Binghamton University professors urge elimination of payments for publishing research in academic journals

To get their important discoveries out to the world, researchers need to publish their findings in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Just one problem: It can cost thousands of dollars to appear in the high-impact publications that offer the greatest number of eyes on their ideas and thus the biggest chance at success. The requirement puts up barriers for anyone who can’t afford those fees, especially researchers in developing countries or without funding support.

SUNY Empire Innovation Professor Carlos Gershenson at Binghamton University believes there’s a better way — and as president of the Complex Systems Society, he is leading a new movement to change the peer-review system and the way that journals operate.

In a recently published “manifesto,” CSS said “urgent reform is needed to ensure that research evaluation aligns with principles of fairness, sustainability, inclusiveness, transparency, rigor and the broader interests of the scientific community.” The group also pledges to support open-access journals that are free for authors and readers.

“Journals used to make money from library subscriptions and from publishing the research, but more and more journals are digital only. It’s cheaper, and they cannot justify charging the same thing if they don’t make the physical issue,” said Gershenson, a faculty member at the School of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering in the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science.

“So they started charging authors for publishing — that could be $2,000, $3,000 or $7,000 depending on the journal. If you don’t publish in those journals, your research is considered of lower quality just because you don’t have the money to pay for it.”

The publishing fee for research findings is often built into grant funding, but Distinguished Professor Hiroki Sayama — a fellow SSIE faculty member and part of CSS’s executive board — points out that the money could have a better use.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “We do all the work. We put a lot of effort into producing new knowledge. Why do we need to pay as the author? If we can take out that item from the research budget, we can use the money to support our graduate students.”

Reviewers generally receive no compensation for their time either, because they see it as an advancement of humanity’s knowledge base. However, that policy has made finding volunteers more difficult as academic pressures have increased in recent years.

“Sometimes to get one review, you need to send 60 invitations — and the more journals there are, the more papers there are,” Gershenson said. “There’s a higher demand for reviewers, but since reviewers are not paid, it becomes more and more challenging. The model is not sustainable.”

One inspiration for the CSS manifesto was Sayama’s experience with the Northeast Journal of Complex Systems. Binghamton University Libraries supplies the content-management system to host the open-access publication, which launched in 2018. CSS is considering a similar journal of its own.

“The short-term goal is not to compete against the publishers or to fight them, but to offer an alternative,” Gershenson said. “We still publish in traditional journals, but it’s good to have another option.”

Since the manifesto was published, other organizations have joined in supporting it, including the International Society for Artificial Life. Gershenson and Sayama hope that it gains more momentum and leads to real reform.

“My hope is that this goes viral,” Sayama said. “If many people join the effort, we will have a much bigger collective voice to talk to publishers. The publishers are not our enemies. They have employees to support, so they need to come up with a business plan when they realize that their current model is not sustainable and not consistent with what science is looking for.”