I think anyone who is in some way related to academia heard a sentence about "How publishers are nyot fair, and they ask for too much money (hopeless crying)". If you want a comprehensive review on the matter go read this^1 or this. Here, I want to give a slightly different perspective, as having been in the academia for some time myself. I want to focus more on scientists themselves, rather then viewing them just as a "prey" of the parasite publishers, the term defined in a first link. Although publishers certainly do parasite on the system, in my opinion it is solely the scientists and public funders that enable them to do so.
Intro
Scientific process is about finding new knowledge. This knowledge is shared in order to be utilized on a larger scale. Additionally, with sharing, one can avoid "reinventing the wheel" and collaborations can be established, capable of producing something more, than just the sum of individual parts of knowledge.
There are many form of sharing: conferences, personal interactions, mailing lists, but nowdays a dominant form of sharing in academia are papers published in scientific journals. Here, what is usually really meant by "scientific" is a journal, which most of your superiors and peers are approve of.
Regardless of the nature of a journal, it is typically expected that it will do the following:
- Checking - or "is it bullshit or not?". Often refered to a "peer-review process".
- Editing/Proofreading - no yellow fonts on blue backgrounds, cut images and grammar misteaks.
- Creating copies
- Dissemination - stuff it to as many folks as possible to find many interested readers.
and it is these services, that scientific journals are really motivating their pay from.
The first one is really a service to the journal, so that they do not damage their reputation by publishing shit. So expecting it to cost something for the author, is ridiculous in the first place in my opinion.
The second one is where actual work for the author starts. Of course, here again it is of mutual benefit, as journals compete with each other and looking shiny and slick is of an advantage. But also, the more comfortable article is to read, the higher the chance that people will actually read it, before being annoyed and moving to something else.
The third one and forth one, historically, would account for the biggest chunk of the costs, as one would have to produce physical copies from raw materials and ship it to different places. But in the digital world, the cost of creating a copy is not even worth thinking about. The dissemination part is really what matters, as it is indeed connected with a service - one has to maintain a server 24/7 and related infrastructure, which people can get articles from. Of course some also send printed copies, but I am yet to meet someone, whose main way of getting papers are printed journals and not an internet search engine. These people exist, but in a very little percentage.
So who is doing what and who pays for it?
The creation of article itself is done by the scientists being paid from public money most of the time.
Although being a service to the journal, checking is done by scientists as well, due to the highly specialized scientific subfields, that require very specific training to understand. The "reviewers" are often scientists themselves, being again paid by public grants or employing institutions. Very little work from the journal, except assigning the volunteer reviewers, and making a decision based on their description.
Editing/Proofreading in reality is shared, with most of the editing already done at the stage of article creation. Somehow it did not happend, that scientists simply write their paper in markdown and hand it over to the publisher to deal with. Most of the time it is written in Word or Latex, which already involves a great deal of formatting, before it arrives to the publisher. I was once on a conference where there was even a separate workshop done by some whatevertitle-editor, who complained on how scientists should better prepare free paper gifts to them, both in writing style and editing. A lot of proofreading is also done at the paper production stage, as typical scientific paper, at least in physics has many authors. Each author would read multiple versions of the paper multiple times, or lie that they did. But main author would read it many times anyway, while implementing corrections.
Journals indeed do proofreading and send you corrections. If you google the cost^3, for a 8 page paper it is about 30\$.
Creating copies has 0 cost, so it is irrelevant. Even if journals do print, one can often opt-out of printed copies and it is not waht most of their readers going for anyway.
Dissemination is the most contoversial, since it has many parameters, main of which being internet traffic, that defines server requirements and, consequently, costs. This site costs 8\$/month. But if heavily pressured Sci-Hub can do it for 88 million of articles and dozens of users, I would say that price of 200\$ presented in ^1 is more than reasonable.
So then it becomes: 30\$ + 200\$ + costs of volunary reviewer database and communication = 2000-10000\$ per article LOL. For both of my articles my institution paid around 2000\$. For the second, I was even actively discouraged by my supervisor against putting it on arxiv prior to publication for reasons unknown and unexplained, even though the actual journal secured free access :D.
Now that problem is clear, how come everyone is accepting such a shitty deal and roll with it? Cited articles place the blame on the greedy publishers and how they borderline forced everyone into this system. They are greedy for sure and doing their best to convince people to play along. But, here I want to argue, that there is at least a one more important factor and scientists themselves are not simply innocent sheeps being abused.
The missing service from the equation that journals provide to scientists for the difference is a feeling of prestige.
Fake prestige.
