If only through blog authors who re-cite (as opposed to recite) PhD Comics on their posts:
I am sure that my Nature hosts have a good sense of humor about this – and Mr. Hannay was certainly expecting it. Jorge reminds his largely grad student-dominated audience of a few important points.
The second panel might seem amusing or cynical, depending on your point of view, but it is realistic. For any scientists who feel shocked or exploited, I remind them that there are other models:
- There are companies who employ their own scientists to provide them with research that will not get published but rather transformed into an item that can be sold later to the benefit of the public, the scientist and their employer, or all of the above.
- There exist journals of much lesser repute than Science or Nature who pay their reviewers.
- There now exist journals of good repute, perhaps still not quite that of Science or Nature, who allow scientists to have access to the results published therein without a subscription fee. I wouldn’t exactly say for free, since there are page charges and a journal has to survive somehow, but more or less non-profit.
The third panel is a bit facile. Scientists “do it” because they want to be published in one of these two journals in particular.
Anecdote: My high school subscribed to Science (perhaps also to Nature but I don’t remember it) and I formed a once-secret, half-acknowledged wish to produce results in some subject that were publishable in this venerable journal. As I advanced in a scientific career for real, I found myself reading Nature more, essentially because the last decade of developmental biology papers have been more in my line of interest. I also think the News and Views section has a somewhat more global perspective than the eminent competitor, and also there are more paper copies circulating in the laboratories I frequent than of Science. I also enjoy the latter when I get a chance to peruse it on paper, but I nearly never go to peruse the issue online, unlike Nature (okay, I often get sucked in because of Futures, but shhh…).
The Web has been where it’s been for most of that last decade already, though. I agree with Mr. Hannay’s conclusion as reported by Mr. Cham, except that electronic funds transfers seem to be pretty popular, too. I’d take one over paper, especially if the figure is high.
About the myth that print journals will be replaced by the internet entirely. I’m stunned how many people (editors?) seem to neglect the point that scientists publish their work to quite some extend not because they have to, or for approval by their peers, but to have the information safely stored for future generations. And until the fleeting phenomena of digital information comes up with good reasons users feel their work is safe and readily available up to hundreds of years into the future, I don’t think online journals will replace print. I wrote about this here and here .
It is curious actually the point is so rarely brought up on blogs, but then I have the impression that those who are very into web2.0 are those who don’t worry about the issue too much.
I don’t really believe things will be replaced entirely by electronic information, no more than I think money will be entirely virtual. I’m not an extremist by nature and enjoy having choices and options in life.
However, I’m not particularly more concerned about the longevity of data stored on servers versus in paper copies in libraries around the world. Servers are mirrored and the means by which we access data on said servers are well documented themselves (both in silico and in ink).
Many working scientists appreciate that for the vast majority of us, colleagues will mostly access and need the data we produce within the first ten years of its dissemination, before the field has moved on and our contribution to it will have become a given. Certainly an infinite fraction of scientific production from 100 years ago is truly available to most researchers now, and at that time it was all in print. I know this because a lot of relevant work in embryology was carried out and published in Germany in the early 20th century, but it’s very hard to track down the original work.
I’ve been trying to write a post about panel two for quite a few months now, but I’m a little scared about Maxine’s response…
I’ve also heard a medical doctor (Doctor Karl, on the BBC) state that he believes in 20 years we will all have sand-grain sized computer chips installed within our bodies, that contain the entirety of human knowledge in an accessible format for our brains to access at will. Pretty cool!
Not quite sure how it will be updated with each new journal issue, but it certainly suggests that paper copies of journals won’t be very relevant in the future.
P.S. Infinite fractions are tricky things to work with (1/∞ is undefined, as infinity isn’t a number [it’s a concept] and can’t easily be used with arithmetic operators) – but JSTOR are doing their best to arrange online access to journal back issues.
okay, I often get sucked in because of Futures, but shhh
Your secret is safe with me
(grins)
Nature is the better journal: and frankly, when I had a personal subscription it wasn’t for the science. It was for the N&V, the Futures, the reviews and editorials and job listings.
I’ll still happily pay for that.
Regarding the second panel, I see yet again the tired old myth that journals add nothing of value to the articles they publish. I’ve gone on about this ad infinitum elsewhere so will keep it brief. But I invite anyone to compare the manuscripts coming in to any journal with the manuscripts that are finally published, and weigh up how much it costs the journal to provide skilled staff and infrastructure to effect those drastic improvements, and then see if they still think they are being exploited to the extent implied in the comic.
(To be fair, Timo is not editorial, so he might not know it either.)
