Now they force you to pay 2.3k GBP to publish an article. Previously it was free, unless you wanted it to make it immediately accessible on the website.
People in astrophysics always did put articles on arxiv.org anyway, so papers were already accessible to everyone (in a non-typeset/not-proofread form), but now it will be the same, but everyone will have to pay 2.3 kGBP per paper.
Also a useful comparison. The subscription to MNRAS for the institution was 6.5 kGBP. So any institution that publishes more than 2 papers a year will pay way more then before.
Also none of the referees are payed.
Also, some funding agencies (like UK's UKRI) prohibit to put page charges in overheads for grants, so I wonder how people are supposed to get the money...
To be honest, the natural consequence of this will be that people will stop publishing in MNRAS. There is simply not enough value added in the publication process to justify 2.3k GBP, given that the referees are not payed, the journal is published online only, and the arxiv already provide hosting.
Also, this is the case of Royal Astronomical Society (which does a lot of good things: provides grants, fellowships, organizes meetings, gives prizes) of trying to preserve the income stream to fund that. This is wrong, and we should not accept that in my opinion.
Even if it eventually gets covered by funding, this is still kind of bad. Who gets to publish is basically decided at funding time, not on merits of a paper.
It was 10+ years ago, but I once saw the amount of money Springer paid my old boss (chair of a department) for being managing editor of a run of the mill low impact journal. He spend maybe 10h per month on it but was paid 1.5x yearly of what I was earning for a full time job.
I disagree, it's ridiculous for publicly-funded research to be published behind paywalls, and open access fees are supported by research councils who mandate open access publication anyway. The point of publishing something in a journal is to have people _more_ able to read it, not less!!
It's simply not true that UKRI don't allow you to charge APCs to grants. I've costed it in to my current grant with no problems. They also provide funds to institutions to support open access publication, that academics without grant funding can access.
Generally people without funding support e.g. from 'developing countries' are able to publish for free via a fee waiver, as the article suggests. This new policy also means they're actually able to afford to read the research in the publication they're submitting to.
If you're arguing that the academic commercial publication model makes no sense and is in desperate need of wide-ranging reform, I agree with that. But I think this is a step in the right direction because at least it makes research accessible.
> The point of publishing something in a journal is to have people _more_ able to read it, not less!!
There won't be anything to read if most researchers are gatekept out of publishing in the first place.
> Generally people without funding support e.g. from 'developing countries' are able to publish for free via a fee waiver, as the article suggests.
Money issue is an issue in a lot of countries, not just developing ones. In France research budget are slimmer every year and it's not unusual for researchers to pay things like travel to conferences from their own pocket. Even when the institution is paying, it's often only refunding months after the fact, so researchers have to pay in advance and god forbid they ever lost a paper or else they won't see their money back.
And then there is the case I mentioned in other comments like myself who are out the academic system (or tries to enter it but have no support yet) but still having papers they want to publish. I don't want to shell out half or a full month of salary to publish a PDF that will be read by a dozen of person worldwide.
RAS used to have all articles available to everyone for free after 1 year (immediately if one wanted to pay for open access). I thought this was a reasonable compromise. The new policy will damage early career researchers and groups at less established institutions that will not be able to publish their own research. I have published a number of papers on MNRAS, but now I will move to other journals. In principle, I can charge the publication costs to my NSF grant, in practice that means I would not be able to send my students to conferences, because research support funding is very stretched (no more than few thousand dollars per year per student). This would damage their career prospects. Theory grants are already very small and adding several thousand dollars extra to the budget can make the difference between the grant being awarded or rejected (it should not be, but this is how it works). Moreover, even at R1 institutions, a lot of theory research is actually not funded by federal grants.
Journals were created to support the scientific community and provide a platform for scientists to discuss. Charging exorbitant publication fees damages the very mission of these journals.
While for other fields Gold Open Access may be a good thing, in astronomy it is worse than the status quo. Most papers were on arxiv, so people could read for free anyway. I've already seen comments saying we should switch to PASA which is has no page charges (unless you want to do the Gold Open Access thing) https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/publications-of-the-...
The right thing to do would be to switch to OJAp (see https://telescoper.wordpress.com/), and have the institution funds go to arxiv and such overlay journals.
