Somebody has to pay for the scientific editors, copy editing, typesetting, and infrastructure. Of course the open access publishing fees of Nature & co. are completely outrageous, but even non-profit publishers have to charge something.
I don't know for this specific publisher, but in research, usually:
- scientific editors… are researchers paid by a university
- copy editing… is done by the authors
- typesetting… is done by the authors
- reviews… are done by the other researchers paid by their respective university
Okay, the infrastructure remains. The needs are: a simple website serving PDF files and pages with the metadata. You can even let something like HAL, Arxiv or Sci-Hub do that.
This does not match my experience in science publishing. Scientific journals usually have at least a few paid full-time and part-time editors. They also do their own copy editing and typesetting of the manuscripts. The differences between the arXiv versions and the published versions are usually quite noticeable.
> What's more, universities already have this kind of infrastructure.
Ha!
While "technically" true, many (most?) university's (at least in Australia) have IT infrastructure that was last run competently sometime around when dinosaurs roamed.
Saying that from having worked at some (as a contractor), and having non-IT friends at others... whom are constantly frustrated about this stuff. :/
One of the journals in my field is going through this at the moment. They were set up with an initial grant to cover editorial and typesetting, which is about to run out. Their two suggestions for carrying on are either to charge a couple of hundred dollars a paper for typesetting (which is apparently what it actually costs) or to require submissions in a standard LaTeX pipeline (which is not standard for my discipline but would enable it to be done automatically). I suppose a strict Word template would also suffice at the expense of annoying all the computational scholars (that's what another Diamond OA journal does in my field).
But somebody's doing the typesetting. Giving sufficiently technically competent authors that could be the authors, but otherwise some money has to be found from somewhere. I don't mind that coming from libraries or research grants if necessary: it's cheaper than Elsevier.
Hmmm. Isn't quite a lot of these publications taking in a PDF, so their cost of much of this is roughly zero? Except for the eyeballing if the header/footer overlaps anything on the page, in which case you request the author reformats their paper to respect the margins?
Most journals completely re-do the layout in some desktop publishing software and only copy over the text and figures. It is a fair bit of work to make everything consistent, for example formulas and references. I have only seen author-submitted PDFs in very low-cost publications, for example some conference proceedings.
Yeah sure it take thousands of dollars to make a PDF. There is a bunch of small organizations and universities that manage to have journal free for reading *and* publishing. There's no reason to pay huge fees for "typesettings" in an area where most of this thing in automated. If the publishing pipeline is too complex it's time to remove bullshit and simplify things. Feeding a latex file into a pipeline or clicking on "save as PDF" in Word shouldn't cost more than a few cents.
