Recently I have read the Article A billion-dollar donation: estimating the cost of researcher...
which examined the monetory cost of time spent on peer review by researchers. At this time of the open science movement gradually getting its momentum, a need has arisen to re-examine/re-visit the existing peer review and publishing model.
The question is: Who will pay for peer review? The publishers will not. If they would, they had to make other prices higher (APC etc.).
In addition, different kinds of payments have been repeatedly challenged: APC, fees for download of papers, subscription fees. The problem is that someone has to pay the publishers. See also my today's reply to this discussion: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Why_we_pay_the_charge_to_read_papers_in_journals_but_journals_dont_fund_the_research_work
Wolfgang R. Dick thank you for your reply. Understandably, publication always involves a cost, and there is no “free” publication, as you rightly mentioned. The existing publication model charges exorbitant APCs and a high price for individual readers (while downloading). It is an open secret that publishing companies are making huge profits out of these existing publishing models. For example, in 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year (Refer: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science). Therefore, the scientific literature should be made more affordable and APC should be reasonable (according to the reader’s/researcher’s country). The exorbitant profits may be shared with peer-reviewers and researchers.
Dear Shankar Prakash Alagesan : I agree that the profits of some large publishers are extremely high. One of the reasons is the run for high-impact journals and the monopolization which follows from this preference. Although there are many small publishers, the free market does not really work. Most of the small publishers are just getting by and not making a profit for shareholders. Even if we could urge large publishers to share their profit with reviewers and authors (instead of paying it to the shareholders), this would increase monopolization: Small publishers would not be able to pay, so authors and reviewers would even more prefer the large ones. The only solution I see is the stop making decisions on the basis of citations (impact factors, h indexes, etc.). See demand No. 3 of this petition: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Petition_Stop_Tracking_Science (as well as the documents related to this petition explaing the effects of citation counts on monopolization in the publishing business).
Wolfgang R. Dick Your argument definitely makes sense. As you said, Clarivate is acting as a monopoly to almost all the scientific performance evaluation metrics. We should not go after and prefer metrics (like highly cited, impact factor, and so on). But metrics play an inevitable role right from tenure track, promotion, project funding, etc. WE SHOULD DO AWAY WITH IT. Several academics, researchers, and a few universities are doing away with these metrics (see: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01759-5). These changes must be accepted at large, but the early career researchers and researchers from Global South will suffer until then. Thank you so much for your thoughts and for sharing the Petition "Stop Tracking Science."
that's what makes science go on: our donations, expertise, time, effort, attitude.
Hi, I really agree with the need to change the current review-publishing system. Look at what is suggested in this paper from 2016: Preprint Can paid reviews promote scientific quality and offer novel ...
Mathilde Borg Dahl Thank you for sharing the article. In addition to the above replies and the article you have shared, I think: Why can't the publication services be made fundamentally the duty of the Universities, by continuing the same business model already existing in scientific publishing? We have Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and many similar University Presses. Instead of the journals being hosted in ScienceDirect, Wiley or other similar journal aggregators, universities may start managing all publishing works. If it becomes a reality, the exorbitant profits may go to the Universities themselves and those profits may once again be used to produce new research, NOT TO THE SHAREHOLDERS OF THE PUBLISHING COMPANIES.
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