* I absolutely agree that publicly funded research should not be behind paywalls, but right now with MNRAS it is not. Pretty much everyone puts paper on arxiv and people in the UK had to deposit papers into university repositories anyway where it is available for free. (This may not apply in all fields, but it is certainly true in astronomy)
* I have just applied for a UKRI grant this week and we are not allowed to put in page charges there full stop. (I am also lucky to be in Scotland where there is a special deal with MNRAS where we don't have to pay)
* I agree waivers are good, but there are plenty of people without external funding even in 'rich' countries like UK/USA etc. It's enough to see the success rates for grants to realise that many people don't have them.
> I have just applied for a UKRI grant this week and we are not allowed to put in page charges there full stop
I am highly and increasingly out of touch with how research funding is organised these days, but the MRC guidance about grants [1] says:
> Applicants should not include any costing for access publishing charges (APCs) or other types of publication in respect of peer reviewed research articles (including review articles not commissioned by publishers) and conference proceedings that acknowledge funding from the MRC.
> The charges for APCs and other publication charges for all research papers resulting from work funded by MRC (or one of the other research councils) are supported through block grants to UK HEIs, approved independent research organisations and research council institutes. A RO can then access these funds to pay for APCs for any article resulting from research council funding.
So no, you can't pay for publishing costs out of a grant, but you can pay for them out of funding the research councils have already given to your institution (and which they may have spent on property investments etc of course). is that not the case for you?
That Publishing fee is nothing compared to the cost of the research itself. It's a rounding error and can be easily included in any research funding. Free Access is a clear Win. Any research that can not afford that Fee for a peer Review makes me doubt what other expenses have they eliminated during that research.
Indeed. Astronomy has two major journals: The Astrophysical Journal and MNRAS. Up until now they complemented each other in their business model. MNRAS had no publication fees, but supported itself with a higher subscription cost. ApJ has publication fees and a lower subscription cost. Papers would require a subscription to read for a longer time on MNRAS than ApJ.
I always felt this system was nice because it allowed younger or independent researchers who perhaps didn't have grant money to publish in a top tier journal. But if one did have grant money one could afford to publish in ApJ and see the paper released earlier.
But it looks like this system is coming to an end.
> To be honest, the natural consequence of this will be that people will stop publishing in MNRAS.
Good. These "publishers" need to die out anyway. The only point of a journal is peer review and they don't pay peer reviewers anyway due to conflicts of interest. People should be able to simply set up a blog and start peer reviewing. No need for this old media whatsoever.
Three cheers to this. Let all the world’s knowledge be open and free. There is much to bemoan about the state of the world today but on the other hand for someone outside academia who loves to learn this is the golden age. Curious dilettantes of the world join me in cheer!
It looks like it's gold open access, btw, or even bronze AKA the worst one:
> [...] supported by Article Processing Charges (APCs), with the infrastructure to ensure that authors continue to face no financial barrier to publishing their science in the RAS journals
Look… the parasites got to eat… and until we wrestle control of copyright out of the hands of Disney, Warner Brothers, Elsevier, Weily, O’Reilly, etc… and get some major reforms … well we at least have to celebrate when the parasites make decisions that benefit the public and only hurt smaller money holding interests.
In this case the change will be obvious, the university and/or the grant programs will wind up funding these fees… and students everywhere will benefit from this. Hooray!
And opening the archives is a big win for such a prestigious journal with a long history.
I would point out that the Royal Astronomical Society is a charitable organisation. It should not be put in a class with Elsevier and the like. The page charges actually go to the cost of publishing rather than to shareholder profits.
You know… it’s been so long since I thought about who actually owned a journal other than Elsevier, et, al … and your right, I had completely forgotten the Proceedings of The Royal Astronomical Society aren’t owned by one of the the big fat asshole publishers! So this is just all around a good thing!
Yes this is important to note: while the RAS is a charitable organisation, the publication process is facilitated by publishing companies (primarily OUP). Though exactly how the fees are distributed and what the arrangement is with OUP with regards to publication fees is, I'm not sure.
OUP provides the administrative side, platforms for submission/review, hosting and other editorial services. It doesn't make much sense for RAS to reimplement all of this from scratch.
