<story><title>Journal of Functional Programming moving to open access</title><url>https://www.cambridge.org/core/blog/2021/11/11/journal-of-functional-programming-moving-to-open-access/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>adminprof</author><text>This comes up every time there&amp;#x27;s an article about academic publishing. Yes peer reviewers do the reviewing, but it&amp;#x27;s the long-term infrastructure and coordination that the journal provides.&lt;p&gt;AirBnB&amp;#x27;s content is generated by users, but AirBnB itself requires software development, legal, customer support, HR, program managers, quality control, etc. Same with publishers.&lt;p&gt;Note that this journal now has a publishing fee for authors to cover these costs, rather than a fee for the reader as before. The 2022 fee for each author is $1,705 according to the FAQ. So moving to open access it not about removing the costs (which many people on Hacker News seems to always assume), but changing who pays for it.</text></item><item><author>tux3</author><text>Isn&amp;#x27;t peer review performed by authors, not by journals?</text></item><item><author>threatofrain</author><text>The infrastructure to replace is not the publication part but the peer review and institutional credibility.</text></item><item><author>xupybd</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t understand what value traditional publishers of scientific journals offer?&lt;p&gt;With the current web it&amp;#x27;s so easy to setup the required infrastructure. No way can the cost of articles be justified.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ggrrhh_ta</author><text>The coordination and most of the infrastructure (except for archival) is actually also performed by us peer reviewers... We set up the conference&amp;#x27;s websites, we find the committees, the reviewers, we distribute the work, we do the reviews, we organize the meetings, we create the instructions for formatting, editing, publishing, etc.&lt;p&gt;We require that some institution is there milking us and the institutions so that we can collect stamps to get to the next level, making everybody waste resources and then finding ourselves not being to access our own publications for free! sometimes requiring (for formal applications) extra paper copies at a high cost!</text></comment>
<story><title>Journal of Functional Programming moving to open access</title><url>https://www.cambridge.org/core/blog/2021/11/11/journal-of-functional-programming-moving-to-open-access/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>adminprof</author><text>This comes up every time there&amp;#x27;s an article about academic publishing. Yes peer reviewers do the reviewing, but it&amp;#x27;s the long-term infrastructure and coordination that the journal provides.&lt;p&gt;AirBnB&amp;#x27;s content is generated by users, but AirBnB itself requires software development, legal, customer support, HR, program managers, quality control, etc. Same with publishers.&lt;p&gt;Note that this journal now has a publishing fee for authors to cover these costs, rather than a fee for the reader as before. The 2022 fee for each author is $1,705 according to the FAQ. So moving to open access it not about removing the costs (which many people on Hacker News seems to always assume), but changing who pays for it.</text></item><item><author>tux3</author><text>Isn&amp;#x27;t peer review performed by authors, not by journals?</text></item><item><author>threatofrain</author><text>The infrastructure to replace is not the publication part but the peer review and institutional credibility.</text></item><item><author>xupybd</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t understand what value traditional publishers of scientific journals offer?&lt;p&gt;With the current web it&amp;#x27;s so easy to setup the required infrastructure. No way can the cost of articles be justified.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>discardable_dan</author><text>A few things:&lt;p&gt;- AirBnB serves a significantly-larger infrastructure than a website hosting up PDFs. Github with Jekyll can do it.&lt;p&gt;- Software development is really at a minimum for journals. Hosting can be a static blog, and review infrastructure could literally be replaced with e-mailing PDFs &amp;#x2F; text files back and forth, and often devolves to that anyway.&lt;p&gt;- The editor of the JFP uses their university and external grant budgets to cover most, if not all, of their operating time and expenses.&lt;p&gt;- Legal is likely the largest cost (ensuring the journal has sole publication rights, and contracts to that effect), but open access can also simplify this.&lt;p&gt;- Without customers (e.g., open access), there is no need for customer support. HR and program management is a very small minimum, as well.&lt;p&gt;- Nobody involved in the actual journal work (editing, reviewing, etc.) is paid.&lt;p&gt;The cost of $1075 is, frankly, kind of absurd. What does it cost to host a PDF online forever? Volume 31 of the JFP published ~25 research articles, which would be ~$25k. When Github has the infrastructure to entirely eat the hosting cost, what justifies this much money?</text></comment>