AAS Journals Will Switch to Open Access

https://aas.org/press/aas-journals-open-access

by sohkamyung • 5 years ago

215 43 5 years ago

aas.org

elefanten• 5 years ago

That's great news and a step in the right direction for research!

resoluteteeth• 5 years ago

For a second I thought this said "AAAS" but no, I guess Science is not going Open Access.

yawnxyz2• 5 years ago

I was so excited to see Science going Open Access as well... but one publisher is still a step in the right direction.

xqcgrek23• 5 years ago

Publication charges for authors and students will probably rise for a factor of 2 or more... open access journals in technical fields are approaching $500 per page.

This will basically lock out people in the developing world from publishing in these journals.

westurner6• 5 years ago

JOSS (Journal of Open Source Software) has managed to get articles indexed by Google Scholar [rescience_gscholar]. They publish their costs [joss_costs]: $275 Crossref membership, DOIs: $1/paper:
> Assuming a publication rate of 200 papers per year this works out at ~$4.75 per paper
[joss_costs]: https://joss.theoj.org/about#costs

^^ from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24517711 & this log of my non- markdown non- W3C Web Annotation threaded comments with URIs: https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-24517711

xqcgrek23• 5 years ago

A low cost of $1/page just shows how much of a scam even prestigious journals have become for all involved parties.

Referees work for free. Submitting authors pay through the nose for presumably typesetting and proofs whose true cost is closer to $1/page rather than hundreds. Editors are overworked.

Sci-Hub was supposed to disrupt that industry, but it seems all it's done is shift burden to authors and created pay-for publishing.

westurner6• 5 years ago

From https://joss.theoj.org/about#costs :

Income: JOSS has an experimental collaboration with AAS publishing where authors submitting to one of the AAS journals can also publish a companion software paper in JOSS, thereby receiving a review of their software. For this service, JOSS receives a small donation from AAS publishing. In 2019, JOSS received $200 as a result of this collaboration.

timkam• 5 years ago

Does anyone here have thoughts on JOSS? I've reviewed for them once, had the impression the editors take their job seriously, and think I'll review again in the future. The review approach that the journal facilitates has a strong focus on engineering aspects, i.e. it addresses a weakness of other venues, where it often does not matter how messy, unstable, and poorly documented the code is (or even if it compiles). On the other hand, the JOSS reviewers are typically not experts on the problem that the software is solving.

corty4• 5 years ago

That is a new round of FUD from the predatory publishing industry.

On balance, open access helps the developing world far more and costs less: Because access to journal and conference articles is now possible. Before open access, article fees around $50 for reading a single article meant, that to write an article you had to spend the $500 on the roughly 10 (usually more) related articles you needed to research and reference. To even get to the stage of writing an article, you need to read quite a few, impossible with the sky-high subscription fees that even rich western institutions balk at. And as everywhere, university libraries reimburse publishing fees out of the subscription cost they saved.

Open Access is cheaper, fairer and especially beneficial to education in the developing world.

Of course reading articles costs nothing on SciHub, but I guess the people you are working for don't want that to be known, eh?

xqcgrek23• 5 years ago

No, Sci-hub and the arxiv was always an option for people in developing countries.

All that's changed for researchers now is they have to fork over a factor or two or more to publish in the same journals as a few years ago.

chmike• 5 years ago

That is a new round of FUD from the predatory publishing industry

How do you define exactly "predatory publishing" ? Every journal that is not one of the major monopolistic journal that profits from the work and money of others ?

privong• 5 years ago

Publication charges for authors and students will probably rise for a factor of 2 or more... open access journals in technical fields are approaching $500 per page.

There's a charge comparison table[0]. Prices are going up, but they'll be lower than the previous AAS Journals Open Access premium. Their sample paper prices are $60-225 per page (because AAS journals have "quanta" charges, where a quanta is a set number of words, a figure, etc.).

https://journals.aas.org/oa/#charge_comparison

travisporter• 5 years ago

Thank you for this comment! At least they acknowledge this and offer waivers.

resiros• 5 years ago

I disagree. Most open access journals offer lower, and sometimes free pricing, for researchers from developing countries. For example PloS One (one of the main open access journals) offer free publishing to ~100 countries <https://plos.org/publish/fees/group-1-countries/>)

This does not affect the open access business model: Only a small fraction of papers is submitted by researchers in developing countries.

