Scientific Publishing 101
by Daniel Brouse and Sidd Mukherjee
Publishing scientific papers, articles, and essays is far more backward than most people realize. In many fields, authors are not paid to publish; they may actually have to pay publication or open-access fees. Scientific publishing operates very differently from the music business. A young musician may dream of getting paid to record an album and become a rock star. A young scientist, however, needs to understand the very different economic reality of academic publishing.
One example is Open Access publishing in Nature. The current Gold Open Access Article Processing Charge for an accepted primary research article is £9,390, US$12,850, or €10,850. That fee is charged only after acceptance if the authors choose to make the article freely available through the Gold Open Access model.
The larger point is that the academic publishing ecosystem contains substantial financial and institutional differences in publication, access, indexing, and visibility. Nature itself says Open Access makes research more widely available and highly discoverable.
For us, publishing 10 papers a day through that model would mean $128,500 a day in Open Access fees. That’s about $47 million a year.
This is one reason Sidd and I started the Philadelphia Spirit Experiment Publishing Company in the 1990s. We agreed we didn’t want to go that route for many reasons. We thought it would be better to do it ourselves and offer the publishing service to others working in the humanities and related fields—arts, music, science, and teaching—for free.
We also agreed that we wouldn’t apply for patents. We wanted our research, inventions, and music to remain in the public domain and be available for everyone to use.
That philosophy is still very much alive in what we’re doing today: learn, create, experiment, publish, and share. Feel free to join in and sing along.