Comments on: Paying for Peer-Review — or, What We’ve Learned from Financial Watchdogs

By: Jo VanEvery

Jo VanEvery — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:59:26 +0000

depends on the business model. The price you pay for things is not really directly related to the costs of providing it. It’s related to the market for the thing you are buying.

Same goes for publishing. A journal can presumably set it’s own submission fee. And the question is just whether people will pay for it.

Then there are 2 issues. Do you get enough submissions to cover your costs. And do you get high enough quality submissions to put out the quality of journal that you want. Quality journals right now have a pretty low acceptance to submission ratio.

All researchers have an interest in the journal being published, both the accepted, the rejected, and those who didn’t even submit. You can’t get the latter to pay but those rejected do have an interest in the journal not only being published but publishing high quality material. If the quality drops, they don’t win either.

But you don’t have to break down the costs and justify them. You set a fee. Presumably the market evens all that out a bit. Maybe the higher quality journals can actually set a higher fee. But then all of those submission fees are “income” which they use to pay their expenses, the expenses of running a journal which is more than just the peer review process.

And on that model, your problem seems to disappear.

By: Richard Sever

Richard Sever — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:43:44 +0000

Submission fees would presumably cover only the cost of peer review. The cost of publication would require an additional fee for the article to undergo typesetting, XML mark-up, etc. (which it would be unreasonable to expect rejected authors to cover through submission fees). The temptation would be for publishers to lower the acceptance barrier so they receive more of the latter.

By: Joseph J. Esposito

Joseph J. Esposito — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 01:24:46 +0000

Yes, you are missing something. Follow the link to the liblicense archive and you will see that Stevan Harnad describes a system under which authors pay on acceptance.

By: Jo VanEvery

Jo VanEvery — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:01:10 +0000

I’m not understanding something about this argument. what does the fact that you pay for the peer review process have to do with whether or not you get accepted. everyone pays. You are paying an administrative fee, no? so the journal gets the money whether they publish/certify your article or not.

Or am I missing something.

By: Bill Hooker

Bill Hooker — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:03:13 +0000

Submission fees may be at least part of the solution — e.g. http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2009/06/15/an-economic-solution-to-reviewing-load/ and recent discussions on the Amsci OA forum.

By: Richard Sever

Richard Sever — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:55:34 +0000

The potential for standards to weaken because of the reversal in who pays for services represents the strongest argument against open access. In the most obvious case, journals may come under financial pressure to increase acceptance rates, since online economies of scale mean that profit/surplus is made on a per article basis – in contrast to subscription journals, the incentive is to publish more rather than less. OA advocates argue that the solution is simply to isolate editorial decision making from the finance department. This may be possible in organizations that can rely on philanthropic funding but it is hard to imagine a small society facing collapse or a commercial company with duties to share holders being able to resist this.

Moreover, since there is money to be made from authors, there will be an incentive for an (even) lower tier of vanity journals to emerge that will simply publish anything and so increase the overall cost of the scholarly publication process (so often one of the arguments for OA). Indeed, Phil and Kent’s recent experiment suggests that this is already happening.