eLife Latest: The costs of publishing
Jennifer Gibson, Damian Pattinson,
eLife,
Mar 26, 2020
The objective of this article is "to promote awareness among authors of the basis for the fees they and their institutions are asked to pay for open-access publishing." Also, "initiatives such as Plan S are pressing for transparency around prices for open-access publishing," so they're forced to do it. So openness about publishing costs is a good idea. But when this is done without an actual spreadsheet, I get suspicious. In fact, we learn remarkably little by reading this article; mostly, that they've saved money by lowering payments to editors. We learn nothing about actual expenses - what are the details of the 'staff costs', for example? What are the 'technology costs' that they are paying? Transparency should mean transparency, not a mish-mash of vaguely defined categories and uninformative bar charts.
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