"Lewin was clever. He realised scientists are very vain, and wanted to be part of this selective members club; Cell was ‘it’, and you had to get your paper in there,” Schekman said. “I was subject to this kind of pressure, too.” He ended up publishing some of his Nobel-cited work in Cell." ... "Almost overnight, a new currency of prestige had been created in the scientific world." ^2
And no the first quote is not from 2022, this is 80x. But even now, nothing really changed. Scientists are never the ones actually carrying the costs of publication. But prestige they get from being published in some famous journal is a direct personal benefit. Here lies the main incentive for scientists directly to accept the bullshit and check the box. And I know for a fact, a lot of them do it knowingly or simply refuse to care when such matters brought to their attention. In the best case you would be greated with "But what can we do? It is done to us". Like they are a piece of clay.
I wish there was a "prestige seeking meter" on every scientist, so that we could see a real motivation. I want to emphasize, not only they have means and possibility to resist the publishing madness, often they simply do not want out of personal benefit that come from it.
And this is not the only mechanism for abusing public funds for clearly personal benefit. Have you ever heard of scientific conferences? These are events, where otherwise relatively poor and overworked people, 2-3 times per year have an ability to travel to a nice place and hotel, that most of them themselves would never pay for. But luckily they do not have to. They have a public fund pot that does magic, just like in a fairy in Cinderella. A lot would say that meetings and discussions are very beneficial for scientific process, which I definitely agree. But I would argue that 4-star hotel in Las Vegas is not necessary for a scientific discussion. Heck if anything, a casino on the first floor and super huge territory where everyone is super scattered is even detrimental for the "official" purpose.
I know that real motivations are not scientific discussions. A lot of people would admit it jockingly in personal interactions and I did it too. For most of "necessary interactions" a Jitsi-call would do just fine. Or some cheap place that has heating and a projector. But there is not prestige in it. It is much more pleasent to tell, which pompous places your visited. Somehow it is never the essence of discussions that are mentioned first, if at all.
And it is not only not considered immoral to spend public funds just for the sake of personal traveling to the specific city, but even encouraged. The choice of conference is done at least as much, if not exclusively by the venue, rather then by the content and the program of the conference.
Impact factor
Introduction of impact factors gave the prestige seeking a measure stick. Now, it is not only which journal you published in, but also how much, how many links etc, all united into one number. Just like Instagram and TikTok "stars" salivate on the amount of likes and reposts they get, there are enough scientists that do the same with their citations and metrics. And analogy is even similar to the point, that noone even analyzes the context in which this or that citation was given. The mere existance of a lot of them spawns a necessary dofamin rush, satisfaction of one's ego and respect from impressed faces of the peers.
At least Instagram and TikTok stars do it with their own lives, time and money. But scientists are fully aware of the public sums that are used just to hit that new number on the way to new promotion on "professor mountain". In fact if given the possibility between lower impact factor journal + lower price and higher impact factor + higher price, the latter would be chosen.
Literally zero times someone gave a shit whether you made you data available, whether it is in a readable form or not, whether your article is freely available to the public. The first and often only question is: 'Is it a "reputable expensive journal"? Oh, congratulations!'. The end.
Maybe it gives you some better outreach to similar minded folks, but come on, in the era of search engines it is stupid to scroll article lists of publishers as opposed to using search engines or agregator sites. I am even sure arxiv is used much more often for "new article on the topic", than any 5000\$/article "reputable" journal site. This makes usefullness of journal's impact factor exactly the same as instagram likes. It is a representation of "important articles" just as much as dog video liked 100 million times is an important social issue.
Not a lot of people is citing your article? Oh, bad news champ. But, that just life: you either created something that people find usefull and important or not. It is simple as that. They might do so for the wrong reasons, of course, but you just have to deal with it. Giving some more money to private company will not improve your thinking and writting.
Do not believe me? Read about these cases or this one. If three non-peer-reviewed papers on arxiv is enough to win an equivalent of Nobel Prize in math, than clearly it is not the name of the journal or it's impact factor that stoping you from becoming next Einstein.
Case of the Sci-Hub
I have to address this point as well, as I sure many would think, why would someone even care, if there is a deep well of pirated knowledge?
Sci-Hub is like constantly taking painkillers, when you have a broken hand. Painkillers will not heal your hand.
But it is even worse, as it gives publishers the possibility to shift focus from total prestige driven rip-off of public funds that they are doing together with many scientists onto philosophical issues of piracy, freedom or other general topics. And yes, pirating and hacking is viewed as a negative thing by many and it's morality depends solely on the context, which in turn "too long did not read"ing people away from the issue.
