One of the most controversial aspects of the scientific enterprise concerns the way scientific work is published. Basically, this works as follows. Scientists do research, write it up, and send a manuscript to a scientific journal. At the journal, an editor looks at the paper and decides whether it’s potentially interesting. If so, the editor sends the paper to a number of fellow scientists who review the reported research. If the reviewers think the paper is good enough, the editor accepts the paper for publication. That’s it.
The actual process of publishing the paper is handled by a publishing company. The biggest companies are Elsevier and Springer, but there are also professional organizations that do this, like the American Psychological Association (APA). Publishers make a lot of money off this process. For instance, in the Open Access model, it costs anywhere between €1000 and €8000 to publish a paper. The authors, editors, and reviewers are scientists who typically do their work while being paid by the university (actually, most do it in their spare time) so they cost the publishing company nothing. Because publishing companies basically only publish the paper on a journal website, it’s no surprise that their profit margins are large; Elsevier, for instance, has been reported to have profit margin close to 40%.
This publishing model has been criticized intensively. Most scientists think the added value of publishers is too small to justify the pricing of papers. Publishers try to defend their status by arguing that they typeset and copyedit papers, make them findable, and archive them, but the argument is both questionable and undercut by these same profit margins. Before the internet, publishers clearly had added value, because they printed journals and distributed them to libraries. But today, publishers just put a pdf online. It’s thoroughly unclear why that should cost thousands of euros.
So why don’t we just stop? We could simply put our papers online, for instance on a preprint server, and have people review the paper there. We could recreate journals as a kind of playlist, where an editorial board marks a paper for their journal if they think it’s good enough. Technically speaking, we don’t need journals to disseminate findings anymore. If all of the scientists did the rational thing at the exact same time, and just picked a day at which everyone stopped publishing in commercially operated journals, the scientific engine would keep running just fine but would immediately be free of charge.
Unfortunately, there is one small problem with this scenario: it’s a tragedy of the commons. A tragedy of the commons is a problem where the collective benefits if we all choose option A over B, but the individual loses if they choose option A while the rest of the bunch sticks with option B. If we all decided to no longer publish in Nature starting tomorrow 12:00, nobody would suffer; however if I decide to no longer publish in Nature while my colleagues do, I lose because I lock myself out of important channels of communication.
Tragedies of the commons don’t typically resolve themselves. My colleague EJ Wagenmakers has suggested that the situation will only change if funding agencies simply prohibit publication in expensive journals. That might not be a bad idea. <<
One of the most controversial aspects of the scientific enterprise concerns the way scientific work is published. Basically, this works as follows. Scientists do research, write it up, and send a manuscript to a scientific journal. At the journal, an editor looks at the paper and decides whether it’s potentially interesting. If so, the editor sends the paper to a number of fellow scientists who review the reported research. If the reviewers think the paper is good enough, the editor accepts the paper for publication. That’s it.
The actual process of publishing the paper is handled by a publishing company. The biggest companies are Elsevier and Springer, but there are also professional organizations that do this, like the American Psychological Association (APA). Publishers make a lot of money off this process. For instance, in the Open Access model, it costs anywhere between €1000 and €8000 to publish a paper. The authors, editors, and reviewers are scientists who typically do their work while being paid by the university (actually, most do it in their spare time) so they cost the publishing company nothing. Because publishing companies basically only publish the paper on a journal website, it’s no surprise that their profit margins are large; Elsevier, for instance, has been reported to have profit margin close to 40%.
This publishing model has been criticized intensively. Most scientists think the added value of publishers is too small to justify the pricing of papers. Publishers try to defend their status by arguing that they typeset and copyedit papers, make them findable, and archive them, but the argument is both questionable and undercut by these same profit margins. Before the internet, publishers clearly had added value, because they printed journals and distributed them to libraries. But today, publishers just put a pdf online. It’s thoroughly unclear why that should cost thousands of euros.
So why don’t we just stop? We could simply put our papers online, for instance on a preprint server, and have people review the paper there. We could recreate journals as a kind of playlist, where an editorial board marks a paper for their journal if they think it’s good enough. Technically speaking, we don’t need journals to disseminate findings anymore. If all of the scientists did the rational thing at the exact same time, and just picked a day at which everyone stopped publishing in commercially operated journals, the scientific engine would keep running just fine but would immediately be free of charge.
Unfortunately, there is one small problem with this scenario: it’s a tragedy of the commons. A tragedy of the commons is a problem where the collective benefits if we all choose option A over B, but the individual loses if they choose option A while the rest of the bunch sticks with option B. If we all decided to no longer publish in Nature starting tomorrow 12:00, nobody would suffer; however if I decide to no longer publish in Nature while my colleagues do, I lose because I lock myself out of important channels of communication.
Tragedies of the commons don’t typically resolve themselves. My colleague EJ Wagenmakers has suggested that the situation will only change if funding agencies simply prohibit publication in expensive journals. That might not be a bad idea. <<
