>Also, not all open access journal are charging author, that is a lie installed by publishers lobbying (and this is how they actually spend money). You can research "diamond open access" or "overlay journal" for some examples of economical models where journal are high quality, open access and free to submit to.
Those all seem to be sponsored. That won't scale to every paper unless some large organization funds it. The biggest open access journals all charge.
> it includes literally zero work from the publisher.
As long as their expenses are >60% of revenue, I find this hard to believe. If you think they're wasteful, you can run your own and try to spend less, but denying their costs won't convince me.
>The only thing that publishers provide is reputation/prestige
Like I said, this model doesn't fit with the numbers we have about their margins. I'd at least expect over 50% profit margin if they were merely extracting rent, and probably closer to 90%.
Its hard to answer your argument directly because publishers like Elsevier never publish transparent accounting numbers. For all we know, their costs could mostly be "Hollywood Accounting". (not to mention, the profit they do report is already through the roof).
It all does strike me as obviously inefficient though. In my day to day research as a grad student I almost never benefit from work the publishers did. I don't even use them to download my papers because the paywalls are so annoying that I usually go directly to the author's home page (google scholar will even find these for you). Every half-decent CS researcher makes their work available on their personal website, at no cost,
In the end, what I am trying to say is that I don't trust Elsevier's reported expenses and that even if I did I think a huge chunk of them would be something that could be drastically reduced with a bit of technology.
>It all does strike obviously inefficient though. In my day to day research I almost never benefit from work the publishers did. I don't even use them to download my papers because the paywalls are so annoying that I usually go directly to the author's home page (google scholar will even find these for you). Every half-decent CS researcher makes their work available on their personal website, at no cost,
Different fields have different needs. You don't need too much trust in CS or math, because you can just evaluate the arguments and proof. But other fields require much more, and you do benefit from the work they did in only showing you certain papers and not others.
In all fields, the peer review process is performed by volunteer researches at no cost. The publisher DOES NOT evaluate arguments or ensure that the contents of the paper are correct. The only thing the publisher does is own the name of the prestigious journal.
> Why is it considered hard to get into those journals
Journals only publish so many papers in a given time. Its not just a matter of submitting a good enough paper.
Dunno why this is the case for journals but when it comes to conferences (where lots of CS research is published) there are obvious time limits regarding the number of presentations that can be accepted.
> why do people give them prestige and won't give a new startup journal prestige?
For historical reasons and perverse incentives, sadly. Young researchers cannot afford to publish on new startup journals because advancing your carrer depends on publishing in prestigeous journals (universities evaluate researchers based on the prestige of where they publish). Meanwhile, tenured professors are under less pressure when it comes to career advancement but they also need to publish on prestigeous journals to secure grant money to fund their labs and to accomodate for their younger co-authors (who are still trying to advance their carrers).
It also doesn't help when the "journal prestige categorization" is defined by the government, as happens in my country[1]. Not only are our journal ratings always outdated (punishing startup journals and conferences) but they also emphasize publishing in journals over publishing in conferences (which is terrible for CS research in particular)
Once again: the curation is not performed by the publisher, but by the editorial board and the reviewers, who are researchers, and are not paid by the publishers for this work.
Paid academic journal editors are rare exceptions.
From one of your own links:
Carol Barnes, professor of psychology and neurology at the
University of Arizona in Tucson, is a reviewing editor at
the Journal of Neuroscience, a 3-year appointment for which
*she receives no compensation*.
(…)
Barnes has received funding from the university to hire an
assistant to provide clerical support to assist her with
the manuscript review process. She considers herself
fortunate, because "without this help, I would have had to
decline this position."
Not only she was still paid by the university for whats seems to be a full time job during 3 years according to the article, but in addition to that the university, not the publisher, paid for an assistant to this job!
Exactly. I strongly believe that the majority of their expenses are related to lobbying and paying professional lawyers to scam public research librarians into signing awful contracts with them.
By the way, these contracts most often contains non-disclosure as legal requirements, which I find outrageous for public money, especially because it gives a strong advantages to publishers in negotiating these contracts.
Even if that is true I would rather see public money sponsoring real open access journals than spend paying author fees and subscription to closed access and hybrid journals.
> As long as their expenses are >60% of revenue,
What I truly question is the nature of these expenses. From my point of view inside academia in the field of computer science, and knowing a lot of people in other fields of academia, the actual work put by publishers in the final product that is a published scientific paper is close to zero (except for those fields where there is layout work because they do not use readymade LaTeX documentclasses).
>Even if that is true I would rather see public money sponsoring real open access journals than spend paying author fees and subscription to closed access and hybrid journals.
That's a legitimate argument. Shifting around who pays what may very well result in positive externalities. But merely complaining about publisher profits while ignoring their costs doesn't work.
Those all seem to be sponsored. That won't scale to every paper unless some large organization funds it. The biggest open access journals all charge.
> it includes literally zero work from the publisher.
As long as their expenses are >60% of revenue, I find this hard to believe. If you think they're wasteful, you can run your own and try to spend less, but denying their costs won't convince me.
>The only thing that publishers provide is reputation/prestige
Like I said, this model doesn't fit with the numbers we have about their margins. I'd at least expect over 50% profit margin if they were merely extracting rent, and probably closer to 90%.