This comes up every time there's an article about academic publishing. Yes peer reviewers do the reviewing, but it's the long-term infrastructure and coordination that the journal provides.
AirBnB's content is generated by users, but AirBnB itself requires software development, legal, customer support, HR, program managers, quality control, etc. Same with publishers.
Note that this journal now has a publishing fee for authors to cover these costs, rather than a fee for the reader as before. The 2022 fee for each author is $1,705 according to the FAQ. So moving to open access it not about removing the costs (which many people on Hacker News seems to always assume), but changing who pays for it.
The coordination and most of the infrastructure (except for archival) is actually also performed by us peer reviewers... We set up the conference's websites, we find the committees, the reviewers, we distribute the work, we do the reviews, we organize the meetings, we create the instructions for formatting, editing, publishing, etc.
We require that some institution is there milking us and the institutions so that we can collect stamps to get to the next level, making everybody waste resources and then finding ourselves not being to access our own publications for free! sometimes requiring (for formal applications) extra paper copies at a high cost!
- AirBnB serves a significantly-larger infrastructure than a website hosting up PDFs. Github with Jekyll can do it.
- Software development is really at a minimum for journals. Hosting can be a static blog, and review infrastructure could literally be replaced with e-mailing PDFs / text files back and forth, and often devolves to that anyway.
- The editor of the JFP uses their university and external grant budgets to cover most, if not all, of their operating time and expenses.
- Legal is likely the largest cost (ensuring the journal has sole publication rights, and contracts to that effect), but open access can also simplify this.
- Without customers (e.g., open access), there is no need for customer support. HR and program management is a very small minimum, as well.
- Nobody involved in the actual journal work (editing, reviewing, etc.) is paid.
The cost of $1075 is, frankly, kind of absurd. What does it cost to host a PDF online forever? Volume 31 of the JFP published ~25 research articles, which would be ~$25k. When Github has the infrastructure to entirely eat the hosting cost, what justifies this much money?
So I think your assumption that academic publishing is "a website hosting up PDFs" is the source of confusion for "what justifies this much money." Just like AirBnB isn't just a website hosting JPEGs, while being worth 129 billion dollars. Hosting PDFs can already be done by arXiv or Google Drive or Github as you said.
Customer support is for peer reviewers who can't log into their account, for managing issues dealing with misconduct, for handling issues with payments, for post-publishing corrections and errata, for passing accounts from editors who become non-responsive to other editors, etc. Not just dealing with readers or subscribers.
As someone who has been on both sides of journal peer review, let me assure you that there is no "customer support" framework like what you are describing. The model simply doesn't work that way. The primary editor of the JFP, in particular, plays an active role and individually manages feedback and reviewer corralling. They are not paid for that service. When submitting to the JFP, my feedback was hand-delivered by the editor via email.
Sure, as someone who has also been on both sides, that's not what I was describing at all though. None of the examples I gave are handled by an editor, except maybe "managing issues dealing with misconduct" depending on the situation, but maybe by the publisher's legal team. But the other issues are not handled by an editor in my experience.
Before Airbnb there was Couchsurfing. I think academic publishers are a better argument against the unnecessity of Airbnb than Airbnb is an argument for the necessity of academic publishers.
The devils are in the details. This does not still justify current model and the steep price they are paid (by taxpayers, FYI a typical university pay millions of dollar to these institutions). Consider openreview by ICLR[1] as an counter example for your claim. The maintenance, quality control, software development is not as steep as current gatekeepers advertise yet their review quality is much higher (network/transparency effect). Not to mention the profit margin of scientific publication is 3x of the Apple (38% for Elsevier) and it should be because the science workers, works free for these institutions (fighting for credit).
The current business model as a whole is a legacy institution based on earlier monopoly by a charlatan named Maxwell [2]. He basically lured scientist by shiny hotels+extra packages to build the initial reputation and then monopolize the entire industry for decades. It's interesting how the model works by rip off the taxpayers twice (by publishing and access) while still peer-review process is free (from money, not credit).
You can find a good review of this scheme from below YouTube video[3].
