CEO of EMS Press here (publisher of the European Mathematical Society). Like most society publishers, we really care about our discipline(s) and want to support researchers regardless of whether they or their institution can afford an astronomical APC or subscription rates.
Good publishing costs money but there are alternatives to the established models. Since 2021 we use the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model where libraries subscribe to journals and at the beginning of each subscription year we check for each journal whether the collected revenues cover our projected costs: if they do we publish that year's content Open Access, otherwise only subscribers have access. So no fees for authors and if libraries put their money where their mouth is then also full OA and thus no barriers to reading. All journals full OA since 2024. Easy.
Happy to share details! Typesetting is a big item (for us becoming even more due to production of accessible publications), language editing, (meta-)data curation, technical infrastructure and software development (peer review systems, hosting, metadata and fulltext deposits, long-term preservation, maintenance, plagiarism and fraud detection), editor training/onboarding, editorial support, marketing, and of course our staff running all of this also wants a salary.
Some keep repeating that Diamond OA is superior because publishing is free for authors and everything is immediately OA. And indeed it is, but only if you have someone who is indefinitely throwing money at the journal. If that's not the case then someone else pays, for example universities who pay their staff who decide to dedicate their work time to the journal. Or it's just unpaid labour so someone pays with their time. It's leading to the same sustainability issues that many Open Source projects run into.
Thank you for contributing your expertise and experience.
> long-term preservation
How is that done beyond using PDF/A? I'm interested for my own files.
> Typesetting is a big item (for us becoming even more due to production of accessible publications), language editing, (meta-)data curation
I'm sure you've considered this idea; how does it work out in reality?: What happens if you push one or more of those items onto the authors - e.g., 'we won't publish your submission without proper typesetting, etc.'? Or is that just not realistic for many/most authors?
Outside of disciplines that use LaTeX, the ability of authors to do typesetting is pretty limited. And there are other typesetting requirements that no consumer tool makes particularly easy; for instance, due to funding requirements, many journals deposit biomedical papers with PubMed Central, which wants them in JATS XML. So publishers have to prepare a structured XML version of papers.
Accessibility in PDFs is also very difficult. I'm not sure any publishers are yet meeting PDF/UA-2 requirements for tagged PDFs, which include things like embedding MathML representations of all mathematics so screenreaders can parse the math. LaTeX only supports this experimentally, and few other tools support it at all.
At least in my experience, grad students don't pay submission fees. It usually comes out of an institutional finances account, typically assigned to the student's advisor (who is generally the corresponding author on the submission). (Not that the waiver isn't a good idea — I just don't think the grad students are the ones who would feel relieved by that arrangement.)
Also, I'm pretty sure my SIG requires LaTeX submissions anyway... I feel like I remember reading that at some point when I submitted once, but I'm not confident in that recollection.
> Outside of disciplines that use LaTeX, the ability of authors to do typesetting is pretty limited.
Since this is obviously true, and yet since most journals (with some exceptions) demand you follow tedious formatting requirements or highly restrictive templates, this suggests, in fact, that journals are outsourcing the vast majority of their typesetting and formatting to submitters, and doing only the bare minimum themselves.
Most of the tedious formatting requirements do not match what the final typeset article looks like. The requirements are instead theoretically to benefit peer reviewers, e.g., by having double-spaced lines so they can write their comments on the paper copy that was mailed to them back when the submission guidelines were written in the 1950s.
The smarter journals have started accepting submissions in any format on the first round, and then only require enough formatting for the typesetters to do their job.
For my area, everybody uses LaTeX styles that more or less produce PDFs identical to the final versions published in proceedings. Or, at least, it's always looked close enough to me that I haven't noticed any significant differences, other than some additional information in the margins.
This is difficult in practice. For LaTeX, in theory the publisher would simply provide their style sheet (.cls) and maybe some style guidelines, and all the authors have to do is to adhere to that file and typesetting is done.
