Comment by denotational
6 days ago
> Good publishing costs money
Good faith question: aside from hosting costs, what costs are there, given the reviewers are unpaid?
6 days ago
> 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?
Outside of disciplines that use LaTeX, the ability of authors to do typesetting is pretty limited. And there are other typesetting requirements that no consumer tool makes particularly easy; for instance, due to funding requirements, many journals deposit biomedical papers with PubMed Central, which wants them in JATS XML. So publishers have to prepare a structured XML version of papers.
Accessibility in PDFs is also very difficult. I'm not sure any publishers are yet meeting PDF/UA-2 requirements for tagged PDFs, which include things like embedding MathML representations of all mathematics so screenreaders can parse the math. LaTeX only supports this experimentally, and few other tools support it at all.
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This is difficult in practice. For LaTeX, in theory the publisher would simply provide their style sheet (.cls) and maybe some style guidelines, and all the authors have to do is to adhere to that file and typesetting is done.
The reason this doesn't work in practice is that authors don't always play nicely, not because of bad intentions, but because they don't want to cooperate but because of the realities of life: they don't have the time to study style guidelines in detail, they use their own auxiliary LaTeX macro collection because that's what they're used to, or simply because of oversights. Also, typesetting often includes a whole lot of meticulous things, if you listed them all in a guide sheet, that would be a long list of stuff at a level that's too detailed for authors.
I'm not saying it's impossible for authors to fully follow a publisher's style guide but there's a reason publishers employ full time workers who do nothing else but correct submitted manuscripts. Like many other professions, it's a trained skill.
1 reply →
> 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.
To understand the academic publishing process better, it's a good idea to look at the four main groups of people involved in the process: authors, editors, reviewers, and publishers.
The authors write up their research results.
The editors organize the review process together with the reviewers and the publishing process together with the publisher.
The reviewers read the papers and write their reviews.
The publishers publish the papers.
Stylesheets are typically provided by the publishers and passed on to the authors early on. The reason is two-fold: for one, the publisher wants to produce a high-quality product and uniformity of layouts and styles is an important factor. But the second reason has to do with everything that happens before the publishers even comes into play: common style-sheets also provide some level of fairness because they make the papers by different authors comparable to some degree, e.g., via the max length of a paper.
On top of that, authors often want to present their research in a specific way, and often have strong opinions about e.g. how their formulas are typeset, what aligns with what else, etc. and typically spend quite a bit of time tweaking their documents to look the way they want it. That is, the authors already have an interest in using something more powerful than Markdown.
But like I wrote in another comment here, in doing so, authors do not always adhere to the style guides provided by the publisher - not necessarily maliciously, but the result is the same. For instance, authors might simply be used to handling whitespace a certain way - because that's how they always do it. But if that clashes with the publisher's guidelines, it's one of the things the publisher has to correct in typesetting.
So, perhaps that's the confusion here also to some degree: the typesetting done by a publisher is in the majority of the cases on a very fine-grained level. A lot of is is simply enforcing the rules that were missed by the authors (with the goal of fairness, comparability, and conformity) and small perfectionist's edits that you might not even notice at a casual glance but that typesetters are trained to spot.
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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.
Yes, we charge $35 a year (for 3 issues) for printing and mailing, which is just a little bit more than what it costs us.
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.