• @[email protected]
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      211 year ago

      The challenge is the peer review system - not saying it can’t be done, but facilitating quality reviews is often costly.

      There has, however, been a push to publish articles as “open access” which costs more for the author but makes it publicly available free of charge to read.

      Overall the system is still a pretty big scam, but would be difficult to make 100% free.

      • @[email protected]
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        41 year ago

        The challenge is the peer review system - not saying it can’t be done, but facilitating quality reviews is often costly.

        What’s the cost? People aren’t paid for peer reviews, right? So, is it just difficult to arrange peer reviews?

            • @[email protected]
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              31 year ago

              It requires full time technical staff.

              The way I see it, this “free” journal is gonna have some overhead, from servers to maintainers, coordinators, and potentially even designers to help get consistency.

              Some people may be able to support with their free time, but ultimately if those people/systems are going to be paid, the platform will need a revenue stream, and like magic we’re back to square one, albeit with hopefully significantly lower profit margins.

              • @[email protected]
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                11 year ago

                It requires full time technical staff.

                A few, but doing what? It’s not like they need hundreds of people.

                • @[email protected]
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                  21 year ago

                  For any one journal, very few, maybe even fractions of a headcount per journal, but for the thousands of journals out there spanning dozens of disciplines and hundreds of specialties, it adds up. If you want to make the end-all-be-all magic journal of all-topicness and maintain a respectable level of quality, you’re going to need quite a few SMEs policing the submissions.

                  There’s millions of scientific papers published annually - you need people to process all of that information and moderate peer reviews.

                  • @[email protected]
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                    11 year ago

                    but for the thousands of journals out there

                    Ok, but we’re talking about thousands of dollars in fees for a single journal. There’s no reason that a single journal should have costs anywhere near thousands of dollars for a single article.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        but facilitating quality reviews is often costly.

        States/academic institutions have to make it part of the job description of people. Get designated an editor of a journal? Your Uni understands and hands you an additional TA to lighten the load elsewhere and/or deal with the paperwork aspects.

        The reviewing itself is already done pro bono anyways.