Pay to publish

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nimbus

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The academic industrial complex. Money is literally the god of all things including academia and religion. As they say, “No margin, no mission.”



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It's out of control.

The "good" journals (or what used to be good journals) publish crap, since all they care about is their impact factor (Anesthesiology, A&A, RAPM). If it's not a baby owl model of tRNA targeted machine learning models for hippocampal meditation-induced molecular changes (they won't accept or publish).

The rest of the journals are some version of pay-to-publish. Some are just better are hiding their fees as editing fees or publishing fees. But all are pay to publish. Cureus is the prime example. New online journal that says they are not pay-to-publish but charge you an editing fee even if no editing is actually done. Crooks.

Glaucomflecken has some good ones on this topic:





 
The academic industrial complex. Money is literally the god of all things including academia and religion. As they say, “No margin, no mission.”


It’s pretty bad - I’ve wanted to submit to reputable journals, many of whom require an article processing fee in that 3K range. I don’t have any grants or anything and the universities I’ve worked for don’t give funds for this.

In fact, many universities barely support anesthesiology research at all - they don’t give you paid time to give a research talk or go to meetings or give any academic funds. So doing research in one’s free time and paying 3K of your own money to publish, then going to give a talk on your own dime on what could otherwise be vacation time is in sum a fool’s errand. The state of academic medicine these days is woefully pathetic.
 
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Regarding the article, this line made me chuckle. What knuckleheads....

"In line with our policy of setting our article publishing charges competitively below the market average relative to quality"

And I imagined this conversation -

"But Mr Boss, no one charges as much as you...so I don't get this statement."

Mr Boss "Well, I said RELATIVE to quality. It is true we charge more than anyone. But our quality far outpaces any competitor - thus making our fees extremely cheep."
 
Okay, wow...

So researching this topic further - I came across this great episode of a podcast. It's worth a listen.


It pointed to a website I have never heard of - nor tried. But it seems interesting.

 
This and the board certification fees - are strong reasons I have actively discouraged my kids from pursuing careers in medicine.
A quick look on the ABA website says your yearly fee is $210. Ours in FM is $200/year.

Don't go into academic medicine and you avoid the predatory journal aspect of it.

$210/year shouldn't dissuade someone from going into a field that should be breaking 400k/year for most of y'all.

Its like not going into medicine because the DEA charges over $700 every 3 years (so more per year that the ABA).
 
A quick look on the ABA website says your yearly fee is $210. Ours in FM is $200/year.

Don't go into academic medicine and you avoid the predatory journal aspect of it.

$210/year shouldn't dissuade someone from going into a field that should be breaking 400k/year for most of y'all.

Its like not going into medicine because the DEA charges over $700 every 3 years (so more per year that the ABA).

I'm paying over 400/year and what am I paying for exactly?
 
A quick look on the ABA website says your yearly fee is $210. Ours in FM is $200/year.

Don't go into academic medicine and you avoid the predatory journal aspect of it.

$210/year shouldn't dissuade someone from going into a field that should be breaking 400k/year for most of y'all.

Its like not going into medicine because the DEA charges over $700 every 3 years (so more per year that the ABA).
It's not the cost.

Have you read much about NBPAS?

 
Okay, wow...

So researching this topic further - I came across this great episode of a podcast. It's worth a listen.


It pointed to a website I have never heard of - nor tried. But it seems interesting.


A lot of Hammer & Sickles and pictures of Lenin on that website. You sure you’re not going to spontaneously combust from posting that commie site on here? 😉

At bare minimum everyone should have free access to published research that received even a single dollar of taxpayer money.
 
“The core of Elsevier’s operation is in scientific journals, the weekly or monthly publications in which scientists share their results. Despite the narrow audience, scientific publishing is a remarkably big business. With total global revenues of more than £19bn, it weighs in somewhere between the recording and the film industries in size, but it is far more profitable. In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year.

“But Elsevier’s business model seemed a truly puzzling thing. In order to make money, a traditional publisher – say, a magazine – first has to cover a multitude of costs: it pays writers for the articles; it employs editors to commission, shape and check the articles; and it pays to distribute the finished product to subscribers and retailers. All of this is expensive, and successful magazines typically make profits of around 12-15%.


The way to make money from a scientific article looks very similar, except that scientific publishers manage to duck most of the actual costs. Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.

It is as if the New Yorker or the Economist demanded that journalists write and edit each other’s work for free, and asked the government to foot the bill. Outside observers tend to fall into a sort of stunned disbelief when describing this setup. A 2004 parliamentary science and technology committee report on the industry drily observed that “in a traditional market suppliers are paid for the goods they provide”. A 2005 Deutsche Bank report referred to it as a “bizarre” “triple-pay” system, in which “the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product”.


 
A lot of Hammer & Sickles and pictures of Lenin on that website. You sure you’re not going to spontaneously combust from posting that commie site on here? 😉

At bare minimum everyone should have free access to published research that received even a single dollar of taxpayer money
Haha -

It is made by a computer scientist who lives in Kazakhstan - and probably the website IS hosted in Russia.

I tried it on some articles published before 2020 (stuff about using principle component regression or partial least squares to predict the stock market) - and they all were available....pretty cool.

There is a court case in India pending, so she is unable to add any more citations to the website.

Also interestingly...something I found out in that podcast episode...is that Biden passed a law that any government funded research has to be made available for free (starting in 2026).
 
I'm paying over 400/year and what am I paying for exactly?
The value (or lack thereof) is a whole different topic. The point I was responding to was about telling your kids that medicine isn't worth it because of the cost of keeping BC.

Even $400/year isn't to my FP mind enough to say it's not worth it and y'all make a fair bit more money than I do.
 
It's not the cost.

Have you read much about NBPAS?

Quite a bit actually. I had a DPC practice for several years and was very anti-authority during that time. Starting the NBPAS made sense given how stupid the ABIM was being at the time with their MOC.

That being said, I've always thought it was kind of a joke. "We'll grant you board certification AFTER you've already been certified by an ABMS board. No, we don't offer our own board exams. Why would we when the ABMS boards do a fine job at it?" Its basically an anti-MOC agency and very little else.

Now I'll admit I'm coming from a place of thinking that the ABFM's MOC activities are actually pretty darn good. Its rare that I don't learn something doing them. I especially like that we now have the option to not do the big exam every 10 years and instead do quarterly open-book questions. I believe the ABA started that trend which I do appreciate.

We had an older doctor recently who let his board certification lapse. He took the ABFM test 3 times and couldn't pass it. That tells me that maybe he shouldn't be practicing at this point.
 
Also interestingly...something I found out in that podcast episode...is that Biden passed a law that any government funded research has to be made available for free (starting in 2026).

The best part of that is that the journals have changed their business model to accommodate this policy (AFAIK several European countries also started requiring govt funded research to be open access within the last couple years).

Nature charges >$10k if you want your article to be published open access like the rules require. So they'll still get theirs because they know they can get away with it.

 
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