AirBnB is useful because it helps people wanting to rent their homes for short periods to people willing to rent them, which otherwise would be harder for both sides; without out, people would have more trouble traveling on a budget or making spare money from their homes. The service they're providing is a marketplace for the two parties to meet and communicate. I don't think this translates that well for journals; academics aren't getting paid by the readers of the articles published in the journals, and readers wouldn't have much trouble finding papers on arbitrary websites due to search engine nowadays. Moreover, renting your home to AirBnB once doesn't mean you're forbidden to let a family friend use it for a week next summer, but many journals forbid authors from sharing their papers for free.
as a complete outsider to peer reviewing and academic journals, this sounds like that scene from "office space", the "what is it you'd you do here?", one.
Journals don't "do" anything, but the professors, PIs, postdocs, etc are evaluated for jobs or promotions based on the "quality" of their work approximated by the "quality" of the journals they were able to publish in. A Nature or a Science paper gets you a lot more than an arxiv preprint (in most fields, anyway). My best bet is we need a new way of evaluating scientific work, without relying on proxies like journal impact factors. Not sure what those might be, probably depends on the field.
It is not about it: some people are greedy and they don't care who the need to hurt to make a buck.
For example, linux publishes its source code and manages reputation of the commit authors without the help of the publishers that take billions for the honer.
The most prestigious journals are the place where researchers find the most impactful research, and therefore academic libraries are willing to pay for expensive subscriptions. For researchers with high-impact research results, the publication venue which will maximise their own personal prestige and attract future funding streams are the most prestigious journals. And so their position is continually reinforced in perpetuity. It has nothing to do with the underlying technology, but is rooted in academic network effects.
I think open science movement slowly erode their grip on the industry. It's perpetual theoretically, but not in practice. Though, It needs a collaborative effort and the main factor is awareness.
> I don't understand what value traditional publishers of scientific journals offer?
The best papers try to get published in the best journals. The academics get more professional credit for better journals. Then, the best journals can charge more money for access to the best papers. If you have a couple of Nobel laureates from the same subfield, they may be able to create a newly prestigious journal, but it's pretty much going to take that and time.
It's similar to MIT/CalTech/Stanford/the Ivy League. Sure, there may be a way to get similar instruction quality elsewhere, but the value they offer is based on they're elite reputation.
They offer publishing authors the credentials of having published with then, which is useful for e.g. getting tenure. And since they have a monopoly on those credentials, they can charge good money for that.
I'm normally skeptical of journals funded by article processing charges (APCs), but this policy is pretty good:
> no author of an accepted paper will be denied publication due to lack of funds
Most APC-charging journals (like the Nature family) have a weaker waiver policy, where they only promise waivers to authors from developing countries, and say they may consider others "on a case-by-case basis" but with no guarantees.
Question: I'm not in the academic world, but I assume the idea of the APC is that the individual author won't be paying it, and it's not expensive enough that the institutions they're affiliated with will balk at the cost, right? So, in that respect it's sort of like that pricing sweet spot that results in $50/user/mo software licenses, $3000 2-day conference tickets, etc.
Not to say that $1700 (roughly the number they list in their FAQ) is an unreasonable amount given the work that goes into reviewing, editing, and publishing an article. Indeed, I wonder if they couldn't raise the cost a bit.
It really varies. Normally the author themselves has to come up with the money somehow though. At least where I've been, you can't just bill it to the university. If you have research grants, you can often pay out of those (this is common in the natural sciences). If you have some kind of general research budget you could pay out of that (e.g. I get $2k/yr unrestricted research money from my university... but I'm definitely not going to spend it on an APC!). Some universities do have an internal OA fund you can apply to, but those are often limited. For example, MIT will cover up to $1k per article for papers written by its faculty/staff/students: https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/oa-publishing...
Typically you would pay for it out of grant money. So Dr. Smith doesn’t pay the APC, Stanvard University doesn’t pay, the NSF pays. Or to cut a long story short, the taxpayer.
The funny thing is taxpayers ripped twice, on publishing and on access to the science and the profit goes to publication industry (not universities, research institution).
If you summarize the cash flow, the publishing industry charges twice the taxpayers in addition to the science worker and research institutions costs. If you want to make your article open access, then you pay extra fees and nowadays, the university funds ripped off twice: they still bear the cost of pay-wall publishers and open access. Long story short, the whole system is rigged in favor of gatekeepers. You may check this video[1]
With the current web it's so easy to setup the required infrastructure. No way can the cost of articles be justified.