Europe the funding agencies mostly held scientists harmless by paying, and because of the captive audience, publishers went to European countries first for Read and Publish agreements. So European scientists haven’t been hurt too badly. But North America has so far refused to go down the same path, leaving North American scientists without grants (a majority of them) with an ever shrinking pool of subscription-based journals to publish in. And scientists from less rich countries are hurt even worse. Let’s get honest. How long before every university in Africa is covered by a Read and Publish agreement from the for profit companies? Decades? Never? And the odds an African scientist can come up with $2000 in the meantime? Zero.
- Paying to publish creates bad incentives. The rapid growth of the for profit OAs (MDPI, Hindawi, Frontiers, etc) is maybe the biggest signal of this (notwithstanding there are some entirely reputable journals with those companies, but there are also a healthy dose of so-called predatory journals in there too). The correlation between the price you pay to publish OA and the prestige of the journal is another bad sign (second figure in this). Nature charges around $12,000 for OA. Given how bad acting for profit companies have been in this field, just think of all the incentives created by paying per paper published (publish everything because each paper brings in money, lower costs which basically boils down to lower the extent of the review process, prioritize appealing to authors over delivering quality science). Note the non OA-only publishers are clearly pushing in this direction too (there were a lot of discussion about increasing the number of papers published when I was an EiC at a Wiley journal).
The bottom line is for profit companies are eating our lunch with our active participation. They’re experts at extracting more and more money. And unfortunately academics are highly complicit. Nature Ecology and Evolution didn’t go from zero to highest rated journal in ecology in five years with no participation from academics.
What do we do going forward?
- Make peace with read and publish deals. The push for OA was a really bad, naïve idea. But it is a done deal now. The best thing we can do is push for more transparency around the Read and Publish deals and more speed for them to spread universally. And we need to make sure for profit companies offer reasonable read and publish deals in poorer countries.
- Societies have to start owning their power. For sure they need to take care of themselves and their own profitability. But they also have to be good actors and ultimately their primary function is to serve science and scientists. What could BES and ESA extract from Wiley if they bargained jointly? How about APC waivers (or better automatic Read and Publish deals) for scientists from the 75% poorest countries in the world? Or APC waivers for PhD students? Or what if they left for Oxford/Cambridge/Chicago? Sadly, I hear no conversation of this around societies. Indeed, I’m not in the innermost circles, but I hear disappointingly little receptiveness to acting for change. I think they’re too focused on their own survival. Plaudits to the Society for the Study of Evolution (and the American Naturalist Society) for setting a good example.
- Scientists have to wake up and change their behavior. We need to submit our papers, read papers, and volunteer our time to journals owned by good actors and not bad actors. This largely overlaps with for profit vs not for profit, but not entirely. And Wiley, with a large number of society journals, remains a conundrum in this classification. This is a classic altruism type of problem though, as it costs the individual to benefit science collectively. So it’s not easy to predict scientists will change soon. Just exactly how bad will the fever have to get before it breaks? In the meantime, if you have tenure, how much are you doing to change? Publish with society journals. Publish with good actor companies. Don’t let yourself be captured or fall into brand extensions. Don’t fall for the impact factor ruse (IF is a journal metric, not a paper metric – highly cited papers appear in low IF journals and the vast majority of papers in high IF journals are barely cited).
- Support disruptive efforts – don’t just stay away from some journals. Support ones that are trying to disrupt the publishing ecosystem for the benefit of academics. Public Library of Science (PLoS), PeerJ, the unfortunately defunct Axios, and specific journals like Evolutionary Ecology Research and Frontiers in Biogeography (UPDATE: as pointed out to me in the comments EER seems to be winding down and PeerJ got bought by for-profit Taylor & Francis – this shows how hard it is to break out in a new direction and why authors need to support them).
- We’ve got to stop publishing so much. Quite aside from chasing high-impact, bad-actor journals, we also have to stop Red-Queening ourselves into unsustainable publication rates. We’ve got to start embracing slow science, where we value quality over quantity. It’s bad for science as it becomes more and more impossible to keep up with the literature and the average quality of a paper necessarily goes down as quantity goes up (scientist time is constant). This frenetic need to publish is part of what gives power to bad actors. And this is hardly good for work-life balance and mental health either.
What do you think? Is it as bad as I describe? Do you have a different opinion about OA? How do you think we change things?
Dynamic Ecology 
Sorry, I’m going to have to rant a bit – this is a pet peeve of mine.
I don’t understand the hostility towards coalition S. It’s a system whereby lots of small institutions and countries have banded together, giving us better negotiating power against the publishing oligopolies you describe above, and generally resulting in fixed-cost contracts that save a lot of money relative to paying paper-by-paper. Moreover, the system helps bigger, richer institutions subsidize costs for smaller and poorer institutions. This seems like exactly what we should be supporting in academic publishing – using collective action to drive down publisher profit margins, sharing costs across rich and poor institutions, AND prioritizing making scientific results accessible to the public that paid for it to be done in the first place.
For sure, it’s not perfect. E.g. for lots of the global south, people are still reliant on fee waivers, which increases barriers to publishing, and leaves some people without much recourse (e.g. colleagues from South America have complained that they often fall between the cracks with this system).
My sense is that the big problem and outlier is the US, and maybe a few of the other Anglo countries. I really don’t understand why American universities and funders seem to be allergic to the idea of collective action. My advice is that US scientists should be *pushing* for something like coalition S, not lambasting it – perhaps if more universities, states, and federal agencies banded together, you could end up getting better deals from the big publishers. If you don’t, you’re just going to end up in the “bad old system” we had before open access, where folks at big R1’s have access to lots of journals and publishing resources, while folks at smaller universities are basically barred from doing research because they can’t afford subscription fees.
And note – like it or not, the US will probably have to institute something like plan S in the near future, at least for federally funded research: https://www.science.org/content/article/white-house-requires-immediate-public-access-all-u-s–funded-research-papers-2025
… end rant. All that said, I very much agree we need to publish way, way less as a discipline. Thanks for collecting and describing all these data – sobering to see how quickly rates are growing.
Well I ranted first, so fair enough! 🙂
Plan S drove an agenda unilaterally. Europe is not even a majority of the publishing world and they drove the agenda for Open Access and foisted it on the whole world without consultation, buy-in or agreement. It’s not even clear to me that European scientists wanted it. I linked to a survey indicating OA was not a priority of scientists. But no it’s not just a “US outlier”. Canada, initially the UK and Australia. And yeah, I can’t just dismiss the Global South as irrelevant as you can. That’s a big place with a lot of people and really distorts the “it’s just Anglo countries” claims. And China is complicated – I know they formally endorsed Plan S (although even at the time it seemed with some hesitation). And China still doesn’t have a Read and Pay with Elsevier for example. I don’t think Japan was on board at announcement time either. It’s really divide and conquer. Peel off the Anglo countries. Peel off the Global South countries. Peel off Asia. But yeah, except for them, everybody remaining wanted Plan S. That’s bad logic. The reality is Plan S was ONLY continental Europe pushing, everybody else was just trying to figure out what to do. Continental Europe is a biggish group but by no means a majority. The truth is the old “pay to read” is much easier to solve for the Global South. You just give away subscriptions that are really cheap for IP addresses in the Global South. It already existed. Now we have a much harder situation for scientists in the Global South trying to publish. Supposedly there are waivers but they’re not very generous The whole staff of Journal of Biogeography resigned over how these waivers were limiting who could publish. Plan S definitely worsened conditions in the Global South. Did anybody in the European funding agencies actually ask them before pushing their agenda? I certainly heard colleagues in Brazil, South Africa etc saying it was a terrible idea.
And then we get to whether it was a good idea. Where exactly is your evidence that it is driving down costs? Or publisher profit margins? I see the opposite. In fact that is the main point of my post. The opposite is definitely happening. The rewriting the rules provided a giant window for for-profit corporations to claw out even more money. And access went down. That means Plan S is a failure if those were the goals.
I think open access is definitely a good thing and where we should be going. Science is supposed to be shared to benefit everyone and I don’t think paywalls are compatible with that.
That said, it’s true there are issues with APCs but I don’t think it’s fair to blame that on open access. It is not a necessary aspect of publishing but a consequence of the for-profit nature of scientific publishing and many of the other incentives that you have already mentioned.
Perhaps chief among those is the obsessive focus on a particular set of journals which are particularly expensive. There are cheap scientific journals and there are even free journals, e.g. The South African Journal of Science. People don’t want to publish in those because they want to be able to say they published in Nature or other high-impact journals. The system pushes people to the most expensive options and allows those journals to charge more.
There is nothing that stops South American or African researchers from starting their own journals which will cover topics of interest and be affordable. In fact there have been many such approaches in the past. The only thing stopping that is the mindset that only certain journals count.
