The price of freedom: Open access, editorial labour, and prestige in academic publishing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper discusses tensions in journal editing and management, particularly for non-fee charging open access (diamond open access) journals. Even diamond open access journals and other journals published on a non-commercial basis are subject to financial and labour costs. Because diamond open access journals do not gain income from subscriptions or article processing charges (APCs), every published paper presents additional costs. Whereas commercially published journals depend upon substantial free academic labour, unfunded or underfunded diamond open access journals depend upon both substantial free academic labour and free non-academic labour. This encourages editors to be selective about the kinds of submissions on which they spend their time. The importance of maintaining a journal’s prestige, as measured through inclusion in bibliometric indices, incentivises further selectivity. Different kinds of papers are suitable for different kinds of journals. Even publications like Island Studies Journal that are radically accessible to authors and readers in diverse financial circumstances must make difficult choices when deciding what material to publish.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.033 | 0.236 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.029 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".