open-access journals, fake & genuine

From: "Jonathan Thornburg [remove -animal to reply]"
Subject: open-access journals, fake & genuine
Newsgroups: sci.astro.research
References:

In article ,
Steve Willner wrote:
For the AAS journals, "enough to cover costs" is something over $100
per page, and that's for journals partially subsidized by library
subscriptions. Take those away, and page charges would have to be
higher.

Martin Hardcastle wrote:
I don't know much about the economics here, obviously, but I find it
hard to see how actual costs can be that high.

How much of that supports (completely unnecessary) paper printing?

Very little -- maybe on the order of 10-20%.

From what I've read, the largest contributor to the cost of running
a refereed journal is salaries for the editorial office staff. The
fundamental problem (after you remove the large profit margins of many
for-profit publishers) is that the editorial process is labor-intensive:
Even if referees continue to be "free", someone needs to assign each
manuscript to *suitable* referees, ping referees about late reviews
(this can be mostly automated), and (probably the largest task) make
judgement calls about what to do when the referees disagree and about
when authors have vs haven't complied "enough" with referee requests.

If we want these tasks to be done well, they need to be done by
reasonably well-qualified people. When trying to hire editors, most
top-tier refereed journals seem to prefer to recruit people with
PhD-level scientific qualifications (I've seen this in Physical Review
ads for editors)... which suggests salary+benefits at least roughly
acomparable with those of academic scientists.

An alternative is to have "free" (unpaid) volunteer editors.
[Of course in a global sense, there's still a cost
here, it's "just" been disbursed to the many volunteers
donating their time.]
For example, PLoS One works this way: most (all?) of the editors
are unpaid volunteers, and there's only a small paid editorial staff.
A problem with this approach is editor burnout -- being an editor
is a lot of work, particularly in fields where there are a lot of
mediocre papers submitted.

ciao,

--
-- "Jonathan Thornburg [remove -animal to reply]"
Dept of Astronomy & IUCSS, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA
on sabbatical in Canada starting August 2012
"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the
powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."
-- quote by Freire / poster by Oxfam

In article ,
Jonathan Thornburg writes:
From what I've read, the largest contributor to the cost of running
a refereed journal is salaries for the editorial office staff.

You are probably right, but I expect figures for the AAS journals are
on the AAS web site. Cost of the serving/archiving function isn't
trivial.

An alternative is to have "free" (unpaid) volunteer editors.

Unless things have changed, ApJ "scientific editors" (the people who
assign and interact with referees and ultimately decide which papers
get published) are paid modestly, maybe a few thousand dollars a year
for maybe 100-150 papers handled, so a few tens of dollars per paper.
However, they get help from paid administrative staff, which probably
costs more.

A problem with this approach is editor burnout -- being an editor
is a lot of work, particularly in fields where there are a lot of
mediocre papers submitted.

Heh. When I took an SE job (1998, I think), Helmut Abt told me it
was going to take 10% of my time. It took probably double that, and
I work in an area that mostly got good papers. The one thing I
really hated was referees who promised to send reports and didn't.
That was a tiny minority, but it caused 90% of the stress that went
with the job.

As to the other message, I never knew until now that it is possible
to add a doi to an astro-ph preprint. As Jonathan wrote, it's very
quick to do once one figures out how, but figuring out how took me
awhile. Anyway, thanks for that, Jonathan.

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