Free science

[A.N.Other]

These are small <1Mb papers so the hosting costs will be minimal. They don't review the papers, they don't do any research into the papers . They are simply charging £20 to download someone else's <1Mb file multiple times. This then lets you create your own <1Mb file to charge someone else to download this new <1Mb file.

They don't do the peer-review, as by its nature that's your peers, but they certainly employ skilled staff to critique and review papers before sending things out. Typically that's PhDs and PostDocs looking for a career change but who carry the knowledge to effectively interpret what they're seeing. There's a substantial number of people behind the scenes - even for PLoS (etc) journals.

The majority of papers sent to top-flight journals are rejected by the office, and don't even get sent out for review.

 

[sven256]

They don't do the peer-review, as by its nature that's your peers, but they certainly employ skilled staff to critique and review papers before sending things out. Typically that's PhDs and PostDocs looking for a career change but who carry the knowledge to effectively interpret what they're seeing. There's a substantial number of people behind the scenes - even for PLoS (etc) journals.

The majority of papers sent to top-flight journals are rejected by the office, and don't even get sent out for review.

I'm fully aware...

But lets take a look at how many students there are in the U.K and America alone around 2.4 million in the U.K and around 20 million in America. Let alone the rest of the world.
If they are charging even a nominal fee of £20 per student (which it will be higher than this) that is a hell of a lot of money being taken in, without even taking into account of business use private use etc.

These guys are on the gravy train for next to no work.

 

[dowie]

These guys are on the gravy train for next to no work.

have you got any evidence of this?

AFAIK quite a few journals are not for profit so we can rule them out - of the private ones are they really such a huge cash cow? Is there some massive market inefficiency here that competitors are missing?

 

[D.P.]

While they don't charge universities like that, they do charge around the £20+ per paper if you wanted to view them.

For me who has to travel around 2 hours if I wanted to access papers, the site is ideal.

there is this technology called VPN. I suggest you learn how to use it so you can access your universities' subscriptions from anywhere!

Simple fact is they are not storing anything like the amount of data like netflix, hulu etc.

These are small <1Mb papers so the hosting costs will be minimal. They don't review the papers, they don't do any research into the papers . They are simply charging £20 to download someone else's <1Mb file multiple times. This then lets you create your own <1Mb file to charge someone else to download this new <1Mb file.

It has absolutely nothing to do with the data. Publications are still printed, there are teams of editorial staff, and a website to host and maintain.


Plus a lot of journals will be hosting videos and data-sets, I uploaded a 500mb video for one journal.

 

[sven256]

have you got any evidence of this?

AFAIK quite a few journals are not for profit so we can rule them out - of the private ones are they really such a huge cash cow? Is there some massive market inefficiency here that competitors are missing?

Any evidence they are not?

I'm purely going off amount of bandwidth needed (next to none)so the hosting is going to be relatively low i.e a fraction of the cost of say netflix, spotify etc.

The relatively low amount of staff needed for them to run vs the amount of revenue they must bring in due to every university, business, private individual buying access.

I would guess their cash flow will be well over a billion just going off the university subscriptions which in effect universities are forced into due to no other options. That's without taking into account big business revenues.

Although old

"Faced with ever-increasing journal prices and dwindling budgets, universities are being forced to take action. In 2003, Cornell cancelled its subscriptions to more than 200 Elsevier journals [ 8]. The University of Wisconsin-Madison has withdrawn from the Big Deal [ 9]. Scholars are also taking action. In 2003, researchers at the University of California-San Francisco called upon their colleagues throughout the world to boycott the journals published by the Cell Press (owned by Elsevier) after the publisher asked the University of California for $90,000 in annual fees for continued access to the six Cell Press titles--this in addition to the $8 million that the university already paid Elsevier annually for online journal subscriptions [ 10]. As another example, in January 2004, the entire editorial board of Elsevier's Journal of Algorithms resigned in protest of the publishers' pricing policies, and went on to begin publishing a competing journal, ACM Transactions on Algorithms, in partnership with the Association for Computing Machinery [ 11]."

And that is a single university $8 million in fees to access the journels.

Elsevier reported a profit margin of approximately 37% on revenues of £2.048 billion.

 

[D.P.]

I'm fully aware...

But lets take a look at how many students there are in the U.K and America alone around 2.4 million in the U.K and around 20 million in America. Let alone the rest of the world.
If they are charging even a nominal fee of £20 per student (which it will be higher than this) that is a hell of a lot of money being taken in, without even taking into account of business use private use etc.

These guys are on the gravy train for next to no work.

They aren't gravy trains in the slightest, profit margins are about 30% which is typically of most industries.

Now I'm no big fan of the status of peer-review in the scientific community and obviously it would be nice if publishers magically worked without profit, open access has its own problems:

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/...fit-societies-demonstrates-just-the-opposite/

 

[sven256]

They aren't gravy trains in the slightest, profit margins are about 30% which is typically of most industries.

Now I'm no big fan of the status of peer-review in the scientific community and obviously it would be nice if publishers magically worked without profit, open access has its own problems:

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/...fit-societies-demonstrates-just-the-opposite/

As i already stated above 37% profit. Around 74% comes from digital revenue which i'm going to guess is highly more profitable than the printed method.

Now in my view that is ridiculous. After all they are doing all the easy parts. they are not doing the actual research, not really doing the peer reviewing just milking the cream.

But as you can see that's my view. You can happily have your view, as you are not going to change my view and I'm not going to change yours.

 

[dowie]

Any evidence they are not?

you're the one making the claim

and yes, as I've pointed out, quite a few are run on a not for profit basis

I don't think they're the huge cash cow you're making out and obviously some people do seem to find value in these sorts of journals above a free for all SSRN type model. It seems that at the moment someone needs to pay for that and a pirate bay type site just undermines that model.

 

[D.P.]

We're switching quiet soon to open access peer reviewed journals which will still cost us 1-2k per paper depending on journal

As a researcher myself finding papers by my research group at home can be a nightmare, and I have no issues using the website stated to access our research

A colleague of mine published in nature, he couldn't email me published journal as he didn't have access to it, instead had to email me the manuscript, odd system

Learn to use VPN

 

[D.P.]

As i already stated above 37% profit. Around 74% comes from digital revenue which i'm going to guess is highly more profitable than the printed method.

Now in my view that is ridiculous. After all they are doing all the easy parts. they are not doing the actual research, not really doing the peer reviewing just milking the cream.

But as you can see that's my view. You can happily have your view, as you are not going to change my view and I'm not going to change yours.

That is for Elsevier, which is renowned in the publishing industry for higher profit margins. Publishers like IEEE are around the 25-30% mark, which is exactly the same as the likes of google and apple.