Are there an affordable, ethical, science paper publishing platforms?

Briefly researched in response to request for affordable, ethical scientific journals to publish a quantum computing paper.

https://arxiv.org/ see https://arxiv.org/help/moderation and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) https://doaj.org/

The open source ones probably have higher standards; see https://news.mit.edu/2015/how-three-mit-students-fooled-scientific-journals-0414

Hi Fernando!

How are you? I happen to be in Denver right now and will say hi to my cousin from you and Nancy! Mostly i’m living 500 miles north in Minneapolis so i expect to be hosting you soon, perhaps 2020 DrupalCon?

I don’t have much as far as close connections, but i can try to figure out who to ask / circulate the question to.

Has he looked at the ‘open source’ peer reviewed journals? A couple i knew about are http://www.theoj.org/ and https://peerj.com/ but neither do quantum mechanics i don’t think.

The really big one though is https://www.plos.org/

As far as more traditional but perhaps still fair, would this journal be relevant? There’s no submission charge, just a fee if accepted: http://www.mdpi.com/journal/universe/apc

Found that one via https://doaj.org/ Another reasonably-ethical-seeming journal:

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physics

https://www.frontiersin.org/about/publishing-fees - mentions fee support including a waiver program: https://www.frontiersin.org/about/publishing-fees#waivers

I’d be interested in what if anything is the problem with some of those journals; if it’s that they’re too general purpose then i’ll be asking people a different question than if they’re not fair.

Good luck to him!

On 09/06/2018 01:39 AM, Fernando Paredes García wrote:

Hi Benjamin,

Hope you are doing well.

I have a friend who is researching quantum computing theory here in Perú. Yet, he is a bit discouraged. Publishing a paper is expensive for him and the legal conditions in most publishing platforms are really unfair for the author. I guess that you have many contacts in the academic world, perhaps one of them is in contact with a journal that is accepting papers about quantum computing with fair conditions. If so, can I ask you to connect me with that journal/person?

Best regards!

  • Fernando

So, like, “fair conditions” don’t exist for peer reviewed academic journals. The authors of the papers do not get paid. If they are extremely lucky, peer reviewers will receive an honorarium that might be a few hundred dollars.

It id an exploitative. economy. Authors get to add the paper to the list of publications on their cv, and it helps them to gain prestige ( which cannot be eaten, of course) and network within their field. It makes it more likely that they will receive grants (sometimes in the millions if it looks like the research cpuld be applied to industry) to fund further research, or paid consulting arrangements, but no, getting the paper itself published is not a paid activity, unless it is extremely influential and an excerpt ends up in a textbook, then the author might receive a small amount of compensation.

The cold email technique might work if the friend has interesting questions for authors of papers that were cited. Most papers have contact info for the authors. At the very least it could help the friend would develop the soft network required for future publication endeavors and gain potential peer reviewers. And authors have privileges to email pdfs of the full published articles for free to those who ask just in case the friend does not have access to full text articles.