Fernando.

If you know of any that don’t, I’d love to know details. There really is not the slightest hint of a rational reason why they should not.

Oh well, here we go.

On copy-editing: The Scholarly Kitchen article that I linked in support of my statement that “Copy editing is rare” says “Some publishers have given up on copy editing entirely. Others apply a light touch to the title and abstract but go no further. Editors are keen to push authors into the hands of a rapidly growing external academic writing and editing industry rather than absorbing the costs of copy editing themselves.”

On “added value”: No-one in this discussion has ever disputed that publishers add some value. The issue is that this value is a tiny, tiny proportion of the total value of a research paper, and that publishers’ traditional reward for their contribition — assuming total ownership and restricting distribution — is both absurdly disproportionate and grotesquely anachronistic in a world where information has no intrinsic barriers but those we impose on it.

At the start of the present round of discussion, publishers were consistently claiming that they provide peer-review — a claim that every functioning researcher knows is false since we do the peer-review ourselves as unpaid volunteers. Having been called on this egregious falsehood, the publishers’ claim retreated to “we co-ordinate peer-review” — but we know that is largely false, too, since the great majority of journals are in fact edited by (you guessed it) unpaid volunteer academics. Now the claim has, rightly, retreated to “supporting and training editors”. That is probably about right (though I would lay money that most current editors would say they learned far more about the process from their fellow editors than from their publishers). It’s pretty shameful that to get publishers to this point we have had to repeatedly counter a sequence of unsubstantiated land-grab claims.

On how researchers are evaluated: Yes, I mention the stupid way researchers are evaluated today. It is bizarre to me that you would claim I “offer no alternative hypothesis” when the whole last paragraph of my article does precisely that, praising an organisation that is evaluating researchers on the basis of their actual, you know, research. Did you even read to the end?

On big, dying animals: You surely know perfectly well that the increase in volume of barrier-based publishing reflects only the overall growth of research in the publish-or-perish environment. Open-access publishing is growing much faster than barrier-based, accounting for an increasing proportion of the overall market. The writing is on the wall for barrier-based. Even the people that Elsevier paid to propose the RWA can see that.

On PLoS’s profit margin: As their 2010 Progress Update (the most recent one published) clearly states, “PLoS reached a truly significant milestone in 2010 when, seven years after entering the publishing business, our annual operating revenues exceeded expenses for the first time”. The report goes onto give numbers: operating revenues were $13M and operating expenses were $12.2M, for an operating profit of 6.5% — less than one third of the 22% that you claim. It is utterly misleading to consider a 6.5% profit in the seventh year of operation comparable to Elsevier’s history of nine straight years of profits in the 30-35% band (and probably many more years before that — nine was as far back as I could be bothered to go. All numbers are straight from Elsevier’s own annual reports, by the way.)

But all of this ignores the much more important point that, as a non-profit, PLoS does not and cannot siphon any operating profit off to shareholders, but must and will invest it in furthering its goal to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication. Works for me! But then, I’m baised. I’m in favour of progress in science and medicine.

On parasitic publishers: Yes, there are plenty of academic publishers that are run by the universities and scholarly societies; and many of these are non-profits. But your claim that “Calling publishers “parasitic” is inaccurate and inflammatory” is itself inaccurate and inflammatory. As you can plainly see by scrolling up to the actual article, what I said was “Only then will researchers will be free of the need (real or apparent) to prop up parasitic publishers by sending their best work to big-name, barrier-based journals”. What makes you think that “big-name barrier-based journals” refers to these university and scholarly society publishers?

The reality that we both know is that academic publishing is hugely dominated by the Big Four for-profit publishers — which are indeed parasitic, and I use that word in a strictly descriptive sense. It is a fact that they leech money out of research and into shareholder pockets. I’m not going to prop that behaviour up with my own work, and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t exploitative for the sake of sparing people’s feelings.

In the immortal words of Tom Holtz, “Sorry if that makes some people feel bad, but I’m not in the ‘make people feel good business’; I’m a scientist.”

Publishers “add value” all along the way — by supporting and training editors (yes, who do you think trains scientists to be editors familiar with COPE standards, COI standards, editorial processes, and so forth?), by providing marketing, sales, and infrastructure support, by maintaining archives for decades turning into centuries now, by registering and monitoring copyright to preserve the integrity of the scientific record, by administering peer-review (which doesn’t just magically happen), by bearing the price of rejection inherent in any selective publication, by shouldering the risk in starting new titles to bring identity and order to emerging fields, and so forth.

You also mention the “stupid” way researchers are evaluated today, yet offer no alternative hypothesis. Do you really think that tracking the uptake of their ideas through subsequent citations, quantifying this in a uniform manner, adding measures of the reputations of the outlets that have accepted their works for publication, and so forth, is “stupid”? It can be improved, and I think it can be, but it is far from stupid. And, again, you offer no alternative thinking, just a casual condemnation that sounds like it came from a teenager. Researcher evaluation is just imperfect, and it would be nice to have actual proposals for improving it rather than dismissive comments.

As for the “big, dying animal” image you’re trying to foster, dozens of traditional journals launch each year, submission rates are going up nearly everywhere, open access journals are now part of mainstream publishing companies (including Elsevier), library budgets continue to grow (albeit slowly), editors and authors and peer-reviewers still compete to be part of important journals, and so forth. So, first, publishing companies are not animals — they don’t have predictable lifespans and inherent mortality. In fact, many have been around for 100+ years, and show no signs of fading soon. Second, and to that point, they are not dying. If anything, they are growing faster now in key ways than ever.

As for PLoS, it now generates a profit margin of 22%, and its profit margin is likely to soon exceed the margins of larger for-profit publishers who are currently being condemned for their pricing practices. PLoS is a not-for-profit, so is not accountable to shareholders or others, doesn’t have to share its profits with outside entities (Elsevier and other large for-profit publishers share their profits with hundreds of scientific societies which contract with them for services), and has no clear scientific mission, only a publishing mission. If we are worried about predatory financial practices leading to outsized profits, we should worry about that occurring in any model being used currently to fund publishers (and PLoS doesn’t get a free pass because it was started by researchers — most publishers were started by scientists, as were most journals).

Most publishers are academic (Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, University of Chicago Press, Rockefeller University Press) or based in scientific societies. Most journal publishers are not-for-profits. Calling publishers “parasitic” is inaccurate and inflammatory. Publishers provide an important role in the scholarly world as more objective third-parties, protecting the record, improving the record, sorting the record, archiving the record, and defining and defending standards (data integrity, conflict of interest, disclosure, and author attribution) that too often are broken by scientists themselves. If researchers were to have to bear the burdens publishers currently take on for them, the productivity of the scientific enterprise would slow significantly. This is a major value publishers provide, and one that is often overlooked. We help create an orderly conclusion to a research project, and alleviate ongoing concerns researchers may have about whether their articles are being misused, are still available, are being cited correctly, etc. And I think we can all agree that more and better scientific research is our mutual goal.