Re: Survey on publishers for ISWC [responses welcome]

Hi Pascal,

Interesting questions! As some personal answers to these (I hope not to 
skew responses to the survey, so maybe folks should answer before 
reading on if they have not already ...)

 https://forms.gle/E5oEfYR7H5Nx9MpK9

Regarding service vs. cost, for me I think this can be answered in large 
part (but not entirely) by comparing the quality of pre-prints delivered 
by authors and the final typeset version published by the publisher. It 
is often the case, in many areas of Computer Science, that the pre-print 
version is just as good, or in the case of some publishers (that do not 
typeset in LaTeX) even better than the official published version. 
Beyond that, all of the labour intensive tasks are undertaken by 
academics that volunteer their time. If a journal requires marketing, 
that can have overhead, but it is not clear to me personally if such 
marketing is effective. (For books, I think the matter is very 
different: marketing is very important.) Other than that, there are of 
course hosting costs, but running a web server is not expensive [1,2], 
and initial costs for platforms can be covered by adopting open source 
platforms and some in-kind contributions (economies of scale apply too). 
There are some additional minor costs like providing DOIs, but these are 
not particularly high [3].

In terms of the costs of low-fee/free OA being hidden, or covered by 
institutions, or governments, or in-kind contributions, this is true to 
some extent. I cannot provide exact figures on how much the costs for 
publishing with Dagstuhl are borne by the German taxpayer, for example, 
but I imagine (speculating here) that in terms of the overall taxpayer 
investment in research, such initiatives provide excellent value versus, 
for example, funding APCs to meet OA mandates. For example, in the case 
of arXiv, the total costs come out to around $1 per paper hosted per 
year (including the publication of new papers, which is the most costly 
aspect) [2]. Again, the services arXiv provides are not the same as what 
some publishers provide, and arXiv benefits from many economies of 
scale, but there is, as you say, the question of what additional 
services (purely in terms of publishing) are necessary, aside from a 
volunteer-run peer-review process.

But it is important to highlight again that the taxpayer burden is far 
from exclusive to low-cost publishers. Taxpayers have been inflating the 
profits and margins of commercial academic publishers for decades. For 
example, in 2005, Deutsche Bank [4] released a report that was highly 
critical of the business practices of Elsevier. Quoting from the 
translation (I did not find the original report):
 
 "[M]argins in the journals business [are] ‘extremely high’. One could 
argue that they are unjustifiably high - bluntly, we believe that the 
professional publishers add little value to the research process.  We 
suggest that readers consider the margins (just momentarily) as 
taxpayers rather than investors. How happy are you, as taxpayers, that 
your governments are enabling private sector operators, with very little 
invested capital, to earn 40% operating margins?"

The fees charged by Elsevier have only increased since then.

I very much agree with your point for the need for competition, but this 
is not so straightforward from an economics/free-market perspective, 
principally because you cannot replace one publisher's product with 
another. You cannot switch your subscription from Elsevier to Springer 
to save costs because they have different catalogues; rather you need 
access to both to not miss out on literature. So each publisher has a 
local monopoly on their content. (Under Gold OA the picture looks a bit 
different.) And in the spirit of competition, it would seem beneficial 
to have low cost alternatives in this "marketplace"; if the services 
these low-cost alternatives provide on a small budget are not up to 
scratch, then researchers can choose to pay more APCs and publish elsewhere.

I agree in terms of the dazzlingly high fees charged by professional, 
non-profit organisations for publishing. And agreed regarding the high 
costs of conferences. These factors, as Sarven mentions, hinder 
inclusivity, pricing certain people (to a certain extent unnecessarily, 
in my opinion) out of participating.

Similar debates on cost vs. service -- and how free OA still has hidden 
costs -- have been had in the Machine Learning community [1], where JMLR 
(a free OA alternative) has had a lot of success.

It's an important discussion. I don't know all the answers to your 
questions, but wanted to share my perspective. A much longer write-up is 
available at [5] for those with immense patience.