OmicronCeti2• 5 years ago

PloS One is not really open access... The vast majority of journals function under a Subscription/Paid open-access model, PloS One just mandates the second option.

I've forked out >$4k for a high-quality journal to make my research open-access. Or I could have paid $0 and it would be behind a paywall.

Some like Nature, publish largely open-access but it can cost >$8k to be published there.

jrochkind12• 5 years ago

They don't discuss how they'll be balancing the books without subscription charges? That's the interesting part!

peter303• 5 years ago

Generally open-access charges the author. $1000-$2000 an article is typical. Research grant applications include modest conference and publication costs.

gammarator3• 5 years ago

Historically about 2/3rds of AAS journals revenue came from page charges rather than subscriptions, so the shortfall is not enormous.

panabee• 5 years ago

what is the cost structure for a typical journal?

if reviewers work free, where does the bulk of the money go?

there is so much publicly-funded research bottled up in journals like science. how do we break this model so that taxpayer-funded research is more like wikipedia and available to all?

corty4• 5 years ago

The estimated cost structure is 1% webserver operation, 1% indian editing team worsening submitted papers, 1% printing stuff that still is delivered on paper, 2% office staff, 25% advertising, 30% legal cost to harass and prosecute students, researchers and universities, 20% executive compensation, 20% dividends.

gammarator3• 5 years ago

It's worth noting that the AAS is a nonprofit scientific society, and so has different incentives than a for-profit publisher like Springer. You can take a look at the AAS tax returns here: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/210...

In 2019 the Journals division reported $7.3M revenue against $5.6M expenses. Direct-paid salaries appear to be a minority of expenses; the AAS journals are hosted by IOP publishing (https://iopscience.iop.org/), so presumably IOP charges for its journal hosting platform are a significant proportion of the remaining expenses.

DaiPlusPlus2• 5 years ago

Why should hosting papers cost so much?

Unless their fee involves paying for a granite-imprint of the paper to preserve it for centuries, the marginal cost should be near-zero.

di4na• 5 years ago

This is great !

I hope the ACM got the memo, cause i would really like to see them follow suit...

JuettnerDistrib• 5 years ago

I applaud this change!

In practice, however, I don't think much will change. In astronomy, and my subfield in particular, all papers are free on arXiv, and the publishing and referee process are almost more of an afterthought: the threat that you better produce a high-quality paper to get it officially published and usable in a job application.

But for research, arXiv is king. (There are even reports of some people no longer bothering submitting to a journal once they got tenure...)

If you can't pay the publication charges (usually paid by your grant), then there are other reputable journals in astronomy like MNRAS and Physical Review D. Physical review even let's you submit by importing from arXiv.

yawnxyz2• 5 years ago

in biology we have bioRxiv, but there's still a lot of hesitancy to submit to it, especially by PIs.

Covid certainly helped push the field in that direction, and eLife is going to only publish articles from preprints going forward: https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/e5f8f1f7/what-we-have...

raincom• 5 years ago

When can we expect the same from ACS (American Chemical Society)?

istillwritecode• 5 years ago

As a matter of fact, I have been studying the economics of open access publishing. It's important to distinguish the price of open access publishing from the cost of open access publishing. Commercial publishers are hopeless because they are of course trying to make the most profit they can by obfuscating costs, practicing price discrimination, and shifting licensing fees through transitional models. ACM, IEEE, and others use their revenue from publishing to fund various other activities (like lobbying or outreach). There is a very interesting recent article about the _cost_ of publishing here: https://f1000research.com/articles/10-20/v2

Arxiv is useful for making stuff available, but peer review and professional publishing are still necessary for academics to advance and enhance their reputation. The peer review process is what typically establishes the quality of scientific work.

One thing that software people often overlook is the cost and value of human copy editing. Scholarly work often benefits from having a skilled editor correct grammar and formatting. Metadata and citations are incredibly important, and are usually mangled badly by lazy authors. If a journal accepts Microsoft Word (which is very common outside math and CS), then it has to be typeset to produce consistent PDF. All of this human effort costs money; perhaps a few hundred dollars per article.

AAS Journals Will Switch to Open Access

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