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| ▲ | andrenarchy 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | mmooss 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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? | | |
| ▲ | capnrefsmmat 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | adgjlsfhk1 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I bet if you offer to waive a $1500 fee for authors who submit a latex version, a lot of grad students will learn it pretty fast. | |
| ▲ | D-Machine 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Outside of disciplines that use LaTeX, the ability of authors to do typesetting is pretty limited. Since this is obviously true, and yet since most journals (with some exceptions) demand you follow tedious formatting requirements or highly restrictive templates, this suggests, in fact, that journals are outsourcing the vast majority of their typesetting and formatting to submitters, and doing only the bare minimum themselves. | | |
| ▲ | capnrefsmmat 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Most of the tedious formatting requirements do not match what the final typeset article looks like. The requirements are instead theoretically to benefit peer reviewers, e.g., by having double-spaced lines so they can write their comments on the paper copy that was mailed to them back when the submission guidelines were written in the 1950s. The smarter journals have started accepting submissions in any format on the first round, and then only require enough formatting for the typesetters to do their job. |
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| ▲ | kleiba 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | D-Machine 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Nonsense. Formatting demands make things worse here, you could just ask authors to submit unformatted content (e.g. Markdown or RMarkdown, or utterly minimal LaTeX file, with references and a bibliography file) and then trivially move that content into whatever format is required. There are in fact journals that do this too (i.e. don't have formatting requirements). As a submitter applying to multiple journals with arbitrary formatting requirements, you are often forced to meet arbitrary and irrelevant (visual) style requirements even before you are likely to be published, so of course you keep a base unformatted copy that you modify as needed to satisfy whatever bullshit policies each random journal demands. This wastes everyone's time. The reason submitters don't "play nicely" is because the publishers' demands ("style guides") are demented here: they should just be asking for unformatted content (besides figures), certainly for submissions, and even for accepted publications: they should actually be doing the work of formatting and typesetting. But instead they force most of this on the submitters, to save costs by extorting the desperation of academics. |
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| ▲ | D-Machine 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | kleiba 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | D-Machine 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | > 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. As I said, if this is the case, the vast majority of typesetting and formatting has clearly been outsourced to submitters, and this means the amount of actual typesetting/formatting done by journals can only be minimal compared to in other domains. EDIT: > 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. Yes, generally, I don't want to present my formulas and figures in the shitty and limited ways the journal demands, but which would be trivial to present on a website (which is the only way 99.9% of people access articles now anyway). So journal requirements here are usually harmful and generally 20+ years outdated. | | |
| ▲ | kleiba 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | > and this means the amount of actual typesetting/formatting done by journals can only be minimal compared to in other domains This doesn't follow logically, and even though I don't know how it is in other domains, I know for a fact that the amount of typesetting done for a typical CS journal is non-trivial. > So journal requirements here are usually harmful and generally 20+ years outdated. I see you have very strong opinions already formed - I don't expect to be able to change them. | | |
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| ▲ | gucci-on-fleek 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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/ | | |
| ▲ | adgjlsfhk1 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | Surely you charge printing and mailing to the people you are mailing to though. | | |
| ▲ | gucci-on-fleek 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | bubblethink 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | D-Machine 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's bullshit, if typesetting were a serious cost, they wouldn't demand such finicky formatting and/or filetype requirements from authors (and would instead prefer minimal formats like RMarkdown or basica LaTeX so they could format and typeset themselves). Instead they clearly make submitters follow rigid templates so that their work is trivial. | | |
| ▲ | KingMob 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | Hmm, I'm not 100% convinced. What if there are multiple downstream formats that have to be exported to? (E.g., another commenter mentioned PubMed requires something called JATS XML.) In that case, a consistent input format assists with generation of the output formats, and without that, there'd be even more work. --- That being said, I don't doubt publisher fees exceed their actual costs for this. I always wonder why there's no universal academic interchange schema; it seems like something XML could have genuinely solved. I suppose the publishers have no incentive to build that, and reduce what they can charge for. | | |
| ▲ | D-Machine 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | You shouldn't be 100% convinced: obviously there are some non-trivial typesetting costs. But general typesetting is very obviously a largely solved problem in 2025, regardless of the submission format, so since academic journals have weirdly specific input format requirements that are not demanded in other similar domains, it is clear they are doing dated / junk / minimal typesetting / formatting. Also see what the costs are anywhere else, typesetting is a triviality: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/52009 https://www.lode.de/blog/the-cost-effective-revolution-autom... https://svpow.com/2015/06/11/how-much-does-typesetting-cost/ https://old.reddit.com/r/publishing/comments/1cdx1jq/author_... | | |
| ▲ | KingMob 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well, I don't think it's "very obvious", nor do I think "it is clear they are doing dated / junk / minimal typesetting / formatting". I guess I'm not seeing the evidence the same way. --- I read your links, and I think the most interesting relevant one with good numbers is the svpow.com link. The StackExchange one says "34%" of their cost is "editorial and production". That includes more than type-setting, so it's not clear what subfraction is pure type-setting, and whether it's overpriced or not. The Lode one is selling Latex templates, and they even say "Users without LaTeX experience should budget for learning time or technical assistance." It's more of a low-cost self-serve alternative, which probably doesn't include everything a journal does to maintain visual consistency. We can argue that full-service is overpriced, sure, but this is different, like complaining about coffee shops because the vending machine is cheaper. The Reddit link is about a book author with a pure text novel, possibly the optimal scenario for cheap type-setting. --- The svpow.com link was interesting, but, it seems like type-setting costs are usually bundled in (possibly to obscure overcharging, sure), so maybe it's better to critique the overall cost of academic publishing instead of trying to break out type-setting. My $0.02, anyway. |
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