I liked the first part of this series:
Printed in reverse chronological order. Units, days m-2
Jenny, at the risk of provoking further tired fury, most current desktop word processors allow authors to format their manuscript pages in 2 justified columns, and they can import pdf figures pretty well. Unless I’m mistaken, most journals ask for submissions to come in ugly format, as it makes it easier for reviewers to read and comment on them with double line spacing.
Perhaps formatting only really becomes difficult when you’re trying to squeeze that stuff around the white lab coats.
Mike, it sounds like you assert that the added value of journals is in formatting. Jennifer’s position is that they add a quality filter, and Sabine’s is that they add archiving for posterity. I agree with all of you.
What I appreciate with PLoS journals and other similar ventures – gold, green, turquoise polka-dot OA journals – is that authors have a choice of where to submit, according to their level of pragmatism, idealism or any other sort of -ism. So I wouldn’t want to see Nature journals or Cell Press put BMC journals out of business directly, or the vehicle of the AAAS eliminate that of the NAS, but nor would I want to see the reverse happen. Quality – which is filtered and brought to the forefront as much by the care of a designated, talented editorial staff as well as the stable of reviewers upon whose expertise they call – is the most important part of whether I will read a journal on a regular basis and give an article published therein the benefit of my doubt when I don’t have the time or knowledge to be as critical as I might want to be. For instance, a good editor would have cut that sentence into at least three parts so that you could parse it.
Without journals, and without filters of some sort, I’m afraid the dreck and the misinformation would really drown the bits that are valuable to me.
As for Mr. Cham’s part one, I particularly enjoyed the punchline. As did most.
Mike, I don’t think Jenny is talking entirely about how the bloody thing looks.
Maybe you need to go and look up what ‘editorial’ means, and ‘typesetting’, and present your homework to the class.
Sorry Heather, comments crossed.
Mike, I was so not talking about formatting. Sounds like you might benefit from a week-long sabbatical in an editorial office to see what actually goes on in one; you might find it enlightening.
Jennifer – I bet we could all benefit from said week-long apprenticeships, at any career stage. How about we organize some cross-shadowing? Easier for y’all in London, but still. Editors if so inclined, could equally spend a week shadowing a researcher in a domain of their interest, and then a mirrored feature describing the impressions on both sides would make really cool reading.
The reason I think shadowing in the lab might be equally rewarding for science-journal editorial staff is that while some are fresh out of a lab, they are not fresh out of all labs, and a different albeit brief experience in another one could give a very interesting perspective. I’m prejudiced to their following a postdoc or junior PI, while in the other direction, a junior, perhaps copy editor, might be as interesting to follow (and more practical to organize) than someone more senior.
I wouldn’t mind it at all, Jenny – from the perspective of a large publication house. I feel it’s valuable to get as much insight into the whole scientific process as possible. And if I was smart, I could bring the whole system down from the inside within a week :op
Of course, I agree that there’s much more to getting a submitted paper in a publishable shape than formatting/typesetting. Perhaps that is one of the few parts that consistently requires paying somebody though, across all journals. These guys must have a good union.
I’ve never been paid for editorial1 or reviewing work, although I know some journals offer a small remuneration to subject/handling editors and I’ve been offered 6 month subscriptions to journals for reviewing for them, but they sure didn’t pay for my university training which brought me the “qualified” status required to act as a reviewer for them. {Thanks gracious tax-payers for stepping in}
I guess the point I was trying to make was that many journals run (basically) on a voluntary handling editor/reviewer basis2. This is the part that can take most time, and could potentially cost the most, if we were paid according to our qualifications and time spent on each paper. I have no idea how the major open access journals (e.g., PLoS, BMC) deal with payment to editorial staff. I know that some smaller OA journals deal with it with reverse financial psychology, if you catch my drift (see1).
As journals/publishers generally don’t pay scientists for much of the editorial or review work, the publishing houses that run for profit seem to be getting a reasonably good deal out of this relationship. At least, their shareholders are if the publisher does that part of their job well.
This is possibly where a distinction could be made. For profit publishing houses are “victims” of their own “success”, therefore actually have to pay people full time to deal with the higher volume of submissions that come their way. However, they can also reduce certain other costs through consolidation.
It is a competitive market – publishing houses are taking over successful journals formerly published by scholarly societies (both the British and Nordic Ecological Societies have moved from in-house to Wiley/Blackwell in recent years – that’s about 9 journals and associated subscriptions) – decisions that I realise must have been ratified by society members. However, in a competitive market, it’s not always the product that is best for the majority of consumers that wins out.
Apologies for sidetracking a discussion ostensibly about comics, Heather ;) I’m off for a large, surprisingly unhealthy hamburger from a multinational corporation. I love it.
