PeerJ, A New Open Access Megajournal Launches 61
Mirk writes "Academic researchers want to make their papers open access for the world to read. If they use traditional publishers like Elsevier, Springer or Taylor & Francis, they'll be charged $3000 to bring their work out from behind the paywall. But PeerJ, a new megajournal launched today and funded by Tim O'Reilly, publishes open access articles for $99. That's not done by cutting corners: the editorial process is thorough, and they use rigorous peer-review. The cost savings come from running lean and mean on a born-digital system. The initial batch of 30 papers includes one on a Penn and Teller trick and one on the long necks of dinosaurs."
$99 entitles you to publish an article a year, for life. $300 nets you unlimited articles published per year.
Charging authors is not much better... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Charging authors is not much better... (Score:4, Insightful)
The charge is a very small amount. One would think it is ~ 1% of the dollar value of time invested in writing the paper.
What is achieves is to filter serious papers from frivolous ones and this cuts the total cost of peer reviewing them.
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Yeah... you would just add this fee into your grant application. Shouldn't be too difficult. Also, it would only really take about 8-9$ per month.
Yawn (Score:2)
Yawn. Another open access "journal" that's going to make money by charging authors. Open access journals are the science equivalent of vanity publishers. I get about three solicitations a week for me to send papers to some open access journal that I've never heard of.
There's almost zero entry barrier to somebody setting up a website and calling an "open access scientific journal." What they're saying is, give them a hundred bucks and they'll put your text on the web! It costs almost nothing to them,
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You seem to oddly leave out the review process. Anyone can host random papers on the web for very little money, and stick an official sounding name on it. That was true even before the open access thing gained momentum, and really has nothing to do with open access at all.
It all comes down to quality and consistency. This depends heavily on the review process, and how well it is managed. But once you've established a record of doing that well, the readership, citations, and better submissions will fol
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All scientific publishing is vanity press, by your measure. The alternative is "give me your work, so that I own it, and I will publish it".
In one case you pay with cash, in another a commodity.
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Re:Charging authors is not much better... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Charging authors is not much better... (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know about PeerJ specifically, but typically the editor (or more generally, editorial board desginees) for the journal selects the specific reviewer(s) for a paper. They don't just hold up a paper and ask for volunteers for a specific paper. To execute the strategy of signing up a bunch of shills and hoping that the editor will randomly select them, and nobody who would actually do a legitimate peer-review, is probably not going to be a very good long term strategy if the editors aren't in cahoots, although it might occasionally work for a very obscure topic.
On the other hand, that's no worse than the situation today (the more obsure the research, the more cooperative backscratching there is).
The bigger problem I see is how to entice quality peer-review volunteers. Traditional Journals entice peer-reviewers by offering stuff like book vouchers, or free access for a few weeks per reviewed article and/or free access to all references in the paper during the peer review duration. If it costs nothing to access the journal, these traditional enticements don't have any value. As I understand it, to make up for this, they are forcing members to "volunteer" to review at least 1 time per year (or at least comment on a public submission). I don't see how this would be very effective out of the gate, but as with the /. moderation system, I'm sure it will be tweaked over time...
FWIW, it seems that PeerJ is apparently currently only Biology and Medical Science Journal (not a true megajournal). Journals in those fields tend to have the most egregious pricing scales and have the most annoying editorial boards (because there are limited publishing options). I'm sure that's a deliberate marketing ploy (hit the Journal industry where it's the most vunerable).
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Re:Charging authors is not much better... (Score:4, Interesting)
Right, it can be seen as part of your task as an academic. The extra income I get from teaching is very little, but it is part of what an academic should do. Reviewing does not give me money at all (although it marginally publicizes my name), so it's also part of my tasks as an academic.
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I assumed that's part of what the $99 is for.
That's not done by cutting corners: the editorial process is thorough, and they use rigorous peer-review.
Peer review is not paid work (Score:3)
When I have reviewed papers for a refereed journal, I have not been paid. The most "pay" I get is to be mentioned as part of the "scientific committee" for that particular number of the journal.
Of course, the journals should choose who gets to be a reviewer — If I have reviewed something, it is because I have submitted works there that were published, and were deemed worthy of being a reviewer.
Now, there *can* be a journal where the author doesn't pay, the reviewers get only credit, and the readers do
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Even if the publishers were charities (which they aren't) there are still costs that still have to be covered.
Charging authors doesn't mean that it comes out of the authors personal pockets - generally, the money comes from the university, or more likely, from the funding body that paid for the research to take place.
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Even if the publishers were charities (which they aren't) there are still costs that still have to be covered.
Name those costs. Universities already archive scientific journals as a service, peer review is generally done by unpaid volunteers, editing is generally done by unpaid volunteers, and we know how to use peer to peer networks to distribute large amounts of data without paying a lot for bandwidth (imagine the major universities acting as seeds for bittorrent archives of each years' collection of published journal articles). So what cost do you think remains to be paid here?
Charging authors doesn't mean that it comes out of the authors personal pockets - generally, the money comes from the university, or more likely, from the funding body that paid for the research to take place.
In other words, we still have
Re:Charging authors is not much better... (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, we still have some of the problems that open access should solve. While we no longer have the issue of individuals being unable to access knowledge, we are still saying that research can only be done by those with university affiliations or who are wealthy.
A $99 one-time fee does not limit this to the "wealthy". If you can't afford $99, you're not likely to be able to do any meaningful research either.
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$99 is a trivial amount, EVERY author has the ability to pay that.