I don’t know that I follow. How is OA not to blame for APC? That is the very essence of OA. Unless you believe in Diamond OA which is nobody pays. But that involves an imaginary source of money. Or it requires that the cost to publish to be $0. Which it’s just not. It really is $500 if a bunch of scientists donate their time or $1500-$2000 if only reviewers donate their time. That has to get paid regardless of whether it is a for-profit it or not. High APC are about for-profit. The existence of APC is not about for-profit (e.g. look at PLOS). So how does OA not involve APC?
Yikes! I’m not claiming that the global south doesn’t matter – rather, that fee waivers do exist for many, many poorer countries. E.g. see this list for Journal of Ecology – if the corresponding author has their primary affiliation in one of these countries, then publication is free: https://authorservices.wiley.com/open-research/open-access/for-authors/waivers-and-discounts.html
That’s about 85 countries for which publishing in JoE is automatically free, and ~40 more where you get an automatic 50% discount. This is pretty standard for Wiley society journals (but see below).
That obviously doesn’t solve everything. Where I’ve head the biggest issues from authors regarding fee waivers is from folks from “middle income” countries, where fees are still prohibitive, but no waivers are automatically applied (e.g. Argentina, Chile, Brazil – though Brazil is a special case, as they have their own local journals that are strongly supported by national funders). This is a big problem that needs solving, but it seems to be getting addressed incrementally, as the list of countries for which waivers are offered keeps growing (at least based on my experience as an AE at a Wiley journal).
Of course the other place where I’ve heard lots of complaints from US authors at poorer institutions, who have their applications for fee waivers turned down. This is the reason that I see this as an Anglo issue – the demographic is unique, in that authors come from rich countries that in theory would have money to support a system with Plan S, but choose not to, basically leaving rich US institutions to benefit from their established power and resources, while leaving poorer universities out to dry.
Now, regarding implementation: I find the critique that Europe “went and did plan S without asking the rest of the world” rather strange. First off, there is no general rule that everyone in the world needs to follow Plan S – rather, only researchers funded by a participating institution (i.e., European-based researchers). Criticizing that seems akin to getting angry at NSF for choosing to only fund US science, without first asking the EU and global south for permission first. Both decisions impact the global publication market, and they bring about winners and losers. But Plan S at least includes a framework for bringing in new members, and for sharing costs equitably. It’s also worth noting that Plan S actively pushes for fee waivers for lower-income authors – and so, is partially responsible for the fact that so many Wiley and Springer journals now offer them for so many lower income countries.
I think your point about JBI is actually a really nice example of why we *need* something like Plan S. Wiley treated JBI like a cash cow because it had no big society behind it. For now, places like BES and ESA are big enough to negotiate some concessions. But much better would be a general framework that *forced* the big publishers to take money from rich countries like the US and EU member states, and spend it on waivers for authors from poorer countries. This is an argument for why Plan S needs to get bigger – not smaller.
Regarding costs – here I agree with you, and very much wish there was more transparency. But, I know that at least at our Uni, the overall library budget has remained more or less constant since before the implementation of Plan S – meaning that we pay roughly what we used to pay for *just* journal access, but now get both universal journal access *plus* open access in all Wiley, Springer, Elsevier, Oxford, etc. journals. I see that as a huge win, since that money doesn’t just give access to some small, elite group of R1-equivalent universities, but rather, makes all of our science available to anyone one earth for free.
Finally, just to push back on the model that you seem to support: funny enough, one journal that I *don’t* have access to is AmNat. This is because our library decided that the subscription cost was too high (note, our Uni is about three times the size of University of Maine, but only has about a third of the budget – and we are well-funded in comparison to many other European Unis). I’ve also stopped publishing in AmNat for the most part, since page charges always came to at least a few hundred euros, but without the benefits of open access. I think the old “journal subscription” model is super attractive if you are coming from a well-funded R1, but pretty lousy if you are coming from a less well funded school, even in a comparatively rich country.
Thanks for engaging!
I didn’t mean to imply that you didn’t care about the Global South. Just that I think it’s a problem to claim that it’s “just a US problem”. And I really think if anybody asked the Global South would have opposed Plan S.
I’m very acquainted with that APC waiver list having been an EiC at a Wiley journal. The 50% discounts are not very helpful. So at that point pretty much all of South America, All of Africa, Almost all of Central America/Mexico, India, Pakistan, Southeast Asia. All have to pay $1000s to publish. About the only country I can think of that actually submits papers with any frequency what so ever that is getting a good deal is Iran.
That’s too bad about AmNat. I guess you could get a personal subscription for $50 if you wanted though. But certainly no system is perfect.
You say your library is paying the same now as before. You yourself are the same (read or publish without charge). You say it is better because it’s better for others because anybody can read the paper. But that leaves out the scientist in the Global South (or other countries that don’t have a grant) who wants to publish. You’ve traded universal publishing for universal reading. I’m not sure it’s better. Arguably it’s much worse because when it comes to reading you could always find a copy online somewhere or email the author. There’s no side door on publishing though.
I just don’t see the evidence that Plan S is giving negotiating leverage that is changing anything for the better. What is your evidence for that?
I can’t reply directly to your previous message, so I will make a new reply here.
Obviously, there is a cost to publishing but that cost does not have to be borne by authors, so there is no need for an APC. There are viable diamond open access journals in the world; for example Web Ecology (which is funded by the European Ecological Federation) or the South African Journal of Science (I believe funded by the Academy of Science of South Africa).
Not everything needs to be funded by societies either. Universities and national funding bodies can pool their resources (especially what is currently spent on subscriptions) to fund journals. That seems to be what cOAlition S is going to push for next; a system where funders supporting the necessary infrastructure for sharing scientific results and there is no direct cost for authors to publish or read. Similar to how you pay to go to a private theme park or use a toll road but you can visit the local park for free and drive in the city without paying to turn onto each street.
I don’t think we disagree that much. But the cost of publishing has to come out of the pool of funds supporting scientists. It might be libraries or societies or grant agencies or universities. But in the end it’s money that comes out of a finite pool of money for science. Therefore, it is never FREE to scientists collectively (neither is driving around on city roads – I pay taxes). In general “free” doesn’t exist and is a distraction. So then the questions are two. Which institution should pay. And should it be attached to reading or publishing. Those are complex questions. I personally don’t believe the direction we’re heading now improves the lot of science. I do think it improves the lot of for-profit corporations despite the fact there is a version of “free” thrown around.
Likewise, thanks for the discussion.
With respect to “asking other places” and “whether the global south would have supported” – no need to make it a hypothetical – have a peek at the list of institutions that have issues statements of support for Plan S – these include, among others, the African Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
With regard to what the coalition is doing, have a peek at their news feed: https://www.coalition-s.org/category/news/. These include, among other things, summaries of ongoing and completed initiatives, and planned future goals, including potential transitions to Diamond Open Access (i.e. no-fee journals).
I mostly don’t link to Twitter leaving them to their own discussion. But I think this is too relevant not to link to: https://twitter.com/khuongaquatic/status/1784891400359690501
Just for context, Jon’s comment is coming out of the German Project Deal (which is a private Germany-only thing). Germany is NOT part of Plan S – my understanding is that they backed out because their politicians were offended at the idea of subsidizing publication costs for poorer countries. I very much agree that Project Deal is a blood sucking monster that must be destroyed.
In contrast, coming out of Plan S, my Uni does not permit me to pay for open access fees for any of the Nature Family journals, including Scientific Reports, specifically because these fees were deemed to be exorbitant. The goal is to boycott these Nature journals so as to force Springer to drop its’ fees. See, in stark contrast, AAA’s Science, which has instead decided to make open access free for Plan S members.
This is the whole point of collective action, and is the reason that I think you should be *for* things like Plan S, not against them.
@ Brian
I completely agree, this is the major issue that we are facing. Publishing is on a downward spiral and I see no way out of this.
Today I received an email about a special issue in an MDPI journal. The APC is CHF 2400, which is BRL 13462. As a professor at a federal university in Brazil – which is basically the highest research position one can have here – my monthly income (after tax deduction) is BRL 9809. A postdoc receives about BRL 4100, a PhD students about 3100 and a Masters student 2100. So, one MDPI paper costs more than four months of a PhD student’s income. So I’d rather use this money for funding students, or buying equipment, or paying for fieldwork, and then publish in subscription journals or open access journals from developing countries.
I fully agree with Brian’s suggestions. I think it would be great if there was a list of “good actors” – society journals, non-for-profit journals, and I’d include journals based in the Global South and/or outside Europe, USA, Canada and Australia. There are for example some good diamond open access journals in Brazil; the problem is that even Brazilian researchers view them as having smaller importance and quality (and there are also some really badly managed journals here; once the editor of one or the main Brazilian journals decided not to publish a paper of mine after its acceptance!)
I’d also like to point to the SciELO initiative, which is open access and I think older than most other open access initiatives: https://www.scielo.br/
Thanks Pavel. I think the personal impacts such as you present should help focus the mind. And thanks for the link to SciELO.
I’m curious how you would rate the problems of the subscription/pay-to-read model (old model) relative to the situation you describe above with the clear problem of the pay-to-publish model from your experience. Did you find access to read limiting? And was it more limiting/problematic than the limits to publishing that are now occurring?