The reason this doesn't work in practice is that authors don't always play nicely, not because of bad intentions, but because they don't want to cooperate but because of the realities of life: they don't have the time to study style guidelines in detail, they use their own auxiliary LaTeX macro collection because that's what they're used to, or simply because of oversights. Also, typesetting often includes a whole lot of meticulous things, if you listed them all in a guide sheet, that would be a long list of stuff at a level that's too detailed for authors.
I'm not saying it's impossible for authors to fully follow a publisher's style guide but there's a reason publishers employ full time workers who do nothing else but correct submitted manuscripts. Like many other professions, it's a trained skill.
Nonsense. Formatting demands make things worse here, you could just ask authors to submit unformatted content (e.g. Markdown or RMarkdown, or utterly minimal LaTeX file, with references and a bibliography file) and then trivially move that content into whatever format is required. There are in fact journals that do this too (i.e. don't have formatting requirements).
As a submitter applying to multiple journals with arbitrary formatting requirements, you are often forced to meet arbitrary and irrelevant (visual) style requirements even before you are likely to be published, so of course you keep a base unformatted copy that you modify as needed to satisfy whatever bullshit policies each random journal demands. This wastes everyone's time.
The reason submitters don't "play nicely" is because the publishers' demands ("style guides") are demented here: they should just be asking for unformatted content (besides figures), certainly for submissions, and even for accepted publications: they should actually be doing the work of formatting and typesetting. But instead they force most of this on the submitters, to save costs by extorting the desperation of academics.
I'm calling bullshit. Look at how annoying the template requirements are for authors: https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/submissions, and note the stuff around Word files. Other journals can be much worse.
If any serious typesetting were being done by these journals, simple plaintext, Markdown (or RMarkdown) or minimal basic LaTeX, with, admittedly, figures generated to spec, would be more than enough for typesetters to manage. In fact, if you were doing serious typesetting, you wouldn't want your users doing a bunch of formatting and layout themselves, and would demand more minimal representations of the content only. Instead you have these ridiculous templates. I am not convinced AT ALL.
Do authors submitting to literary agents have to follow such absurd rules? I think not. Can modern blogging tools create beautiful sites with simple Markdown and images? Yes. So why do academic publishers demand so much from authors? IMO because they are barely doing anything at all re: typesetting and formatting and the like.
To understand the academic publishing process better, it's a good idea to look at the four main groups of people involved in the process: authors, editors, reviewers, and publishers.
The authors write up their research results.
The editors organize the review process together with the reviewers and the publishing process together with the publisher.
The reviewers read the papers and write their reviews.
The publishers publish the papers.
Stylesheets are typically provided by the publishers and passed on to the authors early on. The reason is two-fold: for one, the publisher wants to produce a high-quality product and uniformity of layouts and styles is an important factor. But the second reason has to do with everything that happens before the publishers even comes into play: common style-sheets also provide some level of fairness because they make the papers by different authors comparable to some degree, e.g., via the max length of a paper.
On top of that, authors often want to present their research in a specific way, and often have strong opinions about e.g. how their formulas are typeset, what aligns with what else, etc. and typically spend quite a bit of time tweaking their documents to look the way they want it. That is, the authors already have an interest in using something more powerful than Markdown.
But like I wrote in another comment here, in doing so, authors do not always adhere to the style guides provided by the publisher - not necessarily maliciously, but the result is the same. For instance, authors might simply be used to handling whitespace a certain way - because that's how they always do it. But if that clashes with the publisher's guidelines, it's one of the things the publisher has to correct in typesetting.
So, perhaps that's the confusion here also to some degree: the typesetting done by a publisher is in the majority of the cases on a very fine-grained level. A lot of is is simply enforcing the rules that were missed by the authors (with the goal of fairness, comparability, and conformity) and small perfectionist's edits that you might not even notice at a casual glance but that typesetters are trained to spot.