What can seem like a small improvement can often delay or even prevent major overhaul of the system. It's throwing a few crumbs at the starving peasants and we scramble to pick them from the ground instead of demanding shares of the bread. There should not be private companies profiting off publicly funded research in the first place. If it's like you say and universities will be paying those fees, that's in some ways even worse. It wouldn't surprise me if the feudal copyright lords like Elsevier actually supported this. Best thing that can happen to them is getting their fees under the table and not in the open. The less students and the public understand about how it works, the better from their point of view.
> wrestle control of copyright out of the hands of Disney, Warner Brothers,
With generative AI, more content will be made on a per-year basis than all of recorded human history prior.
I don't think the kids will give a damn about Star Wars when they can make their own "Space Pirates vs Steampunk Captain Nemo 20XX: Ultimate Dad Joke Battle The Stakes Have Never Been Higher 2"
This has historically shown to not be the case. In the modern era, there's rarely any value in a raw idea, but how it affects those who observe it (mainly can it drive them to buy toys). It's been pretty consistently shown people like what's familiar, so we get an endless stream of mid sequels
When have kids (or any other non-specialist) previously been able to create their own customised blockbuster series, that looks like a professionally made show?
There was a time, a good few years ago, that the free 3D animation software Muvizu (sadly no longer around) envisioned kids doing just that. Here's a clip produced with Muvizu using assets from Shawn the Sheep. (Muvizu was at the time discussing collaborations with Aardman.)
This is not my field so I didn't take the time to read the small print. But, in my field, lots of journals have an "open" option available to authors. The thing is, you have to pay more in page charges, and so not everyone does this.
The money for those page charges come from the same hard-earned grants that pay for computing time, graduate student stipends, etc. Institutions do not pay these charges (in my field, anyway); the funds come from grants. And, although granting agencies increasingly dictate that "open" models be used, they do not supply extra funds.
As a reader, I love the idea of journals being open. As an author, the additional cost of publishing is discouraging.
Another discouraging thing: having to pay to see even the papers I've written. I never pay for a paper. Many times, I just want to take a quick look to see if the paper merits further study, and that is not worth $35 to me.
Nothing pisses me off more than journals charging thousands for access. None of the money reaches the actual researchers and it only serves to reinforce public distrust in research
> Nothing pisses me off more than journals charging thousands for access.
Wait until you hear about the last publisher fuckery: APC (article processing charges). For those outside the publishing loop, a lot of journals are now publishing papers under an open licence BUT authors have to paid a huge (often in the thousand or more) sum to get the article published. Since whole journals are now "open", this isn't negotiable. In the end it means journals are still taking a lot of institutions money, just in another way, and blocking access to people like me who are trying to publish papers on their own.
I've come to think this is actually a large problem. In the subscription model the prices were paid for longer time periods, like yearly, and publishing was free. The bills went to librarians who managed everything professionally and had a good overview. This showed clearly in the conflict between 'Project DEAL' and Elsevier the last few years, where a bunch of German Universities and Institutes started collective bargaining to get prices down, and even stopped subscribing for a while.
Now the bills go to individual researchers who often don't even publish with a specific journal more than once every couple of years. I doubt anyone will keep track how much publishing fees increase. Also it's not really the case that there is much competition, if you can get your paper into a high-ranked journal you don't send it elsewhere to save 500$ or something.
Also it used to be that the library subscription budget was clearly defined to the University or institute, now the APCs often come out of one of the many research grants.
My bet is that the APCs will increase much faster than the subscription fees did.
This. And also the fact that read access can in most case be easily bypassed using Sci-Hub (or LibGen for books), while I don't see a way to get around APCs.
The way around high APCs is to start non-profit journals, and it really irks me that the supposedly smartest elite on this planet still gives their research funds away to for-profit publishers and their shareholders.
We as a society do not treat researchers as elite.
They are paid shit, they spend half their time filling in meaning less papers to get grant funding, they have no political influece, media does not give them airtime or ask their opinion on critical issues. They have a modicum of respect and thats about all.
pardon if this is ignorant but i mean now that arxiv is well established, what is the barrior to “publish papers on your own” if you dont particularly care about the journal reputation (and those that do probably dont pull this kind of scummy stunt)
I would be as happy so just share a PDF on my website and send it to people who care but if I want to go back in academia somedays I need "real" publications and those are count by universities administration only when done in existing journals and conferences count (also arxiv et al. are not used in the fields I could publish in).