Thanks, Brian!
I personally haven’t had many problems with the subscription model, because in Brazil, a large part of the journals is accessible via institutional subscription from CAPES (one of our main funding agencies); some of them are not, but then we can always write to authors or colleagues abroad, or use, say, alternative means to get the papers. I’ve learned to access these CAPES subscriptions in my first year as an undergrad and it still works, although with some changes.
However, a colleague of mine who works at an environmental agency (ICMBio, which deals mostly with protected areas) has more problems, because environmental agencies don’t have access to these subscription journals, so it’s hard for their staff to have access to ecological research relevant to their activities.
I was President of SSE when we made the switch to Oxford. It took a lot of work by many, many people to make this switch, but it seemed the right thing to do. And Wiley was treating us so badly that it was hard to believe them when they said that would improve. Now that it’s done we know it was well worth the effort.
I have my own experiences with cycles of crisis management and then returning to old ways at Wiley, so my guess is you read that clearly. So grateful to SSE for leading the way on this! I am not hearing things from other societies that make me optimistic yet, but hoping that will change.
@dynamicecology.wordpress.com
Curious if @petersuber has thoughts on this…
@pederengelstad @dynamicecology.wordpress.com
In brief, I agree on the problems with #APCs & publishing #monopolies. But I'm more optimistic than the author about #GreenOA & #DiamondOA. I can't agree that #ReadAndPublish agreements are the future (descriptively or normatively). Can't agree that "OA has been a disaster" or that "scientists never really wanted it" unless these refer APC-based OA rather than OA as such. (Critiques of APC-based OA need precision!)
Great post Brian. One quick note, I’m not sure that Evolutionary Ecology Research is still active. We just pulled a paper from there that languished in review for, well, let’s just say too long, and talking to some of the AE’s at the journal it sounds like they are putting together their last issue.
I’m afraid you are correct about EER, which is why I didn’t link to it, but that was probably confusing because I was effectively referring people to there.
Thanks Brian.
I’m totally on board investing our resources with society journals (and their brand extensions Ecology—>Ecosphere, JAE—>Ecology and Evolution) since the main goal is to get the work out in front of our main audience. Once it’s out *promote it*, send it around, blog it, use (what’s left) of social media for good.
Likewise weight your reviewing effort to journals from societies you believe in and represent your values!
Re-reading your 2015 (!) essay, I’m always intrigued by “Slow Science” as there are few concepts that promote such a strong approach/avoidance conflict. It reminds me of r vs K selection—imagine the environments that would favor slow-ish vs fast-ish publication habits. And how they would promote individual vs group fitness.
Mike
I love the notion of r vs K scientists and what environments would select for K scientists. Two nominations (which everybody will absolutely hate!). Cap the number of papers you can be a co-author on per year. Five seems pretty generous! Second option, instead of APC after being accepted, charge a small fee (few 100 $’s) up front to submit to a journal. Have to find a way to hold early career people whole with that second one.
Re: environments that select for “slow science”: it’s whatever the environment of the field of economics is.
Here’s an old survey-based experiment showing that academic economists are more impressed by a cv that has several papers in leading journals, then by a cv that has those same papers plus additional papers in low-impact journals:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169534712002091?via%3Dihub
The features of the “environment” (“culture” might be a better word) that produced this result seem to include a quite strong dose of hierarchical-bordering-on-elitist thinking. Economics as a field places a *very* high premium on papers in top journals, a *very* high premium on getting your PhD from a top graduate program, etc.
So one way to rephrase the question “how do you select for ‘slow science’?” is “how do you make your own scholarly field more like economics?” And if you don’t want your scholarly field to be more like economics (and there are good reasons not to want that!), well, then another way to rephrase the question is “how do you select for a strong culture of quality-over-quantity *without* your field adopting the extremely hierarchical status-consciousness of economics?”
Here’s another way to promote “slow science”: make sure your journal has arbitrary formatting requirements for submissions, and long review times. 🙂
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0246675
(I’m kidding, but also not kidding.)
It hasn’t escaped notice that two proponents of slow here are also working on books. 😉
“It hasn’t escaped notice that two proponents of slow here are also working on books. 😉”
“Instead of publishing all these papers, everyone should follow Brian and Jeremy’s examples and write books.” Yeah, now that I type that out, it doesn’t seem like the *most* scalable, practical, effective way to encourage slow science. 🙂
Also, you’ve given me the excuse to share this old quote. Pretty sure I shared this in a very old post, but it’s too good not to share again. First read it, then see if you can guess who wrote it and when:
“[W]hen almost every person who can spell, can and will write, what is to be done? It is difficult to know what to read, except by reading everything…A book produces hardly a greater effect than an article, and there can be 365 of these in one year. He, therefore, who should and would write a book…now dashes down his first hasty thoughts, or what he mistakes for thoughts…[N]ot he who speaks most wisely, but he who speaks most frequently, obtains the influence.”
…do you have a guess?
….ok, here’s the answer…
…wait for it…
It’s JOHN STUART MILL. Writing in *1836*. (He was complaining about newspapers.)
Here’s a more recent, but still old quote along the same lines. It’s from Nobel Prize winner Harold Urey:
“I am terribly concerned at present about the lack of control in scientific publication. Science has always been aristocratic. Not everyone could get his ideas published in effective journals…Today anyone can publish anything…[T]here is often so much noise one cannot hear the signals.”
Urey was talking about scientific journals. In 1964.
The more things change, etc. etc.
While the paper acknowledges ‘Green OA (author shares their paper on a website)’ most of the discussion conflates all open access with ‘OA (aka author pays)’.
I agree! I would love to see Green OA take off as an alternative. Statistics show it is not happening, unfortunately. But it should.
For the record, PeerJ (which was always a for-profit company funded by Silicon Valley venture capital) was recently purchased by Taylor & Francis: https://newsroom.taylorandfrancisgroup.com/peerj-joins-taylor-and-francis/
Ah thank you for the update. I had missed that. I was aware of the for-profit status, although I considered it one example of of how profit status and good/bad actor were not entirely linked. But it may well be in a different kind of for-profit status now.
Here’s a radical idea. Let’s stop citing Nature and Co. papers. That will bring their impact factors back down to earth and consequently their cost. And of course, a deterrent to those who think shelling out $12,000 on a single publication portrays them as good scientists when their own salary and that of their mentees are nothing to be proud of. Being a scientist does not absolve one of financial ignorance, especially when you are spending other people’s money.
I broadly agree with you. I practice that myself to some degree. But I do think there are some limits. It is a bit unethical to not cite a closely related paper. Which is why I prefer activism at the submission and reviewing stages more. But I completely agree. I don’t read several prominent ecology journals, so a paper has to really shove itself in my face for me to know about it and cite it. And if I can cite something in a good-actor journal instead, I will.
Of course, I meant selective citing. Further, refusing to cite articles in those journals would not hurt most researchers because only a very few people publish regularly in those venues. More so, “ethics” is perhaps a misplaced notion in this context because we are not dealing with ethical actors. The impact of this problem on science at large is undeniable. 20-30% profit margin, that’s serious cash being mopped out of academia. And sometimes there’s just not a benign cure to a serious ailment. That’s why doctors sometimes recommend amputation of a seemingly working limb. Activism at the submission and reviewing stage only works to the extent that one is well-established enough to make such a call. Further, many have been using this flavour of activism for ages but we are still in the same spot.
Thanks for a very thoughtful post. I regret I’m mostly with you on your Four Thoughts. I have peers who happily ditch society journals for a big brand paper in Science (er, Science Advances) and even Scientific Reports provides a nature.com root url to their articles, and credulous public affairs staff put out blurbs on a new Nature article. And these Read and Publish agreements have a snowball’s chance in Texas of becoming available to all.
Some encouraging glimmers: I’m active in a mid-size society (SETAC) which just ditched Wiley after 10 years in favor of OUP even though Wiley offered more money. Second, the Gates Foundation, a biggish player in biomed, announced they will no longer mandate OA publishing nor pay for it. Preprints are their route to public access (https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2024/04/11/bmgf-gates-policy-refresh-what-would-success-look-like/).
Btw, Figure 1 seems odd. Scopus indexed journals more than double those of WoS/ISI? When I do a search in both, I get more results from Scopus, but nothing like double.
Thanks Chris!
Personally I consider Science and Science Advances society journals (AAAS, not for profit) but you are right that it is confusing that Scientific Reports is a Nature brand extensions.
Congrats to SETAC. Wish the bigger societies paid attention. And yeah the Gates Foundation move is really interesting. Gates is a big mover in the biomed/public health space. I wonder if it is a precursor or insider hint to what will happen with the US funding agencies which are really the next big card to fall. That would be a real mess if Europe goes all in Gold OA and the US goes all in on Green OA. But I think it is a possibility. And I’m kind of sympathetic with that decision if it is made.
