What I am missing in both tables is an overview of what journals are actually offering for these costs. For example, PLoS One* has no copyediting process, and also seems to skip the final proofreading step common at most other journals (galleys are not sent to the author for final approval).
As a result, some authors decry the quality of their published work. For example, John Logsdon [WebCite] writes
There was no opportunity given for making corrections to proofs. I have already identified an issue with one of the tables that would have been corrected in proof had there been an opportunity.On the same page, Banoo Malik offers an insightful comment:
I contacted the production staff and they mistakenly gave it the citation year of "2007" not 2008. Thus, my first primary-authored paper will likely NEVER appear in anyone's eTOCs,
(...)
Obviously you get what you pay for. Cheap production costs yielded some production oversights. I can appreciate how many hours and effort a copy editor and production staff spend on these seemingly small details now since I followed up on a few points myself. [WebCite]
On the same page, Andrew Staroscik writes:
I am unhappy with parts of the BMC process. I agree that the pros outweighed the cons but I also had an issue with proofing. The BMC process did not have a copy editing step! There are typos in the published version of our paper that I and the other authors did not catch until it was tool late.
Is having a competent copy editor look over the proofs really a particularly costly step in the process? [WebCite]
The answer to the last question - at least from my perspective as publisher of JMIR - is a clear "yes". JMIR charges a $1500 Article Processing Fee, but spends most of this budget - hundreds of dollars - for every article to clean it up before publication, to standardize the reporting, and to improve language issues. Bringing an article into the final form, including checking all the references, crosslinking them to DOIs, PMIDs, PMCIDs etc. is - even though a semi-automatic process - a very timeconsuming and expensive undertaking.
This is what authors often don't realize when looking at APF comparison tables such as those published above: There are considerable differences between journals on how much time and costs they spend on the actual production process, which justify different article processing fees.
The notion that the "ONLY major cost in running a journal is the time spent by the editorial team and reviewers" [WebCite] is - at least for how I run my journal - not accurate.
In fact, JMIR is spending most of the article processing charges on external contractors - copyeditors, XML typesetters etc. There are several copyediting and proofreading steps in the production process, which not all journals seem to employ. I invite authors to critically assess what they get for the money instead of just looking at the article processing fee. JMIR staff and external contractors spend on average 10-20 hours to bring a manuscript into its final form.
And open access journals not charging any Article Processing Fees are almost guaranteed to skip these steps. Many won't even have XML versions of the articles (i.e. no submission to PubMed Central), because creating them is very expensive.
So I would encourage academic authors considering to submit articles to an open access journal to not only ask how much the article processing fee is, but also what they get for their money.
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Correction notice: Edited 25/11/2008. I am taking back (and have removed) my original remark on "superficial" [WebCite] peer-review. More correct and value-neutral would have been to say that some journals have a leaner ("hassle free) [WebCite] peer-review process than others (for example, editors may decide to accept an article without sending it out to external reviewers).
WebCite this page!
3 comments:
PLoS One has a rather superficial peer-review process
I do not think that is true. The review criteria are here:
http://www.plosone.org/static/reviewerGuidelines.action
and the overall process is described here:
http://www.plosone.org/static/guidelines.action#editorial
If you are referring to the fact that an Ed Board member may choose to review a paper on their own, I don't see how this is different from review at most journals, where -- as I understand it -- the corresponding editor has first and final say and is not obliged to send any ms out for external criticism, or to listen to same if it is sought. For instance: do you know of any journal review policies which *require* every editor to obtain a certain number of external reviews of every ms, thereby *guaranteeing* every author that number of peer reviewers?
I think the PLoS ONE model is not so much different from the norm in this respect, but simply more honest.
Bill, thanks for your comment. Point taken, "superficial" was the wrong word.
The thrust of the blog entry was more to comment on differences in the production / post-acceptance processes between journals, which is often not on the radar screen of submitting authors. I didn't want to comment on whether or not the PLoS One peer-review process is more superficial or even inferior compared with other journals (I think this is for future studies to decide).
All I know from my experience is that reviewers and editors are inherently imperfect.
In my mind, peer-reviews are more intended to improve the paper and my experience is that the more peer-reviewers are sought the greater the chance that the author (and the editor) walks away with some useful points that truly strengthen and improve the manuscript.
In my life as editor I never skip the process of sending out a paper for peer-review even though I am seeing many papers where I am certain it will eventually be accepted, including in areas where I am an "expert".
The official JMIR peer-review policy is to send out each paper to 4 reviewers (2 of them author-suggested). For submission/section/associate editors it is recommended to have at least 2 reviews on file before making a decision, and 1 external review is mandatory for acceptance.
Gunther, thanks for articulating some of the different issues in terms of value for money. I think we're on our way toward more sophisticated view of journal value and quality than the old simplistic metrics of name recognition and prestige, and I think that's a good thing.
Maybe someday, there will be a SHERPA/RoMEO type database of journals with a broad set of criteria, such as IF/Eigenfactor, APC, reuse rights, time from submission to publication, rejection rate, PubMed deposit, etc., perhaps along with general information such as commercial or non-profit, age of publication, etc.
Anyway, the only point I take issue with is the comment that "journals not charging any Article Processing Fees are almost guaranteed to skip these steps [copyediting, PMC deposit, etc.]". I don't think we should confuse revenue with expenditures, i.e. I don't feel comfortable assuming that, because a journal doesn't derive its revenue from a particular source, it doesn't expend resources on copyediting, etc. There may well be "big budget" journals with revenue from sources other than APC fees, e.g. print subscriptions or sizable endowment/grant/sponsorship. In other words, I don't think "no APC" necessarily means "no/low budget".
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