Somebody has to pay for the scientific editors, copy editing, typesetting, and infrastructure. Of course the open access publishing fees of Nature & co. are completely outrageous, but even non-profit publishers have to charge something.
I don't know for this specific publisher, but in research, usually:
- scientific editors… are researchers paid by a university
- copy editing… is done by the authors
- typesetting… is done by the authors
- reviews… are done by the other researchers paid by their respective university
Okay, the infrastructure remains. The needs are: a simple website serving PDF files and pages with the metadata. You can even let something like HAL, Arxiv or Sci-Hub do that.
This does not match my experience in science publishing. Scientific journals usually have at least a few paid full-time and part-time editors. They also do their own copy editing and typesetting of the manuscripts. The differences between the arXiv versions and the published versions are usually quite noticeable.
> What's more, universities already have this kind of infrastructure.
Ha!
While "technically" true, many (most?) university's (at least in Australia) have IT infrastructure that was last run competently sometime around when dinosaurs roamed.
Saying that from having worked at some (as a contractor), and having non-IT friends at others... whom are constantly frustrated about this stuff. :/
One of the journals in my field is going through this at the moment. They were set up with an initial grant to cover editorial and typesetting, which is about to run out. Their two suggestions for carrying on are either to charge a couple of hundred dollars a paper for typesetting (which is apparently what it actually costs) or to require submissions in a standard LaTeX pipeline (which is not standard for my discipline but would enable it to be done automatically). I suppose a strict Word template would also suffice at the expense of annoying all the computational scholars (that's what another Diamond OA journal does in my field).
But somebody's doing the typesetting. Giving sufficiently technically competent authors that could be the authors, but otherwise some money has to be found from somewhere. I don't mind that coming from libraries or research grants if necessary: it's cheaper than Elsevier.
Hmmm. Isn't quite a lot of these publications taking in a PDF, so their cost of much of this is roughly zero? Except for the eyeballing if the header/footer overlaps anything on the page, in which case you request the author reformats their paper to respect the margins?
Most journals completely re-do the layout in some desktop publishing software and only copy over the text and figures. It is a fair bit of work to make everything consistent, for example formulas and references. I have only seen author-submitted PDFs in very low-cost publications, for example some conference proceedings.
Yeah sure it take thousands of dollars to make a PDF. There is a bunch of small organizations and universities that manage to have journal free for reading *and* publishing. There's no reason to pay huge fees for "typesettings" in an area where most of this thing in automated. If the publishing pipeline is too complex it's time to remove bullshit and simplify things. Feeding a latex file into a pipeline or clicking on "save as PDF" in Word shouldn't cost more than a few cents.
So is going to be actual open access or only access to read without the freedoms afforded by open access? Not mentioning anything about licensing kindof point towards the latter.
Open access publications in RAS Journals are licensed CC By, CC By NC or CC By NC ND depending on author choice and the specific journal. But as far as I can tell it's always a CC license.
This is a little surprising since MNRAS's niche has been that it had no page charges. So if one was short on grant money then you went with monthly notices. That's pretty nice if (a) you have zero grant funding available or (b) want to prioritize conference travel for students/postdocs.
MNRAS is one of the three "main" journals for astronomy along with Astronomy and Astrophysics (A&A) and the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ and AJ). A&A is mainly Europe and ApJ is more mixed but with more North America. Along with Nature and Science for high-impact things and regional journals for Japan, Australia, and the US (PASP).
I love the complaints here. They all literally just come down to "I want everything to be free all the time and never pay for anything". As if journals just pay for themselves out of a magical pot of gold.
Wanna publish for free? There's plenty of free blog hosting sites out there.
This is a terrible comment at every level. First, it attacks a strawman argument. No one is clamouring for free "everything". Most rational people would agree that thousands of dollars/pounds/euros PER article is an insane markup when literally none of the value add is provided by journals. The role of a journal is essentially administrative, webhosting and some database management. Almost none of their work is technical or specialised.
Second, what would a fair processing charge be? Certainly not thousands of dollars. Here is just one journal that manages to provide the same level of service for the princely sum of EUR 75 if you submit an MS Word manuscript: https://www.wind-energy-science.net/about/article_processing...
