Thread by @skdh

Yes, commercial academic publishers currently have excessive profit margins. As most scientists, I am in favor of open-access (all my papers are freely available online). But those who wish big academic publishers dead often haven’t thought about the consequences. 1/13

First, the facts. Publishers do provide services. Besides editing and copy-editing and getting print magazines to print, that’s notably data-storage and retrieval systems. 2/13

There is also indexing, tagging, and other search-related functions, as well as the constantly necessary software updates. Having a pile of information alone isn’t enough, you also must be able to find the piece that you need. 3/13

Publishers also currently facilitate peer review. While this doesn’t necessarily have to be done through publishers, this is still mostly the case. Like that or not, it’s a service vital to science. 4/13

If you add up expenses, a lot of tiny niche-publications would never be profitable. The cost are higher than what any university would be plausibly willing to pay for journals that are occasionally read by only two people on their campus. 5/13

No, open-access servers don’t operate for zero cost either. Yes, people working there also have to pay rent. In fact I feel bad that I and my institution relies on them, yet pays zero. But someone, somewhere, has to eat up the bill. 6/13

Existing publishing houses carry along non-profitable journals by enforcing package-deals. That’s not good practice. But note that the capitalistic stance would require them to stop publishing unprofitable journals altogether. This would be devastating for science. 7/13

Often people claim that scientific papers should be free because the tax-payer has already paid for it. First, not all research is paid for by taxes. More importantly, even if it is, it’s not true that the tax-payer has paid for the publication costs with the research. 8/13

Journal publication adds value and researchers often do not have money to pay for it. It can be difficult to find any funding source to cover open-access fees. It’s especially difficult for researchers in countries where science is underfunded already. 9/13

Point is: The folks at publishing houses do real work, that work is necessary for science to function, and someone has to pay for it. A purely commercial model would work badly for science publishing for the same reason such a model would work badly for academic research. 10/13

“Just make it free” is not a workable option. Nothing is for free. 11/13

The origin of all the trouble is that scientific publishing is a public service, but it’s not currently funded as a public service. 12/13

Summary: It’s not enough to complain about the current situation, you also have to come up with an alternative that doesn’t make the situation worse. And most proposals are hopelessly naïve, haven’t thought through consequences. 13/13

14/13 Addendum: Some numbers.

Typical expenses for publishers to publish one paper open access are in the range $1000-$3000 for your average journal. Source

ht @PaulGuinnessy
physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.106…

15/13 Expenses for high-impact journals are up to a factor ten higher due to higher per-paper expenses on review & editing. Nature magazine estimates "£10,000 and £30,000 per research article published".

ht @PaulGuinnessy

publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cm…

16/13 The numbers are also confirmed in this article:

nature.com/news/open-acce…

The bottom-line is, while exact numbers differ from journal to journal, from field to field, it takes publishers about $1000 at least to publish a paper. That money must come from somewhere.