> the typesetting done by a publisher is in the majority of the cases on a very fine-grained level. A lot of is is simply enforcing the rules that were missed by the authors (with the goal of fairness, comparability, and conformity) and small perfectionist's edits that you might not even notice at a casual glance but that typesetters are trained to spot.
As I said, if this is the case, the vast majority of typesetting and formatting has clearly been outsourced to submitters, and this means the amount of actual typesetting/formatting done by journals can only be minimal compared to in other domains.
EDIT:
> On top of that, authors often want to present their research in a specific way, and often have strong opinions about e.g. how their formulas are typeset, what aligns with what else, etc. and typically spend quite a bit of time tweaking their documents to look the way they want it. That is, the authors already have an interest in using something more powerful than Markdown.
Yes, generally, I don't want to present my formulas and figures in the shitty and limited ways the journal demands, but which would be trivial to present on a website (which is the only way 99.9% of people access articles now anyway). So journal requirements here are usually harmful and generally 20+ years outdated.
> and this means the amount of actual typesetting/formatting done by journals can only be minimal compared to in other domains
This doesn't follow logically, and even though I don't know how it is in other domains, I know for a fact that the amount of typesetting done for a typical CS journal is non-trivial.
> So journal requirements here are usually harmful and generally 20+ years outdated.
I see you have very strong opinions already formed - I don't expect to be able to change them.
> I see you have very strong opinions already formed - I don't expect to be able to change them.
Much like the journals that have figure requirements for print, even though the amount of people that have viewed a figure in print in the last 20 years is an order of magnitude less than a rounding error.
Typesetting costs in 2025 are trivial, if you swallow this claim from academic publishers, you are being had:
I help out with the production of a periodical that is journal-ish [0], and the biggest expense is printing and mailing. But it's ran by a non-profit, our editors are all volunteers, we don't do peer review, and our authors typeset the articles themselves, so this is definitely an atypical example.
This is a silly question to ask. What do you expect a rent seeker to say? Of course there are costs. Real estate brokers have costs, Apple store has costs, a publisher has costs. That's what they'll say. It does not matter what the costs are. The fees are what the market bears.
It's bullshit, if typesetting were a serious cost, they wouldn't demand such finicky formatting and/or filetype requirements from authors (and would instead prefer minimal formats like RMarkdown or basica LaTeX so they could format and typeset themselves). Instead they clearly make submitters follow rigid templates so that their work is trivial.
Hmm, I'm not 100% convinced. What if there are multiple downstream formats that have to be exported to? (E.g., another commenter mentioned PubMed requires something called JATS XML.)
In that case, a consistent input format assists with generation of the output formats, and without that, there'd be even more work.
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That being said, I don't doubt publisher fees exceed their actual costs for this.
I always wonder why there's no universal academic interchange schema; it seems like something XML could have genuinely solved. I suppose the publishers have no incentive to build that, and reduce what they can charge for.
You shouldn't be 100% convinced: obviously there are some non-trivial typesetting costs.
But general typesetting is very obviously a largely solved problem in 2025, regardless of the submission format, so since academic journals have weirdly specific input format requirements that are not demanded in other similar domains, it is clear they are doing dated / junk / minimal typesetting / formatting.
Also see what the costs are anywhere else, typesetting is a triviality:
Well, I don't think it's "very obvious", nor do I think "it is clear they are doing dated / junk / minimal typesetting / formatting". I guess I'm not seeing the evidence the same way.
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I read your links, and I think the most interesting relevant one with good numbers is the svpow.com link.
The StackExchange one says "34%" of their cost is "editorial and production". That includes more than type-setting, so it's not clear what subfraction is pure type-setting, and whether it's overpriced or not.
The Lode one is selling Latex templates, and they even say "Users without LaTeX experience should budget for learning time or technical assistance." It's more of a low-cost self-serve alternative, which probably doesn't include everything a journal does to maintain visual consistency. We can argue that full-service is overpriced, sure, but this is different, like complaining about coffee shops because the vending machine is cheaper.
