Sometimes, a higher price is a lower cost
Discussing academic publications
Guided Open Access is a new model from Nature Publication Group, whereby manuscripts get submitted to a group of journals at once (e.g., Nature Methods, Nature Communications, and Communications Biology). They go through a single review process, with multiple rounds of revision, and then (maybe) accepted into one of the journals. Controversially, the authors pay one fee for the process + another top-up fee if the paper gets accepted (depending on which journal it got accepted into).
This is in contrast with the standard APC (article process charges) model where authors pay only when the paper is accepted. I am still not sure if I will avail myself of the system in this trial period, but I certainly think that it’s a good thing that journals are trying alternative model and this one seems better thought out than most and that it is being given credit for. It does make something that used to be free (review) much pricier, but it can potentially cut costs overall.
Most of the discussion of academic publishing costs does not properly distinguish between costs and prices, so let’s get pedantic here: costs are real resources that get used, prices are money transfers. In academic publication, the biggest (almost only) cost is people’s time. When I spend time reviewing a manuscript, that time is a cost. When an editor reads my review, their time is a cost. When I spend time reformatting the citations for a new journal, that time is a cost. These are real resources that could potentially have been spent elsewhere.1 When I fill out some forms so that money gets transferred from the university’s bank account to the bank account of the publisher, that is a price. The money does represent real resources, but is not itself a cost.
In fact, if, as some people claim,2 the money was going mainly to shareholders, then there would be no actual cost and this would be a much smaller problem than it is. If the money was passing through to shareholders, few resources would be wasted: some of the governmental budget that has a tag saying R&D was actually being spent on pension funds, university endowments, and other large shareholders; but this is not, by itself, that big of a deal (the world has weird accounting sometimes). Unfortunately, very real costs are spent on publications: all this time we spend, all the time that publications languish in review. That is the real cost, not the price.3
Normally, the APC is only charged when the paper is accepted, even though rejected papers use up resources, and this can lead to inefficiencies and misincentives. Inefficiencies happen when journals choose to impose a deadweight cost on submissions through formatting requirements instead of welcoming more submissions.4 Another inefficiency is when the same paper gets reviewed multiple times because journals reject it on impact concerns (this is a good paper, but belongs in a lower-tier journal) so the same manuscript is resubmitted, without any improvement, elsewhere. The misincentive is when journals are paid to accept papers, leading to the phenomenon of predatory journals.
Nature’s Guided Open Access model does seem to try and tackle some of these issues directly. If a paper is simultaneously considered for multiple journals, this can make the whole process faster, cut down the total number of reviews performed (reviewing is a real cost), while aligning the incentives better.
Related: The High Cost of Free Parking
Links of the Week
Very honest report of how Girardian memetic spirals feel from the inside.
NASA quarantined what came back from the moon, but did a terrible job at it.
“Camille Noûs first appeared on the research scene 1 year ago, as a signatory to an open letter protesting French science policy. Since then, Noûs has been an author on 180 journal papers, […] But Noûs is not a real person. The name—intentionally added to papers, sometimes without the knowledge of journal editors—is meant to personify collective efforts in science and to protest individualism, according to RogueESR, a French research advocacy group that dreamed up the character.” by Cathleen O’Grady in Science
For professional updates from me, you can subscribe to my group’s Quarterly Updates Newsletter
Tweets of the Week
Photos
I do believe that I can use my time in ways that are more productive to society than reformatting references. So, when I have to reformat references, society loses.
without much evidence; this is one of those “facts” that is widely accepted, but has little behind it
If publication fees prevent some publications, that is also a cost, but the underlying reason is very often that grants are non-fungible, so that we can easily spend 1,000s of dollars of people’s time before we are allowed to spend 100s to save that time.