As per an earlier commenter, I really think Green OA is a very viable alternative. To all of those who say scientists in poor countries can’t read a paper which is subscription based, that is only if it is not Green OA. Gold OA is not the only way to make a paper easy to access and read.
Not sure what to say about the black line in Figure 1. It seemed like too big a gap to me too. But the sources the data comes from are pretty reliable. I wonder if Scopus covers other fields or maybe non-English publications more? Either way I don’t think it changes the 2 key conclusions from Figure 1 (exponential growth and proportions from different publishers).
Yeah, Science and Science Advances are society journals. I think it’s interesting that they routinely get lumped together with Nature in the context of complaints about for-profit publishing.
Re Science Advances, I was trying to get at brand extension (and my peeve at my friend’s half truths of dropping mention to their SA paper in “Science.”). No shade on SA, just an example of brand lumping for ego and self promotion.
Holden Thorp, Science family EiC touched on the difference between their family of 6 journals and the 90 Nature branded journals in the first couple minutes of this podcast. There’s a transcript. And btw, IMHO, Thorp is a true science leader for the moment. I might not agree with every remark, but his speaking and writing is worth listening and passing on.
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/holden-thorp-straight-talk-from-the
But lumping AAAS and Springer Nature…ooof…. apologies for that impression, that’s like lumping PLOS with MDPI.
The simple reason behind this downfall is that we have stopped reading papers. They are evaluated by where it is published rather than what the contents are. The entire profit making is founded on the “evaluate without reading” culture. Bring back the “read and decide” culture and science is back to its glory in no time. The profit making will collapse the moment people read papers without looking at where it is published.
I strongly agree. Who to submit to (and review for) is one really big choice that is consequential. But how peer committees evaluate peers is another really big one, and probably the real driving force. If peer committees took the time to evaluate papers as papers rather than taking the shortcut of IF and # of lines in a CV, it would pull away a lot of the incentive to chase lots of big publications and encourage slow science (quality over quantity).
“The entire profit making is founded on the “evaluate without reading” culture.”
Hmm. I’m not so sure about that. There are so many papers getting published that everyone needs filters: fast ways to decide what papers to read and evaluate. (Or even: fast ways to decide what papers to skim and superficially evaluate. Or fast ways to decide what paper titles and abstracts to glance at!) So if we didn’t have fast, heuristic filters like (for instance) “I’ll at least glance at the titles of papers published in Ecology, but ignore everything published in Plos One,” we’d have to invent some other filter that does the same job. Old post on this: https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/selective-journals-vs-social-networks-alternative-ways-of-filtering-the-literature-or-po-tay-to-po-tah-to/
I will prefer having no filters to having corrupt and misguiding filters.
Good luck with the whole “no filters” thing: https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/selective-journals-vs-social-networks-alternative-ways-of-filtering-the-literature-or-po-tay-to-po-tah-to/
Good luck with your filters. Here is evidence that the filters are terribly biased. Bias against lesser known researchers like me is 523 % (my calculation based on this data). Peer reviews are tools of power imbalance in science. Doesn’t matter it I have to read a lot more. It is 100% unscientific and also injustice to barefoot scientists to follow only prestigious journals. I will die but not do that. https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2205779119
If filters are applied unfairly (which I agree they are sometimes), I think the solution is to apply them fairly. I respectfully disagree that it’s feasible for scientists to do without any filters.
I don’t have anything further to say in reply, so I’ll step away.
Me too will stop with this last remark. The only way to apply filters fairly is to make the peer reviews transparent. Otherwise there is no way to know that they are fair.
Andrew Abbott’s article, “The Demography of Scholarly Reading,” get’s at the underlying causes of the problem too much literature, as well as problems with many of the strategies of dealing with it. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-016-9315-z
Great discussion, Brian.
Another journal disrupter worth mentioning is Stacks (https://www.stacksjournal.org). Good actors trying to fix a broken system. They also emphasize open and collaborative peer review.
Ooh – great addition that I hadn’t heard about.
I have come up in the era of “OA is the future! Accessibility is so important!” and have watched the OA charges climb and climb. The APC for OA at Ecology Letters is over $5000 (but the standard APC is $0), so I recently decided to go for a sort-of Green OA option. I read ALL the fine print in the Ecology Letters publishing license, and uploaded the latest allowed version onto EcoEvoRxiv. Fun fact – BioRxiv won’t take papers that were already peer-reviewed, but EcoEvoRxiv will!
Great points. There seems to be a growing theme in the comments about Green OA, which I agree with. And good for you for taking the time to read the license and do what you can. Those kind of individual actions add up.
There are a lot of very reasonable points here, but
‘pipe dreaming academics who believed in the mirage of “Diamond OA” (nobody pays and it is free to publish). Guess what – publishing a paper costs money – $500-$2000 depending on how much it is subsidized by volunteer scientists.’
Is a straw man argument. People are well aware that Diamond OA still costs money, the point is that it is not the author. This is why there are so many funding models, schemes, etc that are dedicated to it. Regarding how read and publish deals are doing in Europe, you may have seen this relevant and very recent report https://zenodo.org/records/10787392 from Jisc, the UK’s organisation that facilitates these agreements between publishers and universities (‘transitional’ and ‘read and published’ are intrinsically linked here), which had some criticisms to make, and which also has some interesting points of contact with your own graphs (particularly in section 2).
OK. So who pays for APCs and where does that money come from that is not something else scientists want?
I think the perspective on Read and Publish is pretty different in Europe (going well) and the US (going badly). Thanks for the link. I look forward to reading it.
And a good summary of the JISC report (I agree well worth reading) is here: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2024/04/04/transitional-agreements-arent-working-what-comes-next/
Super interesting point that OA makes the paper the fundamental unit for income rather than the journal or at least single issue. Which really incentivizes publishers to publish more and more.
We don’t need peer review, period. We should just send to the preprint server and let the quality of the work speak for itself over time. They already do that in some branches of physics so it is proven to work.
There are fans of this. I am not one. I think there are some reasons why success has remained limited to some specific branches of physics. I do think preprint servers could play a role in interesting ways though. For example journals that effectively wrap peer review and brand around preprint server content.
Modern peer review began in the mid 1970s. It is not a core component of science. Furthermore, there is much to be gained by cheating (rejecting all work that hurts you) and absolutely nothing to stop anyone from cheating. The result is a horribly broken system in which you send a good paper out 4-6 times until you get two honest and knowledgeable referees. It is not used in MANY branches of physics. Just look up prominent physicist’s google scholar pages. It is not necessary and it slows down science. Finally, every kind of bias imaginable has been empirically shown to plague peer review. Support for peer review is entirely unscientific in fact as there is no empirical evidence that it is necessary, while its costs are obvious to anyone in science.
FWIW, doing away with pre-publication peer review entirely is quite unpopular, at least among this blog’s readers: https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2018/07/02/controversial-ideas-about-scientific-publishing-and-peer-review-poll-results-and-commentary/. It’s unpopular even among our grad student and postdoc readers, and unpopular even among our readers who think scientific publishing is broken and in need of radical reform.
(more relevant to the post: making all journals author-pays open access also is unpopular among this blog’s readers.)
I don’t need peer review in my specific field, so I happily read from all sources confident in my ability to evaluate the claims. But even in fields related to my specific field I rely heavily on peer review to evaluate papers.
An example is learning styles, which are enthusiastically promulgated and promoted very widely, including on many universities’ web sites. One needs a good grasp of the field to determine that most claims for learning styles are not supported by evidence:
Coffield, F., Moseley, D., Hall, E., & Ecclestone, K. (2004). Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning: A systematic and critical review. London: Learning and Skills Research Centre, Learning and Skills Development Agency.
https://www.voced.edu.au/content/ngv%3A13692
Moodie, Gavin (2019) Should learning styles go out of fashion? Mimeo.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339374600_LearningStylesGFM2
why does a review article need peer review? are you suggesting that the scholars who wrote that critical review could not have done so without feedback from what were probably hostile referees? have you ever written a critical review of a popular idea and gone through the nightmare of trying to get it published? and what, pray tell, does peer review POSSIBLY add to a paper that is by definition an opinion piece on a controversial topic? does one expert need another to for him or her to change their admitted opinion?
Um, afraid you chose the wrong person to pose those rhetorical questions to. 🙂 I’ve done exactly the thing you’re claiming is impossible/unpleasant. It’s probably the paper I’m best known for in my field. The reviews weren’t a nightmare; in fact they made the paper better. The paper I’m referring to is Fox 2013 Trends Ecol Evol if you’re curious: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169534712002091
Thanks for taking the time to comment, but I think we’ve gotten to the point where further discussion would just result in us repeating ourselves. You’ve had your say, I’ve had mine. It’s clear neither of us is going to convince the other, so we’ll need to agree to disagree. That’s fine, it happens all the time. I won’t engage further in this subthread, because it’s tangential to the main point of the post. I don’t want to further derail the ongoing, very good discussion of the post.
