When I worked at an academic publisher I was surprised by this, often it's researchers at small or private institutions that don't have a library or one that pays lots of subs.
Also - used to be you'd set this to have a price context for reprints (printed version of the article with more logos) which were a much bigger & more profitable revenue source. Pharma companies would buy '00s to distribute at conferences.
Really hope this becomes part of the mainstream scholarly communications infrastructure - it's slick enough to get people to actually use which is probably half the battle.
Yeah, that was my first thought too. It's a shock because people are used to uploading their papers in final published form but I don't think it's a crazy thing for Elsevier to do.
We should take the opportunity to tell authors to upload author copies into their institutional repositories. That's do far more for open access than complaining about how evil Elsevier is.
Hmmm, this is pretty different to my experience (as both employee and employer), perhaps it depends on the skillset and exact location.
I have a (non-finance related) start-up in central London and it's pretty difficult to find skilled developers with 4-5 years experience who are asking for less than £50k p/a.
Don't get me wrong - I don't think that the existing system works particularly well or is value for money, I just wanted to point out that there's much more going on than hosting a crappy website. ;)
> only familiar with math publishing
Fair enough. I'm only really familiar with the life sciences.
> Automated typesetting is a solved problem
This isn't as simple outside of CS/EE/maths unfortunately. Most academic researchers couldn't tell you what LaTeX is.
> As for your cost of $99/article, the Arxiv costs $400k/year
arXiv is awesome but it's a preprint repository not a journal (whether or not a repo + engaged community is as 'good' as a peer reviewed journal is probably a whole other thread... physicists still usually publish in journals, even though they use arXiv constantly and put their manuscripts up there first)
I picked $99 because it's the number PeerJ (also awesome) is suggesting. In reality life science journals will charge you $1k+...
> are you really going to claim this darknet is more reliable than mirroring articles
I don't make that claim, academic librarians and publishers do.
(if you prefer you can swap out this cost and replace it with the cost of hiring somebody to do ops for you on an occasional, freelance basis to handle things going wrong, moving to new cloud providers etc. over a 25 year period...).
> Similarly, paying membership fees to the other big publishers to keep little guys out of the market
I don't think I explained this the right way. The fees are to help maintain common services that all publishers then use - for example, to ensure that given an identifier you can always find the full text of a paper (URLs being unstable over even relatively short timeframes), to mint and store metadata about those identifiers to make sure the right people get credit when cited etc. Those services are unquestionably valuable and get used by millions of scientists every day.
> If it weren't for reputation effects and agency costs (i.e., if the market were competitive), this process would cost well under $99/article
I disagree but believe that you should be right. People like PeerJ, eLife, arXiv and others need to keep exploring alternative ways of doing things until we hit on a sustainable model.
I'm not a publisher but have worked at publishers in the past.
> All the journal does is provide a crappy web app
> to organize the process.
I'm guessing you're being facetious ;) but that's not true. It depends on the publisher but they may also edit the manuscript; find the right reviewers; have a full time editor make a decision based on the reviewer's feedback; typeset or convert it to machine readable format (authors submit in Word, but this'll often be converted to an industry standard XML format to allow interoperability between different databases - both abstract databases and publisher ones as journals change publishers frequently); ensure the content is properly stored (this is not the same as putting it up on S3 for 2 cents a month. It's the scholarly record and publishers generally take the responsibility of maintaining it seriously. Publishers pay a fee to put content into a darknet run by a consortia of libraries - if the publisher goes out of business the consortia makes all the content available for free. They also pay membership fees to industry organizations like CrossRef that allow them to deposit canonical metadata in a central database and mint DOIs) and discoverable (at the end of the day your paper will get much more attention when published in Science than it does your blog).
Are all of those things worth paying more than $99 an article for? It's debatable.
But can anybody with a Wordpress blog do what publishers can? No.
(Same sort of thing applies to trade. Look at self-published books. You can create great content for free and stick it in an EPUB but you'll rapidly find that you need to start shelling out to be included in the book databases bricks and mortar stores use, to have a cover designed, to get an ISBN, to start actually selling through Amazon or wherever... publishing isn't as trivial as it seems.)
I think you've gotten the wrong end of the stick with Mendeley. It's a reference manager with social features, some of which could be used (with work on the part of the user) for discovery / post-publication review.
PubUp, in contrast, looks like it is designed specifically for those two things.
Presumably to use PubUp I don't need to store my PDFs in Mendeley, to have signed up to their web component, to have found a group of people whose opinions I trust, yadda yadda.
On a tangent Mendeley also certainly hasn't sewn up the market: the majority of researchers still use one of a couple of older, more established desktop apps for their reference management. That's certainly not to say that it's not a good product, it is, or that they won't become an incumbent eventually, I reckon they probably will. It's just that scientists are a notoriously hard bunch of people to reach.
TL;DR it hasn't, Danny Sullivan is a bit confused.
They're shutting down the (cool but forgotten & neglected) Social Graph API that Brad Fitzpatrick created when he moved over to Google. It has the word "social" in its name, I guess.
That said it wouldn't be completely unexpected if they dropped OpenSocial from my.google.com. What do the Google+ games use?
I used to manage mobile products for a large STM publisher. This app is nice - well done getting it off the ground! FWIW I'd stay focused on the core concept (scanning many papers quickly), this is genuinely useful. Nail that first before moving on to other features. I wouldn't worry too much about recommendations: they're very hard to get right in this context, you'd be doing very well if more than one in twenty recommended papers were something useful that the user hasn't already seen.