Best!
Aidan

[1] 
https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-journal/
[2] https://info.arxiv.org/about/reports-financials.html
[3] https://datacite.org/fee-model/
[4] https://notes.knowledgefutures.org/pub/supertanker/release/3
[5] 
https://aidanhogan.com/blog/index.php/2022/10/27/publishing-research-semantic-web/


On 2024-01-16 14:17, Pascal Hitzler wrote:
> I probably shouldn't ... but I'll reply anyway.
> 
> 
> What publishers do is a service. That service comes with a cost. That's 
> the case also for ceur-ws or Dagstuhl.
> 
> The cost (for the provider/publisher) is dependent on the service 
> provided (quality and scope). Little service (e.g. just putting it on a 
> webserver for the public) comes with less cost, of course.
> 
> Somebody has to pay for the cost. I don't know who that is e.g. for 
> ceur-ws or Dagstuhl, though I'd guess that it includes German taxpayers?
> 
> So you can ask a few questions then.
> 
> * How much service do you need?
> 
> * What is a good service/cost trade-off? Branding (reputation of the 
> provider) in fact comes into this as well.
> 
> * Is (for a particular provider), the cost reasonable wrt. the service 
> provided?
> 
> * Is a commmercial or a non-profit or a public provider the best solution?
> 
> I don't think that any of these questions have obvious answers. For me, 
> it is interesting to see that there are providers that have arisen out 
> of professional academic associations, that feel to me like more of a 
> rip-off than some commercial publishers.
> 
> 
> For me, one of the key issues in today's landscape is that some 
> commercial providers charge a multiple of the cost for their services. 
> They rely on momentum (like, it's easier to work through familiar 
> channels; very high reputation of outlet/journal), or on mechanisms like 
> lower per-proceedings cost if there's a high number of proceedings in a 
> series, but then not passing on these cost savings. For the commercial 
> model to do really well, competition needs to increase.
> 
> This said, compared to publication costs in journals or conference 
> proceedings, a much higher cost factor are in-person conferences, 
> including participation fees, travel costs, accommodations. Not to 
> mention the "working time lost" by people in transit. Compared to that 
> (in computer science) publication costs are not that big of a deal at 
> the moment. So if there's an argument made to decrease cost, I'd say 
> that low-cost hybrid conference options are a way to go.
> 
> Pascal.
> 
> On 1/16/2024 10:49 AM, Sarven Capadisli wrote:
>> !-------------------------------------------------------------------|
>>   This Message Is From an Untrusted Sender
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>>
>> On 2024-01-16 17:13, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
>>> It would have been useful to make the survey better for those of us 
>>> who do not have research funds.
>>
>>
>> Perhaps. I'd think of it as an inherit issue with how the whole this 
>> particular Semantic Web/Web Science research space has been operating. 
>> The survey just reflects that.
>>
>> Conferences like ISWC/ESWC, .. journals like SWJ .. all essentially 
>> operate with the understanding and need that's highlighted in the 
>> survey, i.e., the certification and rating system:
>>
>>  >The choice of publisher should not directly affect ISWC's CORE rating.
>>
>> Let's see what happens when we remove that variable. Decoupling 
>> certification from registration.
>>
>> The existing system lacks fairness and inclusivity, especially when 
>> scholarly communication has been relying on third-party (for-profit) 
>> services, all meanwhile the read-write Web has been available for 
>> decades at the fraction of costs.
>>
>> With respect to this survey, transitioning to the use of Dagstuhl for 
>> publishing represents a good / significant step. Or actually 
>> *investing* in ceur-ws.org (you still can!)... or alike.
>>
>> Any numbers on how much (taxpayer) money and rights that got stolen by 
>> using the for-profit publishers to date?
>>
>> It is the age old issue of for unknown wild excuses Web researchers 
>> not having the incentive or motivation to ... publish and communicate 
>> their findings on some sort of a global information superhighway for 
>> all to access.
>>
>> Recycling an obligatory quote by *the* Web developer:
>>
>>> From: timbl@info .cern.ch (Tim Berners-Lee)
>>> Newsgroups: alt.hypertext
>>> Subject: WorldWideWeb: Summary
>>> Date: 6 Aug 91 16:00:12 GMT
>>>
>>> The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and 
>>> hypertext to
>>> make an easy but powerful global information system.
>>>
>>> The project started with the philosophy that much academic 
>>> information should
>>> be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing 
>>> within
>>> internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by
>>> support groups.
>>
>>
>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/1991/08/art-6487.txt__;!!On18fmf1aQ!1T4f-kRl8XnK2nHBsg_VHN6j41t_KFLC8dTZzeEBC9wTqn_UMbEdkA-bqMSUKQuA0mJ_Fji2NEldmUhK2s7P4w$
>>
>> Aidan, thanks for sharing the survey and the underlying considerations.
>>
>> -Sarven
>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://csarven.ca/*i__;Iw!!On18fmf1aQ!1T4f-kRl8XnK2nHBsg_VHN6j41t_KFLC8dTZzeEBC9wTqn_UMbEdkA-bqMSUKQuA0mJ_Fji2NEldmUhigY7xAg$
>

Received on Wednesday, 17 January 2024 04:58:38 UTC