What Does It Actually Cost To Publish a Scientific Paper?

ananyo writes "Nature has published an investigation into the real costs of publishing research after delving into the secretive, murky world of science publishing. Few publishers (open access or otherwise-including Nature Publishing Group) would reveal their profit margins, but they've pieced together a picture of how much it really costs to publish a paper by talking to analysts and insiders. Quoting from the piece: '"The costs of research publishing can be much lower than people think," agrees Peter Binfield, co-founder of one of the newest open-access journals, PeerJ, and formerly a publisher at PLoS. But publishers of subscription journals insist that such views are misguided — born of a failure to appreciate the value they add to the papers they publish, and to the research community as a whole. They say that their commercial operations are in fact quite efficient, so that if a switch to open-access publishing led scientists to drive down fees by choosing cheaper journals, it would undermine important values such as editorial quality.' There's also a comment piece by three open access advocates setting out what they think needs to happen next to push forward the movement as well as a piece arguing that 'Objections to the Creative Commons attribution license are straw men raised by parties who want open access to be as closed as possible.'"

filtering

[goombah99]

What I value is a filter. There's two much to read and too much crappy research. The harder it is to publish and the more that difficulty is realted to the quality the better.

What I also appreciate are special collections that group simmilar themes. I have found over the years that the more electronic things have got the more I have lost out on the serendiptous find of the article that was next to the one I was actually looking for. When I search for things I just get what I search for and that tends to make a tight circle.

A collision of two worlds

[damn_registrars]

Scientific publishing is where the worlds of scientific research and business collide. People who do scientific research are used to needing to get things done with the smallest investment of resources, time, and money possible. Business people are skilled at finding the most profitable points for selling their wares. This collision has one particular effect that does not meet standard thoughts on free markets; competition brings prices UP. Look at PLoS journals for example; they started with very low publishing costs and now for non-members it costs quite nearly as much to publish in PLoS ONE as it does to publish in Nature or Science. Even competing journals from different publication houses are increasing their prices in parallel rather than trying to compete for authors by price.

And as the summary suggests, this is muddied by the fact that the journals don't like to be upfront with their publication charges or charge structure. Many journals even bury how their charges work - do they charge by the page, by the image, some combination thereof, or something completely different? This makes it a massive pain in the ass for a researcher to decide whether or not to try a new (to them) journal for their paper, when they can't figure out how much it would cost to publish in this unfamiliar journal in comparison to one they usually publish in.

Re:filtering

[godrik]

If you have problem finding papers, I recommend you try academic search engines. At OSU, we developped theadvisor ( http://theadvisor.osu.edu/ [osu.edu] ). It is a webservice that allows you to search paper that are similar to what you already know. You basically upload a set of papers you know are relevant and the system find what is around.

We are still working on improving the quality of the database, but I strongly believe that these approaches are the way to go.

how much does it cost to research?

[noh8rz10]

I find the argument over pay-for-placement journals kind of silly. I estimate it costs me $50,000 to write a journal article. This includes research, grad students, overhead, etc. Based on that, no big deal if it's an extra $3k to get it published!

Competition drives prices UP

[Animats]

This collision has one particular effect that does not meet standard thoughts on free markets; competition brings prices UP.

That's very common. In the antiquated "free market" view, competition inevitably drives prices down. In modern marketing, competition is by features, conveniance, marketing, and status symbol value. (Academic journals are in the status symbol category.) Pricing is driven by implicit or explicit collusion, with competitors striving to push prices upwards.

This model applies to appliances, autos, cell phones, music, movie tickets, etc. Some things still have price competition, but they're mostly commodities.

Re:No

[jklovanc]

By the way the projected Xarciv operating costs for 2013-2017 are projected to average of $826,000 per year, including indirect expenses. It is free to the users but the costs are paid for by donations. They also don't edit, peer review or produce journals. Publishing an edited, peer reviewed paper in a journal is much more that making it available on e web site.

Re:Which question?

[jklovanc]

Both are funded by donations and grants. Both have a much bigger audience than scientific journals and therefore a much bigger pool of possible donors to draw from. Going to a donation model would in effect be a voluntary subscription fee that may or may not cover costs. .