Comment by andrenarchy
6 days ago
CEO of EMS Press here (publisher of the European Mathematical Society). Like most society publishers, we really care about our discipline(s) and want to support researchers regardless of whether they or their institution can afford an astronomical APC or subscription rates.
Good publishing costs money but there are alternatives to the established models. Since 2021 we use the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model where libraries subscribe to journals and at the beginning of each subscription year we check for each journal whether the collected revenues cover our projected costs: if they do we publish that year's content Open Access, otherwise only subscribers have access. So no fees for authors and if libraries put their money where their mouth is then also full OA and thus no barriers to reading. All journals full OA since 2024. Easy.
> Good publishing costs money
Good faith question: aside from hosting costs, what costs are there, given the reviewers are unpaid?
Happy to share details! Typesetting is a big item (for us becoming even more due to production of accessible publications), language editing, (meta-)data curation, technical infrastructure and software development (peer review systems, hosting, metadata and fulltext deposits, long-term preservation, maintenance, plagiarism and fraud detection), editor training/onboarding, editorial support, marketing, and of course our staff running all of this also wants a salary.
Some keep repeating that Diamond OA is superior because publishing is free for authors and everything is immediately OA. And indeed it is, but only if you have someone who is indefinitely throwing money at the journal. If that's not the case then someone else pays, for example universities who pay their staff who decide to dedicate their work time to the journal. Or it's just unpaid labour so someone pays with their time. It's leading to the same sustainability issues that many Open Source projects run into.
Thank you for contributing your expertise and experience.
> long-term preservation
How is that done beyond using PDF/A? I'm interested for my own files.
> Typesetting is a big item (for us becoming even more due to production of accessible publications), language editing, (meta-)data curation
I'm sure you've considered this idea; how does it work out in reality?: What happens if you push one or more of those items onto the authors - e.g., 'we won't publish your submission without proper typesetting, etc.'? Or is that just not realistic for many/most authors?
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> Typesetting is a big item
I'm calling bullshit. Look at how annoying the template requirements are for authors: https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/submissions, and note the stuff around Word files. Other journals can be much worse.
If any serious typesetting were being done by these journals, simple plaintext, Markdown (or RMarkdown) or minimal basic LaTeX, with, admittedly, figures generated to spec, would be more than enough for typesetters to manage. In fact, if you were doing serious typesetting, you wouldn't want your users doing a bunch of formatting and layout themselves, and would demand more minimal representations of the content only. Instead you have these ridiculous templates. I am not convinced AT ALL.
Do authors submitting to literary agents have to follow such absurd rules? I think not. Can modern blogging tools create beautiful sites with simple Markdown and images? Yes. So why do academic publishers demand so much from authors? IMO because they are barely doing anything at all re: typesetting and formatting and the like.
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I help out with the production of a periodical that is journal-ish [0], and the biggest expense is printing and mailing. But it's ran by a non-profit, our editors are all volunteers, we don't do peer review, and our authors typeset the articles themselves, so this is definitely an atypical example.
[0]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/
Surely you charge printing and mailing to the people you are mailing to though.
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This is a silly question to ask. What do you expect a rent seeker to say? Of course there are costs. Real estate brokers have costs, Apple store has costs, a publisher has costs. That's what they'll say. It does not matter what the costs are. The fees are what the market bears.
You say there are costs, but you don't say what the costs actually are.
It's bullshit, if typesetting were a serious cost, they wouldn't demand such finicky formatting and/or filetype requirements from authors (and would instead prefer minimal formats like RMarkdown or basica LaTeX so they could format and typeset themselves). Instead they clearly make submitters follow rigid templates so that their work is trivial.
Hmm, I'm not 100% convinced. What if there are multiple downstream formats that have to be exported to? (E.g., another commenter mentioned PubMed requires something called JATS XML.)
In that case, a consistent input format assists with generation of the output formats, and without that, there'd be even more work.
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That being said, I don't doubt publisher fees exceed their actual costs for this.
I always wonder why there's no universal academic interchange schema; it seems like something XML could have genuinely solved. I suppose the publishers have no incentive to build that, and reduce what they can charge for.
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Awesome, thanks for posting your experience with an interesting model.