Things are slowly changing but I can't wait for this parasitic business model to collapse for good.
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.
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?
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"
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
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.
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).
[*] 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!
Seems like, in 2026, we can have direct publishing without the need of these services? Is it the infra, like query tools and such, that prevent a migration away?
edit: I'm not going to reply to every comment, but thank you all, helps paint the picture a bit better for me!
If you don't care about how science street cred works, nothing stops you from just throwing your papers up on arxiv. But then you get no publishing rep. And no visibility either. A big name journal in a given field gets eyes on your paper by default - but in the pits of arxiv, if you don't put your work out there yourself in the circles, no one will see it.
Then you had promising projects like Plos, but they sold themselves. They turned into a joke: open access and good IF, but high fees for the author, thus becoming a quick way to get a sub-par paper published "for the points" if your lab can pay the fee. Pay to win, using a gaming term. If you know you have a good paper, you publish on any other (closed) journal with similar IF but cheaper.
PLOS One does publish pretty much anything, but that was always meant to be the point: "here's some data, make of it what you will. "
The authors who put them up there didn't even plan on publishing in a journal. They just throw their work out there - no peer review, no nothing. Post the link on Twitter and maybe someone in the field will see it and find it useful.
This is especially true in fast-moving and highly applied fields like ML - the fields that are less "big science gang" and more "high intensity corporate R&D warzone".
Hosting pdfs + paying out reviewers could be covered by donations.
Reviewers are not usually paid.
There are a lot of researchers writing papers. In many fields it isn't possible to read them all, so you need someone to make a selection of what is useful. Get into Nature any "everyone" will read your paper because it is important. However if you fail that you only get into a small niche publication - the only people who will read your paper are people who search it out - likely because they are in that tiny niche (and have personally met you to discuss this niche at a conference). There are even lower grades up publications which nobody reads, but in theory someone could find it in a search.
What physics papers should a chemist read? If you are a physicist you should be reading more papers, but there are still too many to read them all so you need a selection, but that selection should bias to others working on similar problems to you. The same applies for every other field: you can't know everything so you need someone to apply a selection to tell you what is important for you to know.
It's easy for anyone to publish papers online, but it's very difficult for a journal to build credibility and reputation. If you publish in some random journal no one has ever heard of, everyone will assume your paper couldn't get through peer review at a "real" journal.
That's why the established journals exist.
How much longer are scientists going to continue respecting and embracing the useless parasites that are journal publishers, with their right-out-in-the-open, obvious, intentional grifting. You don't need these jackasses.
What you rely on them for technically, the dissemination of papers, could be done with an $80/mo Kubernetes cluster and like three part-time volunteers.
Now in terms of what they provide for the peer-reviewing process... It's not like they pay reviewers. And most of that money is definitely not going to editors. It appears journal brands are only useful as signals of prestige, but with their ethics increasingly circling the drain, I'm not even sure that trust is well-placed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3#Plagiari...