I wasn’t talking to you. And, moreover, you did not answer my question, which is why peer review is necessary for opinion piece? in fact, you’re silly pompous response is peer review in a nutshell. You ignored the meat of my post and responded snarkily to a side issue in classic straw man fashion. Couldn’t care less if your respond.
I really do not think you have a full grasp of the situation. You appear to have the grasp of a macroecologist at the University of Maine. No bad thing as I think that is what you are. But there are many fundamental issues with your data and scope. I wouldn’t leave it to a commercial publisher to guide you though as they’re in the game you’re ranting about. And don’t ask an American librarian either. Check the Scholarly Kitchen, it’s a massive profit lobbying committee. As long as they keep buying books and journals and paying for conference dinners and awards they’ll keep shouting about the majesty of paid-for publishing.
I think we can do this better. But not knowing what SciELO is, only including Web of Science/Scopus data, largely ignoring the output of the world that is not in English or from commercial publishers. One might say it isn’t your specialist subject. I’m guessing macroecology is.
Yes, academic publishing is completely broken but it’s not OA what broke it.
OA is a further extension of commerce metastasizing throughout the system. The easy capture of money through digital business models and the blind complicity of wealthy actors such as North American universities where the target is a ranking number is.
For-profit companies will continue to use whatever tools they have. A version of OA is just another tool. So, to blame OA is myopic and naive at best.
It’s a B- paper. Submit with revisions please.
I read scholarly kitchen frequently. It’s an insider oriented blog. This is an ecologist oriented blog.
Are you really implying only specialists in publishing can have a conversation about this? Who does that serve? I suppose the scientists who publish don’t have lived experience that is valid?
Also, I think you misunderstand the nature of a blog. you get what you pay for. This is not an academic paper nor a newspaper article. You don’t wanna read it, don’t read it. And taking pot shots at others is easy. Adding to the discussion is more what we expect around here.
Finally are you really challenging any of the major conclusions I drew from the graphs? If not, then nitpicking over the data is a distraction. If so, please name them.
I think what it really comes down to is you don’t like my conclusions about OA. So be it. I have yet to hear a really compelling argument about how the publishing world is better for scientists anywhere in the world than it was 15 years ago (seems to me maybe neutral for European scientists at best), and a lot of people who think it is much worse (everywhere not in Europe). So show me the data about how great (Gold/Hybrid) OA is. How much money we’ve squeezed from for-profits. How papers are much more widely read than before (relative to the number of potential readers). How we’ve closed the gap between haves and have nots (within or between countries). I’m looking forward to the data that show any of those. Or are you going to get an incomplete on your assignment?
I really enjoyed reading this, Brian! I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how editorial board service factors in here. One of the reasons I like serving as an AE for AmNat is because it’s published by U. Chicago rather than a big for profit.
Brian knows this, but for others reading the comments who might not know: EER came about after the entire editorial board of Evolutionary Ecology resigned en masse:
https://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/one-editor-s-experience-declaring-independence-from-a-corporate-publisher-and-thoughts-on-the-future/
For sure editorial boards have to be part of the conversation (I kind of lump it together with reviewing in my discussion above, but of course it’s not the same). But I’m also cognizant that I’ve seen multiple examples up close where a whole editorial board steps down and they’re all replaced and nothing changes. I was in the lab when Mike Rosenzweig took EER independent. And I was on a sister journal when that happened on DDI, and I think it is happening on JBI as we speak. I guess that’s not really any different than submitting as an author or serving as a reviewer. Just a little more personal. It definitely has to be part of the conversation too, although I’m also cognizant that invitations to be on an editorial board are more rare and do help a career, so maybe a little harder to be picky about? But it’s definitely got to be part of how academics vote.
Thanks for the powerful summary of the situation.
One aspect that I think is crucial is to decouple publishing from evaluation/discovery. If I want to be read/evaluated, publishing in a selective glamorous journal is the best way of publicising it. Community driven services to recommend and highlight papers can be game changers. This would allow to publish anywhere and still get a lot of visibility if the paper is good and gets promoted there by thousands of scientists. Which means you need a very good paper to get noticed, which means you publish less (as good papers take more time). A reddit style upvoting system for scholars? [https://plaudit.pub/ is a start].
I can certainly see problems w thumbs up or down (it’s not perfect on the internet and likely to have more problems w academia), but the system is certainly broken enough that its worth exploring other ideas. I’m curious what you see as the important difference between this and number of citations (which is certainly not perfect either)
Correct, it has also risks, but if done in a transparent way, it can be one more option to find/value papers which is community driven.
It can be faster than citations, and I would recommend many papers I end up not citing.
I hope I had better solutions, but I’ll keep thinking and submitting to ethical journals.
Hmm. The papers that go viral on social media certainly are a non-random subset of all papers, on various dimensions (not least because papers in high-profile journals are more likely to be shared on social media) Are the papers that go viral on social media *better* than the median paper? I dunno, man. For instance, for a long time (and maybe still?), the most-viewed ecology paper in Plos One history was this behavioral ecology paper: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0007595. Now over 400,000 views all time–an absolutely *enormous* number for an ecology paper! I wouldn’t deny that the paper has its merits, but whatever its merits I think it’s hard to argue that it’s anywhere close to one of the “best” ecology papers, however you want to define and operationalize “best.” It got a lot of visibility because the topic was titillating/funny to a lot of people.
More broadly, I remain interested in preprint overlay journals as a publishing model, but they don’t seem to be taking off as best I can tell. (am I overlooking a bunch of examples?) The Faculty of 1000 recommendation service shut down years ago. The PubMed Commons post-publication commenting system shut down years ago because hardly any papers got any comments (https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2015/09/17/post-publication-review-is-still-only-for-the-scientific-1-pubmed-commons-edition/). Publisher-hosted commenting systems are basically ghost towns; approximately no one uses them. I don’t feel like there’s all that much substantial discussion of most areas of the ecological literature on Reddit (is there?) Not sure how Peer Community In (PCI) is doing these days–anyone know if that’s taking off?
So I dunno. I agree in principle that it might be nice to decouple publishing from discovery and evaluation. But in practice, that seems to be awfully hard to achieve.
Yes, creating a healthy active community around the recommending system is a real challenge, but I am an optimist.
This was really interesting (including the discussion in the comments) – thanks for your thoughts. This might just be me representing my own “special interest” group, but as a research-active faculty member at a small liberal arts college, I feel in some respects a kinship with the Global South; by which, I mean it is hard enough to get funding to do the research, much less having to pay to publish. My research program is productive but not at the scale that will generally attract large grants. Instead, I conduct the research on small internal budgets that would be completely drained by having to pay APCs. And I don’t know what it would look like for colleges like mine to get these “read and publish” agreements. We are used to operating on a tight library budget (in fact, we eliminated many subscriptions recently) with zero expenditure on APCs, so with our margins a shift in the model would hurt a lot. Many undergraduates are getting both valuable educations and valuable research experiences at schools like mine, and I’ve had many as co-author on papers, so these trends can/will hurt a non-negligible number of people (even if we don’t represent the bulk of research productivity).
It was also mentioned that APCs can be waived with some publishers when the corresponding author is based in certain countries. This led me to speculate that authors could strategically invite authorship from researchers in such countries, so as to make publication of their manuscript affordable. I wonder if that has happened. Arguably there would be some value to helping connect research teams across parts of the world that differ in resources, but it runs the risk of diluting the concept of authorship by finding individuals who are willing to have their name slapped on a paper in exchange for access to cost savings.
Second this–and I’m based at one of the top Canadian research universities and hold an external NSERC Discovery Grant! It’s just not possible to charge me (and many other Canadian researchers like me) enough in article processing charges to not only cover the costs of publishing our own gold OA papers, but also subsidize APC waivers for gold OA papers by researchers from the Global South.
I avoid OA journals that charge APCs in favor of subscription-based non-OA society journals whenever possible. Because my lab can’t afford gold OA for most of our papers, not if we also want to actually do research. And we don’t even publish all that many papers; we’re a small lab that aims for quality over quantity.
I appreciate this perspective. I think your example is yet another one that is getting ignored by those with big visions.
Unfortunately but maybe not surprisingly, the apc waivers work in the opposite direction. If any author is in a richer country they are expected to pay even if they are 4th of 8 authors. They really are meaningless pr moves
Oh wow, I hadn’t realized you would be financially penalized for joining a Global South-based project in a supporting role or for being a Global South researcher and inviting collaboration from a richer country. Isn’t that kind of collaboration would we need to strengthen global scientific infrastructure equitably? That sounds like what you’d call a perverse incentive.
Thanks, Brian, for this insightful and thoughtful post. Ecology & Society (published by the Resilience Alliance) is still self-published. Not precisely a society journal, but certainly akin to one. If anyone is looking for a “good actor journal” to support, I might suggest that one!
Agreed about E&S. Good call out
A-f-MEN
Great piece.
The overlap is striking between the problems in science publishing and the problems that competition authorities — especially the US FTC — are now working hard to solve.
