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It looks like pay to publish is not very popular among scientists:

Salvador

RF's Swedenborgian
You are using PeerJ to report on PeerJ. Do you not see a problem with this?

Well, I suppose they could possibly maybe misrepresent the impact factor details of the published articles in order to attract more business than if they'd honestly truthfully represented the actual impact factor details of their published articles. Right?

Good news! This link from a source that's seemingly independent of PeerJ does seem to be in agreement with what PeerJ has itself reported for the impact factor details of their published articles.
Impact Factor of PeerJ - 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010
 

beenherebeforeagain

Rogue Animist
Premium Member
List of Misleading and Fake Metrics | Stop Predatory Journals

List of Misleading and Fake Metrics

This is a list of possibly misleading metrics.

Metrics are judged to be misleading if they meet the following criteria:

  1. The website for the metric is nontransparent and provides little information about itself such as location, management team and its experience, other company information, and the like
  2. The company charges journals for inclusion in the list.
  3. The values (scores) for most or all of the journals on the list increase each year.
  4. The company uses Google Scholar as its database for calculating metrics (Google Scholar does not screen for quality and indexes predatory journals)
  5. The metric uses the term “impact factor” in its name.
  6. The methodology for calculating the value is contrived, unscientific, or unoriginal.
  7. The company exists solely for the purpose of earning money from questionable journals that use the gold open-access model. The company charges the journals and assigns them a value, and then the journals use the number to help increase article submissions and therefore revenue. Alternatively, the company exists as a front for an existing publisher and assigns values to that publisher’s journals.
 

exchemist

Veteran Member
If there was one change in peer reviewed article I wish that they would all become open source after a limited period of time. How long is an article "fresh"? In other words how long should an article be protected so that the journal will be able to earn some money from subscriptions? Is two years to short of a period of time? For amateurs it would be nice if we could link at least relatively recent articles. The general public is always going to be a few years behind the cutting edge of science at any rate.
I think one would need to know more about the business model of scientific publishers. It could be that the earnings go up for quite a few years, as the more important papers are cited more and more by others, and more people read them. One would not want to make it hard for scientific publishers to earn a living, and the cost of subscriptions is not huge.
 
One would not want to make it hard for scientific publishers to earn a living, and the cost of subscriptions is not huge.

Many major academic publishers have higher profit margins than Apple (which has ludicrously high profit margins). Have seen figures of 50% regarding medical publishing, for comparison, an average business has a single digit markup.

A significant proportion of academic publishing is a racket, not too different from 'pharma-bros' who buy up niche medicines and hike prices knowing they are the only game in town.

Government funds research. Researchers work for 'free'. Peer-reviewers wonk for free. . Elsevier/Brill/Springer/etc. hoover up journal titles and their back catalogues. Elsevier/Brill/Springer/etc. makes billions of dollars by charging you $50 for a pdf and charging millions to universities with minimal value added.

It's corporate rent-seeking at its absolute worst.

I made a thread on it years ago, some links in this: Ethics of academic publishing
 
Articles in ‘predatory’ journals receive few or no citations

"Many scientists have decried the rise of "predatory" journals—open-access publications that charge authors to publish but offer little or no peer review or other quality controls and use aggressive marketing tactics. Scholars have worried that the resulting articles have contaminated the literature with mediocre, flawed, or intentionally misleading findings. But a new study finds that 60% of articles published in a sample of "predatory journals" attracted not a single citation over a 5-year period. And the articles that received citations did so at a rate much lower than papers in conventional peer-reviewed journals."

I wish that I could read the full text. But it appears that scientists that rely on open access are not taken seriously by other scientists. Sort of like how paying for sex with a prostitute does not earn a man much respect with his fellow men.

It looks like pay to publish is not very popular among scientists

It is worth noting that some reputable journals also use pay to publish models in order to remain open access.

Pay to publish =/= Predatory journal
 

Subduction Zone

Veteran Member
Many major academic publishers have higher profit margins than Apple (which has ludicrously high profit margins). Have seen figures of 50% regarding medical publishing, for comparison, an average business has a single digit markup.

A significant proportion of academic publishing is a racket, not too different from 'pharma-bros' who buy up niche medicines and hike prices knowing they are the only game in town.

Government funds research. Researchers work for 'free'. Peer-reviewers wonk for free. . Elsevier/Brill/Springer/etc. hoover up journal titles and their back catalogues. Elsevier/Brill/Springer/etc. makes billions of dollars by charging you $50 for a pdf and charging millions to universities with minimal value added.

It's corporate rent-seeking at its absolute worst.

I made a thread on it years ago, some links in this: Ethics of academic publishing
One thing to remember is that mark up and profits are two very different animals. Retailers often have a mark up equal to the wholesale cost of the goods or higher. But there percent profits are usually in the single digits. I know that publishers need to make a profit to stay in business. My question about how much they made involved how long articles could stay profitable.
 

Subduction Zone

Veteran Member
It looks like pay to publish is not very popular among scientists

It is worth noting that some reputable journals also use pay to publish models in order to remain open access.

Pay to publish =/= Predatory journal
I am sure that there are some ethical publishers that use that business model.
 
One thing to remember is that mark up and profits are two very different animals. Retailers often have a mark up equal to the wholesale cost of the goods or higher. But there percent profits are usually in the single digits. I know that publishers need to make a profit to stay in business. My question about how much they made involved how long articles could stay profitable.

