Between 2019 and 2023, researchers paid $8.968 billion to make papers open access. Imagine what else could be done with this money if it wasnt paid to for profit publishing companies... 👉 arxiv.org/abs/2407.16551 - ThreadSky

duckswabber.bsky.social • 89 days ago

Between 2019 and 2023, researchers paid $8.968 billion to make papers open access. Imagine what else could be done with this money if it wasnt paid to for profit publishing companies...
👉 https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.16551

Comments

romanvilgut.eu•88 days ago

Usually it´s not the researchers, that pay, but the Univerities. And in case of public Univeristies -> the taxpayers.

joshuagrochow.bsky.social•88 days ago

In the US, even in the case of private universities, publication fees are often covered by grants from the federal government (i.e., taxpayers).

matttkk.bsky.social•89 days ago

Imagine if academics weren’t managed by people stupid enough to think more publications means better science. That’s the driver.

swampthingpaul.bsky.social•89 days ago

That trend is alarming!! What's even more worrying is the number of journals listed as predatory under these publishers continues to grow. Also the growing number of retractions is extremely worrying under this same time period. ⬆️ profit ≠ ⬆️quality

propolis-labs.bsky.social•88 days ago

#opensource dev here--what would be the barrier to creating like, an open publishing portal?

jasonandrade.bsky.social•88 days ago

This is certainly a point but is the implication that publishing costs $0 (and $9b was.. profit?). I am assuming it wasn’t.

So what’s the actual cost of running a publishing ecosystem..

charlespaxton4.bsky.social•89 days ago

Easy solution, do not publish gold open access. No one can winge about excessive profits of these companies and then collude with the process. Make GOA the refuge of scoundrels.

lacalaca85.bsky.social•88 days ago

Which is easy to say, but most European grants nowadays require fully open-access publishing, and arXiv preprints don't always satisfy requirements.

charlespaxton4.bsky.social•88 days ago

Green open access is a possibility and use diamond access journals.

joshuagrochow.bsky.social•88 days ago

Plenty of journals charge exorbitant publication fees *just to publish* (even without OA).

charlespaxton4.bsky.social•89 days ago

And you need to be very vigilant as journals give the impression you can escape GOA when actually it is really difficult as I have discovered 😠

madgreek.bsky.social•89 days ago

A lot of young researchers will opt for GOA as they prefer the visibility of OA and don't have time waiting for things to get better in their struggle to build a career.

thiotrix.bsky.social•88 days ago

Hey scientific publishers, if science research gets shut down in the US, there goes you golden goose. How about you all do something to support us for a change and start lobbying?

tombuckleylab.bsky.social•88 days ago

This is actually a really good point

jaquent.bsky.social•89 days ago

This colour scheme is really difficult to read.

farhanasultana.com•88 days ago

MDPI is a leading predatory publisher. Not that the others are great, esp Elsevier the Evil Leader, but at least their journals that I’ve seen generally have some rigorous peer-review system in place while MDPI doesn’t. Pay to publish model needs to end.

juancommander.scholcommlab.ca•84 days ago

In the linked preprint, we choose a different scheme. That one must be from Science story about it

agdco2.bsky.social•88 days ago

That’s 0.4% of the total spent on R&D world-wide. Certainly I could spend $9B myself in ways I could imagine, but an increase in my group’s research expenditures of < 0.5% would barely have an effect. Yes, paying publishers is irksome, but not publishing Open Access is likely even more problematic.

danielbolnick.bsky.social•88 days ago

Support your society journal using a not for profit publisher!

doctorzen.net•88 days ago

PLOS is a non-profit.

And we should acknowledge that academic publishing is not free. Even preprint servers cost millions of dollars to run annually.

drcat.bsky.social•88 days ago

Millions vs trillions is still a massive difference though.

doctorzen.net•88 days ago

No dispute. But very few researchers have truly grappled with trying to estimate costs.

Even nonprofit publishers have been harshly criticized for their costs.

drcat.bsky.social•88 days ago

Because the exact quantity doesn't matter all that much. We know it's several orders of magnitude less than what we're paying now. And if we involve universities in the system to help with hosting this could be decreased by another decent factor. 1/2

drcat.bsky.social•88 days ago

Open-Source Communities handle these kind of things for a long time at very low operating costs. If you look for arch user repository mirrors you can see many hosted at universities as well etc. 2/2

doctorzen.net•88 days ago

Yes. My impression is that many academics underestimate publishing costs SO much that projects trying to provide alternatives to commercial publishers end up struggling.

http://neurodojo.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-blog-and-secretaries-model-of.html

drcat.bsky.social•88 days ago

Yes, I don't think that this is something that should be provided by third-party entities that have to rely on donations but run by the scientific community. Instead of paying millions to Springer etc, hosting things at universities on university machines and using Uni/Institutional knowhow.

jowilliams.bsky.social•88 days ago

Here's an example of breakdown costs for open access operation. Some journals here have costs covered directly by their society, the ones that charge are about €1300-1800. The price allows for some waivers according to need. https://publications.copernicus.org/apc_information.html

andygeology.bsky.social•88 days ago

There's a huge difference between cost recovery and the profits being made by the large commercial academic publishers.
Given their poor peer-review process I find MDPI's profits particularly offensive (I won't either publish there or review for them).

doctorzen.net•88 days ago

Indeed. My post is informed by having seen many academics underestimate publishing costs, and criticize nonprofit publishers for their costs.

Related blog post: http://neurodojo.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-blog-and-secretaries-model-of.html

tacaro.bsky.social•83 days ago

this is an amazing graphic but really could use a different color scheme

schilthuizen.bsky.social•88 days ago

Money paid to PLoS (which is non-profit) is simply what it costs to edit and process the paper. It is *not* to make it open access, because all of PLoS's papers are open access by default.

gzellmer.bsky.social•88 days ago

One more reason to publish with OUP's Journal of Petrology! OUP is a not-for-profit publisher.

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