So yes, it solves the problem that should not exist, at a wrong point of the pipeline, by diverting attention from the real one. Terrible way of doing it if you ask me.
Let's go away a bit from scientific publishing and imagine another hypotetical situation. I am sitting at home writting a paper. I am done and leave it on my desk without an intention to publish it anytime soon. Or I want to put it on my website for a fee. I am "not freely sharing" the knowledge! Would you consider it a heroic act, to break into my home, scan it, make a bunch of copies and distribute it, without even asking me for permission? Or into my server for that matter. I hope not. And this is exactly how typical publisher would shift the focus to "look they are obviously criminals and, therefore, we are doing the right thing." The same can not be done for triple-payment business model, because they always would look like bad guys.
Moreover Sci-Hub is not even so successfull in what it claims. Institutions and libraries are still paying shit ton of money to publishers, whether or not specific article appeared on Sci-Hub or not. It only solves it for the institutions that would not pay anyway, whether it is lack of funds or desire. So please stop saying to your friends: "Oh, just stick it to the publishers and use Soy-Hub, it is so convinient." and make them aware of the actual problem.
But, it is true that resources like Sci-Hub would be an immensly usefull agregators, just as they are now. I do not discourage or encourage it's use, but it does make it a bit worse, by easing the pain and diverting attention.
To overthrow bullshit system, you need to try to stop feeding it first.
Yes you, an average "what can I do? it's the only way". Let me tell you, it is not.
Don't be a sucker-reviewer
Only do review for your friends and collegues directly. It is a pure lie, that being a reviewer for journal X, gives your CV a new spin. It is not. It only proves whether you can be put to work for free looking for a prestige. Heck, it is not even for free. I doubt that "reviewing articles for specific publisher at no compensation" is a part of the contract, that is really compensated from public funds.
There is literally no reason to do free reviews for a private organization. No matter how you are being told by older collegues of the usefullness and prestige of this activity. You can still do it, but not for a private publisher if you really want to. This review part is really only thing that keeps them in their bullshiting business.
At least give the publishers real market prices for time of a professional consultant in a specialized field.
Try your best not to send them your articles.
Easier said then done, hehe :). I am guilty of it myself for not being moraly strong enough to push against it. Especially for my second first-author paper, when I was fully aware of what is going on.
In my case, my institute already had an infrastructure to put our papers, data and whatever the hell you want on a publicly facing server. Moreover it even gave a unique identifier with versioning and I could verify that this page was indexed by a search engine and could be easily found. Sending it to a publisher afterwards is nothing else that expensive duplicating of most of the efforts. Even worse, we are required to put our stuff on this internal system anyway... :D.
Yet simple requirement of independent peer review is apparently enough of a justification to pay 2000+\$ per article. It is really this argument, that is the only reasonable one in respect of "why the hell do I need to give them this article at al." Somehow it is impossible to organize a peer review process by a hundred-million dollar budgeted research organizations, which have even separate IT-departments and server infrastructures. And on the mass scale this inability costs billions.
Organization of such system, funded directly by different research organizations would probably solve it once and for all. I do not know of any initiative at the moment. For it's creation enough protests and annoyance should be imposed on the management of the institutes and funders and you can be a part of it.
Another option is to pick the cheapest least known journal and do a pre-publishing on something like arxiv. Publishing there will atleast dilute the market for main publishers and is also a win.
Change or lose your job, if necessary.
It is true that scientists are being pressured to publish in good journals by funding organizations and that often currency of research now are papers. But do not forget that noone is holding you there with chains. And no, academic system is not where science stops. It is only one way of doing it.
And it is you, the scientist, who signs the giveaway box for the publisher. No one physically forcing you to do so. You are just looking for prestige, money, promotions... and do not hesitate to sacrifice any possible amount of public money for it. Yes, this insentives are created often by funders, but you choose to accept them and play along. You are not a piece of clay.
Conclusions
What a lot of scientists are doing, with these expensive publications, is really trying to convert public funds in a lump of personal fame, prestige and promotions. Although there is also a lot of downward pressure in favor of this, most of scientists are quite aware of the costs involved and mindfully accept it. This is an additional factor that keeps this bullshit going. This is especially true for more senior staff, that has all the ways available to resist and clarify, but chooses not to do so. Probably because that would invalidate a lot of impact factor achievements they already have.
“Scientists are not as price-conscious as other professionals, mainly because they are not spending their own money,” was super evident even in 1988. So it is also not a recent phenomenon.
Do not be like them. If you play along with this and not resist, you are just a part of it. Only ruminating about it until retirement does not help. And yes, maybe it is your extension or contract will be cut, because there is a need to pay ridiculous subscription and publication fees.