Profits for someone like Elsevier are around $1 billion yearly on $2.5 billion revenue (as icing on the rent-seeking cake their medical division makes above average profits)

The Cost of Knowledge is a protest by academics against the business practices of academic journal publisher Elsevier. Among the reasons for the protests were a call for lower prices for journals and to promote increased open access to information. The main work of the project was to ask researchers to sign a statement committing not to support Elsevier journals by publishing, performing peer review, or providing editorial services for these journals.

The Cost of Knowledge - Wikipedia

I wish that I could read the full text.

*cough cough* Sci-hub.tw *cough cough*

Sci-Hub and LibGen lawsuit[edit]

In 2015 Elsevier filed a lawsuit against the sites Sci-Hub and LibGen, which make copyright protected articles available for free.

Elsevier - Wikipedia
 

exchemist

Veteran Member
Many major academic publishers have higher profit margins than Apple (which has ludicrously high profit margins). Have seen figures of 50% regarding medical publishing, for comparison, an average business has a single digit markup.

A significant proportion of academic publishing is a racket, not too different from 'pharma-bros' who buy up niche medicines and hike prices knowing they are the only game in town.

Government funds research. Researchers work for 'free'. Peer-reviewers wonk for free. . Elsevier/Brill/Springer/etc. hoover up journal titles and their back catalogues. Elsevier/Brill/Springer/etc. makes billions of dollars by charging you $50 for a pdf and charging millions to universities with minimal value added.

It's corporate rent-seeking at its absolute worst.

I made a thread on it years ago, some links in this: Ethics of academic publishing
Thanks for this. I had no idea.
 

beenherebeforeagain

Rogue Animist
Premium Member
students and most practicing professionals have access paid for through their institutions, and through their memberships in professional organizations. Memberships and subscriptions also used to be a tax deduction/business expense, but I have no idea if that continues. In the last few hiring committees I was on, university paying for certain memberships/subscriptions/software packages and support was actually brought up in negotiation.

regular citizens can get access to many scholarly journals through their local public libraries...or can enroll at their local community college for a 1-credit course and get access to the school's library, which usually has access to larger numbers of journals.
 
regular citizens can get access to many scholarly journals through their local public libraries...or can enroll at their local community college for a 1-credit course and get access to the school's library, which usually has access to larger numbers of journals.

Alumni can also get access from some universities on request, although usually to a smaller range of databases.

(tbh anyone with an internet connection can freely access probably 80-90% of paywalled journal articles anyway. I have institutional access, but the 'alternative' method is often actually quicker than logging in and accessing it 'properly')
 

Subduction Zone

Veteran Member
Profits for someone like Elsevier are around $1 billion yearly on $2.5 billion revenue (as icing on the rent-seeking cake their medical division makes above average profits)

The Cost of Knowledge is a protest by academics against the business practices of academic journal publisher Elsevier. Among the reasons for the protests were a call for lower prices for journals and to promote increased open access to information. The main work of the project was to ask researchers to sign a statement committing not to support Elsevier journals by publishing, performing peer review, or providing editorial services for these journals.

The Cost of Knowledge - Wikipedia



*cough cough* Sci-hub.tw *cough cough*

Sci-Hub and LibGen lawsuit[edit]

In 2015 Elsevier filed a lawsuit against the sites Sci-Hub and LibGen, which make copyright protected articles available for free.

Elsevier - Wikipedia
That is an insanely profitable business. Others are going to figure a way to move in on that. Many of the early ones will only be there for the money, the predatory sites, and they will fail eventually or learn how to put a valued product out there.
 
That is an insanely profitable business. Others are going to figure a way to move in on that. Many of the early ones will only be there for the money, the predatory sites, and they will fail eventually or learn how to put a valued product out there.

They do put a valued product out there, but very little of that is due to the publishers. Almost all the value comes from the researchers and reviewers who don't get a penny.

You can't really move in on it either. The profit comes from having already bought up massive quantities of well-known journals and their back catalogues (Elsevier alone own 16 million documents). These are unique resources, and so they rent-seek like people who buy up patents on drugs. They should be viewed as no better than people like Martin Shkreli, yet they control a significant proportion of the scholarly 'memory bank'.

Hopefully more people will use open-access models in the future, but this can't change who owns our scientific and academic publishing history (research that we mostly paid for in the first place).
 

Quintessence

Consults with Trees
Staff member
Premium Member
The university I work at is currently in contract negotiations with publishing giant, Elsevier. As part of that, this recent article was tossed across my desk:


From symbiont to parasite: the evolution of for-profit science publishing

The long and the short of it is that the model needs to change. Much of the profits these companies are making are coming out of taxpayer dollars yet the knowledge is held hostage behind paywalls and we writers don't even hold the copyright to our work in most cases.
 

beenherebeforeagain

Rogue Animist
Premium Member
They do put a valued product out there, but very little of that is due to the publishers. Almost all the value comes from the researchers and reviewers who don't get a penny.

You can't really move in on it either. The profit comes from having already bought up massive quantities of well-known journals and their back catalogues (Elsevier alone own 16 million documents). These are unique resources, and so they rent-seek like people who buy up patents on drugs. They should be viewed as no better than people like Martin Shkreli, yet they control a significant proportion of the scholarly 'memory bank'.

Hopefully more people will use open-access models in the future, but this can't change who owns our scientific and academic publishing history (research that we mostly paid for in the first place).
Organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences sponsors open access, peer reviewed journals, and they are reputable...supported with tax dollars...

then there are others that are supported by nonprofit organizations, supported by private grants or donations...some are more reputable than others...

But yes, ownership of the major/older journals by the handful of for-profit publishing houses does present problems, not so much for researchers getting published, but for control of information to others...
 
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