In science publishing there is consolidation into a few big actors that control the market, and vertical consolidation (new branded journals with transfer arrangements) that are arguably horizontal effects too. The Read and Publish agreements might contain some anticompetitive abuses. And the high APCs charged by some journals, above what we estimate the cost of publishing, could indicate that there is market power accumulated that as a society we would wish to prevent to create fair competition for authors choosing journals to publish in. Right now the Lina Khan FTC is going hard at these kind of things in bigger industries.
The Biden admin’s OSTP, as they write the rules on open access, should also be looking at anticompetitive behaviors in the publishing industry. European competition authorities could dig into this too.
We have levers on several sides of this issue. It’s not just funder and govt publishing requirements. We should use all the levers possible to enable a publishing market that serves science and the public well.
I agree completely with the antitrust description. It’s a hard one to crack though as most of the value buyers assign to a journal (and that is where we are now with author pays) is based on the value perceived by others, not actual cost of goods. It is basically like a luxury goods market where value is purely reputational. But you’re right that the horizontalization and verticalization are easily addressed by regulators
I agree that read and publish is a way to go. African education and policy institutions should promote and support homegrown and specific issue-based publishers/journals with fair subscritions for them to earn, but at the same time for their scientists read and publish.
I do not have a problem with the exponential growth of publications, but their orientation in terms of whose knowledge counts. The global north epistemological, axiological, and methodological content is still predominant. Decolonialising homegrown publishing should alleviate the matter.
Pretty sure NIH (US) and NHMRC (Australia) now require OA for research they fund.
There’s some other paraphenomena you haven’t mentioned. With OA and increased publishing, reviewers are inundated with requests to review and the reviewer to paper ratio is reducing. It also reduces the intrinsic motivation to contribute to reviewing.
In some respects what is also missing is tooling/resources to enable societies to sustainably take back publishing, and thereby reduce the costs of doing so. One of the things I really like about PLoS One is that it validates the science but criteria for publication don’t include and editorial decision of merit, enabling negative studies and replication to occur. But PLoS still uses the same commercial publishing pipelines/tools and some of these sorts of studies could be managed and published in lower cost ways, a bit like pre-prints.
Lastly, it no longer feels right to use the term “predatory journal”. Beall’s list had a time, but the biggest publishers now portray some of the same behaviours that these journals were said to have (that may be your point). There are definitely some of these publishers that have been outed (e.g. Hindwai), and to their credit (albeit not everyone views it that way), Wiley has done a great job of setting a path to forward in that case. Similarly, MDPI has been maligned but there are now some fairly well established journals published by them. I guess my point is that it’s no longer predatory OA vs the rest, as many of the features are adopted by all.
Lots of good points. I think nih (and nsf) requires green oa which is a pretty different kettle of fish.
And i agree w you about hindawi/mdpi. Both that they have plenty of good journals and that the world seems to all be moving towards those practices
Oh and to add, completely agree about the central role of software. If a foundation wanted to do a world of good they could fund the development of a really high quality software platform for societies to use. That is the main limiting factor. Societies know how to hire a couple of staff members (review process, copy editing) and to market the journal. It really is the software. There are some efforts (e.g. UCalifornia, SciELO) but they haven’t gained broad traction yet, and they do feel clunky at least compared to a Wiley/Springer/Elsevier landing page, although really what fonts are used shouldn’t matter.
Great read, I agree with nearly everything. In my experience it is rare to find somebody who openly says what a (foreseeable) disaster pay to publish was going to be.
It’s pretty clear comment has started to move to twitter. But I hope everybody who is coming here to brag about how OA has spread access or made science more open, I hope you’ll really pause and listen to some of the stories on twitter and the comments on this blog.
And from Pavel, a frequent commenter on DE who lives and works in Brazil:
https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2024/04/29/the-state-of-academic-publishing-in-3-graphs-5-trends-and-4-thoughts/#comment-122839
And from Brad, I believe a new commenter on DE, at a smaller college in the US managing to stay research active without much support:
https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2024/04/29/the-state-of-academic-publishing-in-3-graphs-5-trends-and-4-thoughts/#comment-122888
The point is that there were definitely problems with pay-to-read around access, but there were at least some workarounds, but OA has just flipped that into a giant, very unsolvable problem for publishing work.
A lot of the world is pretty clear which system (bad as it was) they preferred, and it is hard for me to understand how people who don’t face those challenges are sitting here telling them they are better off. To be perfectly blunt, it’s really not a good look.
hi there, do you know Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation? This published by the Brazilian society of ecology (Abeco) under Springer. The journal is free for readers and authors and is supported by sponsors we struggle to find every year. The journal is well ranked in Ecology area. This is disruptive.
I didn’t know but i really appreciate your bringing it. I’ll have to take a look. And it does sound disruptive
Great article Brian. Also, a plug for the society- owned New Zealand Journal of Ecology. Check it out folks.
interesting read…. Money rules… Not only in Academia… As you know
I’ll share widely to contribute to your aim oof having us, researchers… Think about it… At least think…. And hopefully, why not… Act
Excellent post and very interesting discussion. Maybe someone has mentioned this, but … Having just spent 11 years at a Dutch university, I wonder if the European support for Plan S and for open access in general is that, for better or for worse, Europeans actually care about public goods for public benefit. (shhhhh….. socialism) They actually want research results to be available to the public. Not just to researchers. The discussion of open access reminds me a bit of the contrast between European and American health care systems, or pensions, or public transportation.
I don’t know if this adds anything to the discussion, but it probably warrants consideration.
Thank you Brian for this very insightful read. I think that you are not wrong with suggesting that we slow down our publication rate, yet I am left thinking about how to reconcile slow science with the need now for most MSc and PhD candidates to be authors on scientific manuscripts to be competitive to receive scholarships… maybe this is also part of the answer.
I think you’re right. It’s not fair to expect junior scientists to lead this change. Senior scientists have to lead this change. Either by doing slow science themselves. Or by evaluating others more on quality than quantity. Or preferably both!
One small bit of information that might help with that reconciliation: most readers of this blog (and I suspect, most ecologists) drastically overestimate how many first-authored papers in leading journals you need to be hired for a tenure-track ecology faculty position in North America. Even if you restrict attention to hires at research universities. Reconciling quality and quantity in publication rate isn’t as difficult as many ecologists think it is, at least in the context of faculty hiring decisions.* (Perhaps some scholarships and fellowships are just automatically handed out to whichever applicant has the most publications?) Data here: https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2018/10/02/how-many-first-authored-papers-in-leading-journals-does-an-ecologist-need-to-be-hired-as-a-tenure-track-asst-prof-at-an-r1-university-not-nearly-as-many-as-most-ecologists-think/.
*And no, that’s not because research unis only hire ecologists with Science or Nature papers. The majority of newly-hired TT asst profs of ecology in N. America do not have Science or Nature papers at the time of hiring. Not even if you restrict attention to new hires at R1 unis. Data here: https://doi.org/10.1002/bes2.1624
Interesting additions to the conversation, truly I wasn’t thinking about hires but really simply about MSc and PhD students of NSERC Ecology and Evolution panels. If a MSc student needs one paper out and a PhD Student 2 or 3 as a bare minimum to get a scholarship it goes up pretty quickly.
Now I’m wondering how many papers a typical NSERC scholarship student has at the time they’re awarded the fellowship. Might be possible to compile data on this. NSERC scholarship awardees are named publicly, right, same as NSERC Discovery grant holders?
You keep saying this Jeremy, and I have witnessed first hand that it doesn’t really matter for the lower amount NSERC DGs (at 1503 anyway).
So why the disconnect with scientists perceptions of what is required? Having just been through a form of academic review, I *know* that the reviewers took issue with my limited amount of first author / senior author contributions whilst simultaneously ignoring many of my non-paper contributions nor that much of what I do is highly collaborative and only 1 person can be first (or last) author. I don’t mind, I have a job, but these personal experiences (not just to me but personal observations on hiring committees, every-day interactions etc) lead me to believe that, despite your data, those doing the hiring or selection do put a lot of weight on first author publications, papers in glamour journals etc.
At the very least, many ECRs do think they need many first author papers and/or papers in “top tier” journals to make the cut. That they believe this either tells me that it’s actually true (despite claims, not just yours, to the contrary), or that they firmly believe it to be true because of their personal interactions with people they see as representing the people on hiring committees etc that are going to be evaluating them.
Oh, I agree that hiring committees, NSERC Discovery Grant committees, etc. look at your publication list and evaluate it! And I agree that they do like to see some first-authored papers in leading journals!
What I disagree with, and have tried to use data to push back against, are incorrect claims like, “You *have* to have a Nature or Science paper to get a tenure-track job at an R1 university”, “Having a Nature or Science paper practically guarantees you an interview for any TT job for which you apply,” “Faculty job interviews and offers at research universities always go to the applicants with the most publications in high-impact journals,” “The NSERC Discovery Grant committee literally just counts up your first-authored publications in high-impact journals when deciding how to score your research output,” “Everybody who gets an NSERC PDF has at least X first-authored papers, where X is some number much higher than the actual minimum,” “If you don’t have at least 10 first-authored papers, you aren’t competitive for a TT job at a research university,” etc. Those aren’t straw men that I’m setting up just to knock them down. If you look at polling data here, and look through comment threads on ecoevojobs.net, you’ll find that some non-trivial number of EEB faculty job applicants and their advisors believe incorrect statements like those.
