Oh even if your org has a subscription, the fees are insane. You just don't see them.

Things are slowly changing but I can't wait for this parasitic business model to collapse for good.

What's most bothersome is there is work for them to do.

How about assigning a real copy editor with subject matter expertise? How about publishing open source libraries that automatically validate and output visualizations for their formats? How about hosting multimedia supplements?

It would not be difficult at all to earn the money they charge. There is so much room for creativity and innovation and adding value in scientific publishing.

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vitally3643 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That sounds an awful lot like "costs" which seriously compromises the "free profit" model.

Why pay money to make a better product when you can pay zero money for a worse product and no change in subscriptions? What are your customers gonna do, go get the paper somewhere else?

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MostlyStable 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

20 years ago, that argument would make sense. They had no competition and could do what they wanted. As an earlier comment stated: that is starting to change, and if they wait until open competitors are fully established, then it will be too late. Now is the time for them to realize that their parasitic business model is coming to an end and they need to change if they want to survive long term.

They can of course choose short term profits over long term viability, which wouldn't be all that surprising, but that changes the explanation from "more profits" to "short-sightedness/incompetence"

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HPsquared 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They have no competition on any given paper that they hold the rights to.

	▲	12_throw_away 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, maybe no competition when we're talking about institutional access rights on dry land. However, for everyone else, there's quite a bit of competition out there in the high seas.

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thayne 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oh they are very aware of the threat. But their weapon of choice is the legal system and regulatory capture, not improving their product.

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spwa4 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Do you think these papers have the economic position they have because they are better than some competitor? Or because they have copyright: they provide exclusive access to some important things ...

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GTP 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, many students and researchers resort to piracy.

	▲	monocasa 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The students and researchers weren't the customers, but instead the large institutions they belong to. In a sense, they should be the same from this context, but the amount of consolidation that has occurred in the academic publishing space means that large institutions don't really have the same plausible deniability that their individual members do.

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leephillips 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, yes. There are several ways to get papers:

https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/

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PaulHoule 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I was involved with arXiv when it first came to Cornell (blame me if you can't get an endorsement!) and we did plenty of analysis about the cost structure of academic publishing.

When we looked at well-run noncommercial journals, like The Physical Review, the cost was justified by exception handling in the peer review process. The average peer review case goes smoothly but if somebody has a complaint and there a lot of appeals and reviews the cost can skyrocket.

Our cost structure was $3-$5 a paper but we struggled to get even that. arXiv was unfunded at Los Alamos and I think Cornell never appreciated the value that it created for the world, had we found a way to capture a few percent of the value we created we would have been "sustainable" but I think that is incompatible with running it on a shoestring the way we did.

I am not enthusiastic about arXiv being independent, I don't have any problem with the high salary they want to pay the director, you are going to pay that for a good non-profit manager in NYC but you could just as easily pay that much for a bad non-profit manager.

I have nightmares though that had arXiv been independent in the 2000s somebody I know might have wound up at Epstein's island not because I think he's evil or perverse but rather because he's naive [1]. arXiv is a gem that would be attractive to somebody like Epstein and would be very possible for somebody like that to have funded it 100% back then. As it is it will be sucked into a somewhat corrupt NGO-industrial complex and end up spending $30-$50 a paper just on fundraising. It's sad.

[1] so many people who got in his circle strike me like children who were playing in the street and got hit by a car, and you'd hope people in those leadership positions should have better judgement

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morelandjs 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I published in Nature Physics and the copy-editing process was quite embarrassing, to the point where we had to repeatedly nag them to stop them from making the manuscript presentation worse.

To be clear, I’m not talking about subjective style issues, I mean conforming to their own spec and avoiding careless bugs.

All remaining work fell on the backs of the physics referees. I’m not sure what value Springer provided from an editorial standpoint. It was disappointing to say the least after all that hard work.

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12_throw_away 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Right? A lot of journals make a big deal about submitting your manuscript in the proper format (sometimes even LaTeX if you're lucky) and then you get the galley proofs back and half the equations and citations now have typos in them.

The entire publishing process often feels like a chain of "you had ONE job"-type errors from the journals (presumably because they're wildly underpaying and overworking the people whose one job these things should have been).

	▲	mattkrause 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		On top of that, the whole thing is done in fits and starts. You send in the final revision, it vanishes into the void for some unspecified time, and then they offer[] you 48 hours--sometimes not even lined up with two working days!--to figure out what they "fixed" and repair it yourself. [] Nothing usually happens if you push back on this fake deadline, though I suppose your paper might end up in a different issue of a printed journal. It's just annoyingly rushed--give me a week!