case in point, michael b eisen, who we know as @mbeisen. He's HHMI, UCB prof, of a certain age and publishing stature....basically your science 1%er.
He has no fucking clue about normal people.
still think people mostly use it as excuse; page charges for most nonOA society Js are higher
What is under discussion is the publication fee of some $1,350 required at PLoS ONE.
This came about because I have been idly speculating of late about the Impact Factor of PLoS ONE..it's about 4.4. This compares favorably with many run of the mill journals (tied to a society or otherwise) that publish huge amounts of general neuroscience stuff. Take initial modifier [American, European, Canuckian, International....etc], add "Journal of", insert [Neuroscience, Pharmacology, Toxicology, Drug, Alcohol, Neurophysiology, Behavior, Cognition....blahdeblah] and you'll get the corpus. Some variants such as "Neuroscience" or "Psychopharmacology" or "Neuropharmacology" or .... You get the point. Published by the usual suspects: Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Elsevier.
Most of these come in with IFs under 4.4...or at least as close as make no practical difference.
They also publish a LOT of the papers in the fields that I follow and participate in.
I happen to think this is where the real science exists. If you've ever cited a paper in one of these journals.....yeah.
I also protest, when people are talking about the level of peer review at the Glamour Mags and attempting to sidestep the outsized retraction rate at those journals (hi PP!), that oftentimes the review is harshest at these journals. The reviews are by more directly focused experts and the scope of the paper is lesser. So the review comments can be brutal.
They can also, at times, be pretty demanding. I, myself, have in recent memory been asked for essentially an Aims worth of data be added to an already not-insubstantial manuscript at one of these sub-PONE-IF journals. AYFK? If I added that, I'd be submitting UPWARD you dumbasses!!!
As you know, PLoS ONE promises to accept manuscripts that are SOUND. Not on the basis of all the extra stuff some reviewer "would like to see". Not satisfying the nutty subjective "disappointment" of the reviewer that you didn't do the study he would (in theory) have conducted. Most emphatically not on the prediction of "impact" and "influence". Supposedly, not on the basis of even having a positive finding!
So with a higher IF and this promise....I'm all of a sudden having a hard time figuring out why people aren't just putting all their stuff in PLoS ONE? What is keeping them back?
It appears to me from doing some harder thinking about what is IN this journal that subfields are either in or out. There are some cultural forces going on here which I touched on previously. People want to make assumptions that they are going to get "their" editors and "their" reviewers....not just whatever random fringe OpenAccess Wackaloon who signed on to the PLoS ONE train sort-of/kinda overlaps with their work.
The other huge problem is the cost. $1,350 to be exact. There's a waiver....but it isn't really clear how likely one is to GET that fee waived. They don't make any promises before you submit the paper. And that's where it counts! Why go through the hassle of review just to find out several weeks later that you have to pull it for the $$? Might as well not even try.
Part of the problem here is the 1%ers like mbeisen and @namnezia think "society journal" means: PNAS is $70/page, JNsci is about $950 total.
yeah, SOME journals that technically qualify as "society" journals have page charges or publication fees. But the ones I'm talking about, for the most part, do not. Not. ONE. dime. Not a $75 "submission fee". Not a page charge.
They are FREE from start to finish.
JNeuro and PNAS are not normal, run of the mill society journals. This is not what we are discussing. It strikes me that this frame of reference is why mbeisen can't grasp the problem I'm trying to explore. It makes me fear that PLoS ONE is falling short of what it could be because it was founded by Science 1%ers who are clueless and out of touch.
It's like I'm blogging in the wind here.