Yes, your publication output matters to faculty hiring committees, NSERC Discovery Grant committees, etc. But the data refute some crude, incorrect ways of summarizing exactly *how* it matters.
Does that clear things up?
plan S did not make much of a difference on the global market, because it tolerates hybrid journals which really take the worse from the both worlds. If Europeans would to publish only in full open access journals we would see a sudden shift of journals that are dependent on the European market. I would also say planS could perhaps make a push for non-profits too.
To me, the saddest part is that society journals do not lead the progress of transitioning to Gold OA, many are still hybrid (there are some notable exceptions). Never the less, the most innovation was done by journals like eLife or by community journals like PeerCommunityIn.
To be honest, I think the only solution is to factor in morality of publishing in hiring – if we would to penalise publications in terrible commercial journals (like nature) people would change. And it’s not even like there are no high impact non-profits/society journals. There are hundreds of them, saying we have no choice is very misleading.
Nice analysis, but I did not find in in a key element. European scientists, with access to publishing funds, don’t even have to make science anymore. They just fund the publishing of papers written completely by scientists in poorer countries, just putting their name on them. So, yes, the big picture does not look good at all. If you have access to funding, you just sit and wait for poor scientists to throw their papers at your feet, you put your name on them, pay the publishing taxes and look how a great scientist you are too.
That’s a disturbing concept! You’re absolutely right that is another of the perverse incentives in the system though. I don’t have personal experience of how often that happens. Seems like you think it is fairly common.
I love the anti European rage.
General public needs to have an access to academic literature! PlanS is democratising science, perhaps at expense of morally dubious academics, but clearly a good thing.
It’s rather more specific than all of Europe if you actually read the blog, LOL. Like the heads of a few specific agencies.
I guess you don’t care about scientists in most of the world having the ability to actually publish in those journals that the general people now get to read. Or is that different and just for the privileged?
I mean, you suggest instead to lock up the research so the global south (and the general public!) have no access to it, how is that better?
Of course dispriviledged will have less options, that’s kind of the definition of privilege. I just feel the disprivilege to access is much worse than dispriviledge to publish in (some!) journals. There are still preprint servers and diamond OA options, and all the waivers for low income countries by society journals… it’s not like there is no way to engage, it’s harder, but everything is when you have less resources, that’s not good enough argument for the status quo in publishing.
Why don’t you do the work of asking 10 random colleagues in the global south whether they prefer pay to read or pay to publish. That seems like a low bar before you start making claims on their behalf
I used to be affiliated with an institution that had limited subscriptions and it sucked hard (and “limited” was still fairly good, I can’t imagine having anything less during my undergrad). Why don’t you look at how SciHub is used? People don’t need OA, right? What about students? They don’t need to publish, they need to read and again, you say that we should listen to their senior colleagues instead of attending to their needs.
“can I read” or “can I publish” is also a strawman argument – everyone. Absolutely everyone, anywhere can publish in a credible journal without a unreasonable financial burden – first there ARE diamond OA options and there ARE waivers for people that don’t have access to funds to pay the OA fee.
People (and this is also an argument you conveniently ignored – people, not scientists) deserve access to the body of academic literature they paid for in taxes.
Not sure how to reply to your next comment, so doing it here.
If the reader pays, and a poor researcher can’t pay the $50 article access fee, they send an email to the author saying, “hey, can you send me your paper”, and the author does so the next day, because they want to be read and cited. Or if they need a paper from 1920, they send an email to a friend who has access, and that friend sends them the PDF. I have done this many times in both directions.
If the author pays, and a poor researcher can’t pay the $5,000 article publication fee, they can’t publish. End. Of. Their career, most likely.
The situation is really not difficult to understand unless one doesn’t want to, unless one wants to be seen as a heroic crusader for open science by closing the profession to all but the most privileged scientists on the planet.
It’s a simple math – how much instituions are paying for subscriptions vs how much would they pay for OA?
Let’s assume the profit margin of publishers will remain exactly the same (although arguably, OA will drive the price down, e.g. nature charges a lot less than what they would get out of subscriptions). Then, it’s those that publish more that will start paying more than what they pay now for subscriptions, while those that chip in to the global pool of publication will pay less.
And it just happens, that those that have more money, generate more science outputs and publish more. Therefore every less-wealthy institution will be better off.
Surely, the transition will be a bit bumpy – there will be a moment where they would need both money for OA fees and subscriptions, but again, there are so many options to deal with that.
Finally, labelling people with different views is in general not seen as very constructive…
@geneflowblog
A) Show me the evidence that things are working out as you predict they will?
B) “a bit bumpy” is an understatement for disenfranchising a majority of the worlds scientists from having equal access to publish as rich countries and the knock on effects on their careers for years and years, maybe a decade or more, no?
C) Telling other people you know better than they do what is best for them is not really a nice practice.
Despite your impression, I told noone what to do… but at the cost of being not nice for once – I would really recommend to think about this.
Great piece Brian, a lot to think about. It’s one of academia’s big wicked problems – if anyone can solve it, ecologists are probably most likely to have the skills needed! 🙂
I think the fact that Wiley acquired Hindawi, and all Hindawi journals will become Wiley ones is pretty telling of where the field is going.
Agreed. There was a time (10 years ago) when people (including me) thought Wiley would carve a middle path. But I don’t think that’s how it’s gone. They look to be doing everything in their power to keep up w Springer & Elsevier. Whether the market demanded that of them or they had a choice is an interesting question. I stubbornly continue to think a for profit could be customer/academic focused and suceed. But I have to admit that all of those have gotten bought up and no longer exist (e.g. Blackwell, Sinauer). And I know not for profits like university presses and societies are being squeezed hard by market forces too. So maybe I’m naive!
Thanks for this thought-provoking article.
I have concerns about the sustainability of transformative agreements. My university (a medium-sized public regional institution) recently signed TAs with four publishers; two of them are the same cost to us as our previous subscription agreements, one saved us a couple thousand dollars, and one costs us about a thousand more. Basically, it’s a wash when compared to our previous subscription agreements.
It’s a good deal for our faculty –they are excited about the APC waiver more so than the fact their articles are open– but for the library it’s business as usual. And when the next round of library budget cuts come around (next year, most likely) the TAs will be every it as vulnerable to cuts as our traditional subscriptions have been. It’s a different model, but it has the same vulnerabilities on the back end.
I agree. I’m not a huge fan of TA. If we could just go back to reader pay subscriptions, I would. If we could go to green OA I would. But in a world where gold oa seems to be winning, a TA (institution pays) seems to be better than pure OA (individual author pays). That is most positive thing I can say about TA
brian, thank you for this. a lot of what you say is true. we tend to get entangled in the never-ending story of publishing, publishers, and publishing fees, forgetting that the issue is different. the main problem, where i see it, is – citizens (taxpayers) currently do not have a right to get information that is freely available and timely accessible, which was produced by using their money? the way things operate, no matter what model we adopt (either the apc open access model or read & publish model), things need to look better. there are two issues: 1. the way science is done and practised today (including peer review), and 2. the way we disseminate science results. let’s focus on the later as that is the main topic here. you said it right, we need to publish less and somene else said it in the comments, we need to delink evaluation entirely dependent on the publication open access is not the problem. open access is not the problem, imo. it is how it is practiced today. the problem is how quickly and cleverly, all the commercial and society publishers started turning the table and became open access champions. i guess folks who advocated/started the open access movement did not realize this at the beginning. i do, however, disagree with you on the society journals. i am sur you know the history of the movement of open access when harold varmus, the then nih director, pushed the e-biomed movement. in that case, the society journals vehemently opposed open dissemination of information as they felt threatened. I have had two podcasts on this (and generally on open dissemination of scientific information) with mike eisen (the ex-editor-in-chief of elife). you can here then here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA23NA0yjsI) and here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPDgNTlDRjI). in my opinion, there has to be a funder-driven model (similar but not entirely like the elife model) where funders pay the journals but not in the way the traditional journals operate. in the future, the best way is to mandate preprints and have preprint-overlay journals that will drastically reduce publication costs. in my estimate, it should be at most 300 $ to publish an article if we use preprint-overlay, use technology and distribute the administrative work of publishing around the world (currently, most of it is in united kingdom and united states). thank you. binay panda
Hi Brian — I agree with you about the overall negative impact of Gold OA (as currently done by the publishing oligopoly, not as done by Frontiers in Biogeography) but I’m surprised by statements on Green and Diamond OA.