Third, in no way are a blog and a scientific journal equivalent.
I don't know about this publisher, but it must be noted that academic publishing is notorious for having some of the highest margins on the planet. As a business they are as close to a magical pot of gold as you could hope for.
Breaking their peculiar hold on research is taking decades. arXiv has existed for over 30 years, but physics journals still thrive.
They only have "a hold on research" because academia wants it that way. There's no legal obligation for any research org to publish in journals. They do it voluntarily, for reasons that have nothing to do with furthering science. And despite this, instead of demanding an end to journal dominated academic research, we just complain about the cost.
Nobody wants to deal with the big pink elephant, so instead we argue about who's gonna pick up the turd it left in the living room.
Some people argue we might consider abolishing (or at least ignoring) institutionalized peer review, e.g. Liam Kofi Bright. The blog post/Arxiv model seems to work reasonably well with no fees or formal referees, and was more or less how science worked in previous centuries. What's more, if formal peer review can't prevent something like the modern replication crisis, and creates publishing incentives widely acknowledged to be pathological, is it really that valuable?
> They all literally just come down to "I want everything to be free all the time and never pay for anything"
It's not "free". We've already paid for the content in the journals through taxes. Most research is funded by government grants, carried out by scientists paid with public money.
The writing and the reviewing and most of the formatting is also done by scientists. The value that a journal provides on top of that is minimal. It's rent-seeking behaviour on content where the actual value has already been paid for.
So tell your representatives in government to stop putting government funded research into journals. (They won't stop, and the reason why is the same reason why journals have those big profits)
I don't think this is true in general. Certainly, they aren't paid by the publisher, but I'd imagine most referees are in paid employment with institutions that expect them to review the occasional manuscript as part of their job.
Nowhere in my contract or in anyone else's contract (as far as I know) it is written that I need to referee papers.
People do it as a service to the community. And I don't necessarily ask to be payed for that, I was just answering the point about "I want everything to be free all the time and never pay for anything". We pay with our work to referee the papers. Sure there are extra costs to host the papers, typeset, but they should be nowhere near 2.5k GBP per paper.
Academic jobs are weird, right? I think trying to write down contract that specifies everything involved would be pretty challenging.
At any rate, the last time I was employed as astrophysics faculty, my offer letter told me that I should “engage in scholarly activities”. I certainly interpreted that as an invitation to review the odd paper on the university's dime.
I wonder if this is in response to Sci-Hub/Arxiv proliferation or what else.
Anyhow, I find it beyond rich -- the authors usually do all the typesetting, spell/grammar checks, formatting etc. themselves and now they get to pay for that (or their respective funding institutions). I presume that is what would land under a "processing fee". Beyond atrocious -- some journals have their custom LaTex templates only to discard formatting they put in them at the pre-publish stage.
Also, reviewers are probably still not getting paid.
I'm not sure if that's an accurate sentiment, but I feel like there's an academic research winter with grants and funding are being slowly squeezed out of academia and moved to external consortia with loose academic affiliations (at least this is what I _think_ I see happening in Europe). If that's true, this trend of moving the paywall from readership to authorship is just sad.
Now they force you to pay 2.3k GBP to publish an article. Previously it was free, unless you wanted it to make it immediately accessible on the website. People in astrophysics always did put articles on arxiv.org anyway, so papers were already accessible to everyone (in a non-typeset/not-proofread form), but now it will be the same, but everyone will have to pay 2.3 kGBP per paper. Also a useful comparison. The subscription to MNRAS for the institution was 6.5 kGBP. So any institution that publishes more than 2 papers a year will pay way more then before. Also none of the referees are payed. Also, some funding agencies (like UK's UKRI) prohibit to put page charges in overheads for grants, so I wonder how people are supposed to get the money...
To be honest, the natural consequence of this will be that people will stop publishing in MNRAS. There is simply not enough value added in the publication process to justify 2.3k GBP, given that the referees are not payed, the journal is published online only, and the arxiv already provide hosting.
Also, this is the case of Royal Astronomical Society (which does a lot of good things: provides grants, fellowships, organizes meetings, gives prizes) of trying to preserve the income stream to fund that. This is wrong, and we should not accept that in my opinion.