Only in developed nations. But even in the 3rd world, it will not be a barrier to anyone with a university or employer affiliation, only to the solo "lone wolf genius" without job or sponsor, which is a scenario so unlikely it might as well be fiction--but I guarantee it will be brought up...
Third world countries... Have a wild variety! (Score:3)
I live in Mexico, which is often qualified as a third world country. Yes, we are way closer than European living standards than to Subsaharan Africa's — But we are still "third world".
In a university, there are myriads of different programs that can be requested to fund a research project. In my university, the two main programs for that (PAPIME and PAPIIT) grant the researcher upon the project approval starting at around US$17,000 a year for up to three years, to be used in project-related activities
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So, in this portion of the third world... US$99 is not *so* terrible. Of course, you can still publish without a formal project approval (and that's what I have usually done), but it will be harder to do so in the author-pays journals.
Especially since it's $99 for life, not per paper, not even per year.
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Chandra. His family wasn't exactly destitute though.
Exactly my point, the genius who cannot possibly scrape together $99 is probably a myth. That means that not only does he not have $99, not only can he not save up $99 in a few years (remember that's for life, not per paper or per year), not only does he not have a mentor or patron who can scrape up $99, he does not have 9 friends who could provide $10 each. Yeah, right. That's not a genius with a publishable paper, that's a lunatic with a delusion...
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The is no requirement that the author pays, only that someone dose. Authors who can't afford $99 only have to find someone who believes their paper is worth at least that.
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You can't be serious. How exactly would one determine this "ability to pay"? How much would *that* kind of policing cost? That cost is not justified when the fee to publish is as reasonable as this. You just argued that meaningful research can be done with almost no overhead cost (pencil and paper is cheap, but a piece of charcoal and the concrete embankment of the bridge you're living under costs even less). If the research is that meaningful, it should be possible to convince enough sponsors to raise
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You can do meaningful mathematics research with nothing but pencil and paper.
You're thinking of philosophers. Mathematicians need a pencil, paper, and a trash can.
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Name those costs. Universities already archive scientific journals as a service
The principal valid costs relate to storage and the provision of an access service, with the costs of operation covered for the next hundred years or so. It's easy to say "but these could be provided for free" but is quite a different story if you've got to guarantee access for that long; with volunteers, it's very easy to end up with nobody storing anything and the data just getting lost completely. You're also unlikely to persuade most university libraries to let anyone outside of their faculty access the
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This was not a concern in the days of printed journals. Either the library had them or not. If they wanted to keep the periodical around longer, the library was responsible for scanning the periodical content onto microfiche or some other medium. The notion that some sort of eternal "access service" is required is due to the decision made by the publishers who did not want to release electronic copying rights to their customers. So why should I be paying more for a choice that the publisher made to limit wh
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Some journals
Re:Charging authors is not much better... (Score:4, Interesting)
hundred bucks isn't that much though, if others will consider this a "real" journal.
anyone can publish anything with practically no costs right now as well.
if the paper is really groundbreaking that would be enough, to upload it even on pastebin. very few papers are that groundbreaking though.
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Re:Charging authors is not much better... (Score:5, Informative)
Charging authors to publish is not much better than charging people to read the articles
Every journal I am aware of that uses any kind of peer review process does this. This system, however, is a lot cheaper. I recently publised in PLoS ONE and I had to pay around $1,500 for that. I really hope these guys can keep their publication costs down and manage to acquire some prestige so they get indexed in relevant places.
What we truly need is a system that is paid for by universities, cooperatively, that allows anyone to submit a paper and allows anyone to download as many or as few papers as they would like.
Some journals have tried that - look at the institutional memberships at PLoS (my institution is not a member) and BioMedCentral for example - the problem with that though is that memberships like that would usually be paid for by the school libraries and quite nearly every school in this country is trying to reduce their library expenditures.
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For what it's worth, I was tangentially part of an effort in the University of Wisconsin Libraries to publish the open-access Journal of Insect Science. After perhaps a year of doing that, we looked at the actual costs and found that, IIRC, $30-$100/page are not actually unreasonable costs. Yes, there's a large variance.
"How," you ask, "could it possibly cost so much to produce an open-access journal? The author is working for free! The reviewers are working for free!" Well:
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They are funded by several grant bodies. I don't think elife is that much of an experiment, PLoS has already taken the middle costs of the market. eLife is aiming at nature and science.
The difference, I think, with peerj is that they are investing in technology. Even at $300 dollars for a paper (PeerJ charges per author), peer J is pretty cheap; it's possible that they have just found somewhere really cheap to outsource their type setting; alternatively, they have worked out a completely automatic system. I
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Biological and Medical Sciences only (Score:3, Informative)
From the FAQ [peerj.com] :
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Those fields are perhaps the worst of the lot when it comes to open access, so I guess it's a good start. Physics, maths and comp sci almost always have preprints on arXiv, which are just as good as the real thing but free of charge.
Still hope more journals like this arise so that researchers don't need to pay extortionate fees to publish, though.
I have a theory (Score:3)
Megajournal? (Score:2)
This gives a whole new meaning to "open access", incidentally...
mixed signals from science media... (Score:2)
My concerns with such models, despite the excellent credentials for the objectivity of the present crop of promoters/purveyors, is that as an author, you are buying your way into people's attention. It is difficult to imagine a fire wall separating advertising intentions from pure scientific communication that can really work whe
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Peer-review. PeerJ is particularly good on this, in that it allows the whole peer-review history of papers to be published alongside the final version: the original submission, the reviews, the handling editor's decision, the authors' rebuttal letter and revision, subsequent editorial comments, etc. As an example, you can see this audit trail [peerj.com] for our own PeerJ paper on sauropo [peerj.com]