First, about Diamond OA. I find unfair to blame Diamond OA for the current state of affairs, even partially. It is difficult to see how it could have had such an impact as many people don’t even know about it (e.g. in our field). And as pointed out above by some, nobody involved in Diamond OA believes that “nobody pays”: academic institutions or societies pay directly journal costs rather than indirectly through authors. Estimated article costs are between one to two orders of magnitude below the high APCs of the current market, depending on how much typesetting is done and how/where it is done. See the numbers reported here and in the cited article here. So there are financial models for this, we can estimate journal cost through article cost x total output, the needed institutional support etc. In mathematics there a number of Diamond OA journals that trace back to the 90s, some quite renowned (see e.g. those co-owned by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics). One can hardly view these as “pipe dreaming”.
There are also a number of viable small Diamond OA taxonomy journals, many in South America through Scielo. They make it work. IMO the big question is how to migrate these good practices to the “western” biology world. In ecology/evol biol, in addition to stuff cited above, there’s WebEcology (sponsored by the European Ecological Federation) and more recently PeerCommunityIn and the PeerCommunityJournal. The financial model for the latter is open, they’ve made a statement recently that they prefer to rely on a multitude of small donations, which you might find interesting.
About Green OA, the fact that disciplines are pooled together in the graphs hides interesting patterns I think. For instance, mathematics and large parts of physics use arxiv for nearly all papers and Green OA is therefore widespread if not ubiquitous in those disciplines. There are a number of other interesting initiatives in maths btw such as https://projecteuclid.org/ for smaller publishers etc. Much to learn from these fields IMO, and I’m curious to see how their learned societies will react to the read-and-publish deals. From their perspectives these are probably not good news.
Other patterns are also hidden geographically, within Europe. In some countries Gold OA appears to be favoured to meet Plan S. In others (like France) Green OA is mandatory for many research institutes (and a law has been passed to shorten publisher embargos) while Gold OA is actively discouraged — with moderate success. So I’m not sure we can dichotomize as US vs Europe, although I understand the need for simplification.
I remark that Sci-Hub is absent from the discussion. I am not exactly set on how it fits into the transition to Gold OA but that’s for sure an important player of the recent years. Definitely more mainstream than Diamond OA journals.
Lots to chew on there, Fred! Every time I see Diamond OA explained it involves the word “free”. You are right that Diamond OA basically means an institution pays. But I think that would be a better terminology to have in the conversation than anything involving “free”. I don’t think “my library/grant funder will pass the cash to journals instead of me” was the original excitement around Diamond OA, but I’m sure perspectives differ.
The slippery slope about talking about APC and what it should be is that, yes you can publish a paper for $300, but that invariably involves a lot of volunteer time from scientists not only in review as in the norm, but also in following up with reviewers, copy editing, website maintenance, etc. I’m not sure that is really a fully sustainable model. I think the $1500ish figure (e.g. Plos) is a much more realistic figure.
I agree about Green OA. I kind of hope the US funding agencies push Green OA the way Plan S pushed Gold OA. What would publishers do if no NSF or NIH funded scientist could publish with a journal that didn’t allow instant access, final version Green OA? More pain in transition but might end up at end point I could support more.
And as you say there was an underground Green OA in practice via sites such as SciHub but also scientists just putting final versions on their website whether that was completely kosher with the licensing agreement or not. This is rarely mentioned, and was not fully legal, but it is a big part of why “saving” poor scientists from having to pay to read does not nearly begin to balance out them now having to pay to publish. There were always ways to read if you wanted to.
I also agree that journal wrappers around biorxiv servers has a lot of potential that needs to be explored further.
On Diamond OA and who pays; we’re already paying the big publishers with both our time and our money to publish in / review for / edit for their journals. Perhaps if we redirected that time to Diamond OA titles things would be somewhat different. The Diamond OA journals that I have experience of are funded by some combination of (relatively small in $ terms) financial contributions from a supporting institution or (in the case of the R Journal, the R Foundation) a charitable organisation (the R Foundation have funded time for grad students to help develop the infrastructure used by the journal and develop a new web-based publishing platform/system).
Part of the problem here though is that to keep Diamond OA cheap to operate, those journals typically require more effort from authors and the editorial board members – for example the R Journal requires R Markdown or Sweave/Knitr (R -> LaTeX -> PDF) submissions as that’s what the publishing system is based around, and the running of the journal uses git.
It’s my experience that the majority of PIs don’t value their students etc investing the time to learn these valuable skills. And these manuscript types don’t often lend themselves to the workflows many more senior academics learned during the earlier stages of their careers, so we have conflict.
I wonder why you focus on the cost of and who pays for Diamond OA, yet suggest things like journal wrappers around BioRxiv as having potential? Who’s paying for BioRxiv when a substantial number of scientists? Someone, somewhere is paying for publishing; low cost Diamond OA titles would be a better recipient of our volunteer time and money.
For profit publishing should be abolished and scientific papers should be readily available to all. Until then long live SciHub & LibGen.
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Hi Brian,
Thanks for this article and discussion. Perhaps we should track down some other issues and look for its origins. I might be wrong (possibly I am), but this crazyness started when universities started creating rankings, most of them based on publications. Well, such rankings were supported by paid universities, so the best marketing for the business is to be on the top (comparing universities is hugely complex, if not impossible, but somehow they simplified the thing, and this is another story). Then, the rankings extended to journals, through impact factors, and obviously those maintained by big publishers had their own strategies to manipulate information and convince the scientists that they should publish in journals with high rejection rates to assure the research quality… as part of the business, scientists should pay (a lot) to access such articles. To be effective, this plan required that scientist’s rankings were created (based on publications in high IF journals and citations) – they played a lot with academics naivety and egos… Science is not game, so why scientists are competing? Recently I heard from a colleague that one day he would be the best scientist of the world in his field and he was struggling to that (what the hell is the meaning of “best scientist”? are there rules for this competition?this is a complete bias of the science purpose). Well, this is a feedback system, we are talking about humans… But big publishers found that OA could be much more profitable… And this is what is have for today.
As a Brazilian researcher, I see the options to publish in high impact journals increasingly reducing, as I (and the majority of my colleagues) cannot afford to pay these high costly APCs. The problem is not the APC themselves, but the fact that they are exorbitant and prohibitive. Even with 50% waivers (only practiced by some journals) it is still impracticable.
I think that empowering scientific socities or university journals could be a way, even if practicable APCs were necessary to cover the costs (not aimed to profit), but I am note sure many people would support that, as we would need to stop (or reduce) the competitivenes among scientists and institutions and change the whole way we are assessed for grants and professional progression…
Just some thoughts, again, thanks for the article.
I’m surprised that there has been relatively little comment above about the arXiv. In most areas of physics it is pretty well universal to post papers there (at the same time or even prior to submission to a refereed journal in most cases). In practice, this means that journals are redundant except for older papers, dating from a time before use of arXiv became widespread. I haven’t looked at journals for years, because work is old by the time it appears there – to keep up, you need to read arXiv, and only arXiv.
So physics is pretty close to diamond open access. OK, running arXiv costs money, but the true cost per paper is a tiny fraction of the exploitative charges for Gold Open Access that all publishers now seem to levy. But the whole operation is free to me, and to all academics worldwide – both to deposit papers and to read them. The necessary modest running costs are paid by donations from relevant organisations (Research Councils in the UK), and the cost is so low that I can’t see any reason why this arrangement shouldn’t continue indefinitely.
This only leaves the issue of peer review. In practice this is dead: people like me read papers on arXiv prior to refereeing, so peer review is not performing a useful filter: you need to develop your own antennae for filtering out poor papers. Not that there are so many of these: the exponential growth you refer to comes from the “not even wrong” papers: incremental work that is correct in itself but not really leading to progress – the intellectual equivalent of expanded polystyrene.
However, young scientists are trapped because the system expects them to publish papers that are peer reviewed. For this reason, I still end up submitting my papers to a “proper” journal, even though its function is simply as a backup for the arXiv. The minimal solution to this issue is the concept of an “overlay” journal, where the paper sits on arXiv, but a separate website holds peer-review material. This route has been taken with great success by the Open Journal of Astrophysics (https://astro.theoj.org/); I intend to publish only there in future, at least in cases where I am able to influence my co-authors.
Indeed, arXiv is a very good exponent of diamond open access. As I observed in a previous comment, it is easier ‘to develop your own antennae for filtering out poor papers’ in fields in which one has some expertise. I expect most readers of arXiv are expert in the field in which they are reading.
I suggest that at the other end of the spectrum is Cochrane, a non profit international network ‘of researchers, health professionals, patients, and carers’. Cochrane goes beyond peer review to ‘produce trusted synthesized evidence’ accessible to ‘anyone interested in using high-quality information to make health decisions’ such as clinicians, patients, carers, researchers, and policy-makers.
https://www.cochrane.org/about-us
Decisions on appointments and promotions are increasingly involving people without expertise in the field of appointment or promotion, who rely on indirect indicators of quality such as citation rates, journal impact factors, and peer research grants which ostensibly don’t need much specialised expertise to interpret. So I fear we are stuck with these poor statistics (’metrics’) for as long as we suffer managerialism.