1 I’ve been an associate editor for a newly created, online only, open access journal since 2004. It’s cost the whole editorial team (5 of us) a small amount of cash and a few favours to maintain this project over the years.
2 Yes, yes, I know, community service, &c.
Hey, how about some real data on the cost of publishing?
Mike, you could turn this around and say that for many authors (those who submit to journals without page charges – and there are quite a few major ones knocking about), they are getting their papers significantly improved entirely for free.
Pretty cushy considering the amount of time, skill, money and effort that goes into sorting a manuscript out for peer review, brokering peer review (which can take many, many hours, including all the chasing, and sometimes pleading, that needs to happen to get a quick decision), adjudicating the decisions, fixing all the errors that creep into the figures that many referees don’t catch (thank the lowly editorial assistants for that), in some cases copyediting and fact checking depending on the journal, production (including brokering replacing figures that just aren’t up to snuff – happens a lot), marketing and promotion of your article so that as many people as possible in your field see it. There is also all the behind the scenes activity, such as IT and development infrastructure, to make everything run as smoothly as possible. It’s a huge job and one that I think would be impossible on a volunteer basis. This is why hearing authors whine about journals exploiting them sort of irritates me.
By the way, BMC pays their in-house editorial staff and runs their affairs just like any other publishing house. I used to be a handling editor there so I know. I understand PLoS’s editors are better paid than BMC but this may have changed in the past few years, and there wasn’t much in it. (Rumor had it that PLoS editorial were better paid than Nature back in the day, in order to poach the very best from the bigger traditional journals.) The fact that a publishing house is open access is actually irrelevant when it comes to the processes and mechanisms of the editorial/production side of the business. it cost just as much whether the articles are free to read or not – the bigger difference is between online only vs print journals, which can be OA or not.
I was also an editor at a traditional society journal, and their academic editorial board members were paid (alongside the in-house staff). It’s a very common practice.
I wonder how much things like the beta Cell are going to cost?
That is a shedload of work, and and someone has to pick up the tab.
No wait, I forgot: people will do it in their spare time. Sorry, I was forgetting.
I suppose those same individuals won’t be keeping blogs or writing comics, then.
Thanks for some good links in the comments, there. I’m struck by the delta between what I paid a journal to publish my article as open access and the average cost for a “STM” article. Sigh. My co-workers were pretty irritated at the time with my idealism (and the number of color figures).
Sabine, getting back to your comment about safely archiving papers. The session Scientific Publishing in 5-10 years at the recent SciBarCamp Palo Alto actually talked a lot about safe long-term digital storage.
I guess as journals go online only, page charges for color figures will be a non-issue. As far as APCs (article processing charges for OA), as I was working at BMC the figure crept steadily upward. It was my impression that the company really wanted this figure to stay low (was it really $300 at one point? I think so), but the numbers just didn’t tally — the fact that most OA journals have stabilized around $2000 per article makes me think this number is probably about right if you have no subscription revenue to help offset the expensive things you’re doing to produce a quality journal. But I’ve been out of that loop for a few years, so don’t quote me.
Thanks for the background details, Jenny. Just to clarify my viewpoint, I have nothing at all against professional editorial staff. I don’t think I mentioned that or criticised them anywhere in my posts. Many of them do an excellent job. I’m more concerned about public money being used to bump up dividends in private companies which rely on the unpaid (or lowly paid) work done by editors not employed principally by the publisher.
I wrote a long-winded response about this, which I’ve decided requires its own blog, to avoid cluttering up this one.
The temporal increases in publication costs is another interesting issue – you’d have thought many of the costs would come down with time and consolidation. Digital storage may have a high start-up cost, but should start to decrease after. The price difference in Richard’s link might partly relate to the same temporal increase (the article compares pre-2005 data for STM [$2,670 per article], with 2007 data for humanities [$9,994]) as well as other factors brought up there.
Thanks for clarifying, Mike. That makes sense. Another thing I was musing about was that when I peer review a manuscript for free, it is with the knowledge that someone else out there is peer reviewing mine for free. So in that way it balances out. I guess for big-shot lab heads who do more reviewing than publishing, it might start to have a karmic imbalance, but then again, these sorts also farm out reviewing to post-docs, so perhaps it does all even out in the end.
The rising prices of APCs I alluded to I think are down to idealism – being priced far too low at the beginning in order to entice in a very skeptical populace of authors. I started working at BMC in 2003, before PLoS launched, and mostly all I got was funny looks when I went around trying to solicit papers. Many had never even heard of OA, so how could you charge what it really cost?