The Reddit link is about a book author with a pure text novel, possibly the optimal scenario for cheap type-setting.
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The svpow.com link was interesting, but, it seems like type-setting costs are usually bundled in (possibly to obscure overcharging, sure), so maybe it's better to critique the overall cost of academic publishing instead of trying to break out type-setting.
Less boilerplate than the other solutions I know... for example it allows you to define types easily just by writing a parser/validator ("transformation" in fefe terminology).
You can also use fefe (https://github.com/paperhive/fefe/) to validate any data with its pure functional and minimalist approach. Bonus: it's 100% type-safe automatically if you use Typescript.
If you use javascript to extract the token from the URL then you can simply pass it via the hash ("fragment") part of the URL. The hash portion is only interpreted by the user agent and never sent to a server (see https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-3.5). This is how we solved it at paperhive.org.
This has been suggested numerous time since I published. I had not previously considered this solution and I think it's a fine solution for people to make if they know the tradeoffs.
It's worth noting there are a number of reasons this JavaScript could possibly not execute beyond people who have JS turned off. I've seen a number of sites fail to execute JavaScript when an Ad Blocker is run, for instance.
In this case, there are a number of server side fixes available that wouldn't require any JavaScript. They're not terribly complicated and will always work. For that reason, I'm still comfortable with the server side fix, but think the JS fix is a decent alternative.
Obviously, the drawback is that you've introduced a javascript dependency to a core function which definitely doesn't require it. Having said that, I notice that paperhive.org renders an entirely blank page if javascript is unavailable, so I guess the password reset is the least of your concerns in that scenario.
And what percentage of the users have javascript disabled? Objectively you have bigger concerns when you run a site than 10 people who have js disabled.
Definitely more than zero. It's not just a case of javascript being disabled, either - there are many other reasons why it might be "unavailable", which is why I used that word.
Of course I'm not suggesting you're not allowed to use any javascript on your site, or even that you should only use it when it's strictly necessary, but if it's entirely unnecessary and you don't engage in best practise by, for example, using progressive enhancement, then that's something that could be improved.
Using an addon like NoScript it's possible to selectively enable javascript per domain. When a website doesn't work without js I am forced to decide whether it's worth enabling js for this site. Very often I decide it's not worth it and I never use that site again.
That would be meaningful if we were talking about some optional UX feature, but this is security. Does having a non-representative browser config mean we don't deserve security? I think not. Security has to work without JS.
And I hate it when a site is loading JavaScript from a large domain, e.g. cloudflare.com; generally I just close my browser window and view something else.
No way am I going to allow JavaScript from every single site using CloudFlare to run all at once.
When your browser runs JavaScript, it downloading and automatically executing untrusted, unsigned, ephemeral code. Even if the site is over SSL, only the _party_ is validated---the resources themselves are not signed.
If your browser instead presented the JavaScript as a program itself, and listed the programs it executed, and from what sources, users would have a wholly different perspective. JavaScript has the illusion of remote execution; most users don't think of it as executing programs on their computer.
Addons like NoScript are essential security precautions that mitigate a host of attacks. Unfortunately, even security-essential software like the Tor Browser Bundle leaves JS enabled by default because it'd "break" the web.
There's other reasons---as a free software user and activist, I won't run non-free JavaScript programs.
Why should we trust any website and execute their JS code on our machine? What about privacy, if they decide they can track us and sell the information to whoever they want? And even if they're "legit", what about the 3rd parties they might trust wrongly?
I come to a website to read it, not for it (and who knows what else) to execute code on my machine, no matter how deep into the sandbox it is. If I want to watch the video and allow it to use my data, I will explicitly allow it.
For users without JavaScript it's reasonable to include a plain form and send token in plain text as well, so user can copy-paste it into a form and reset his password.
You are assuming that 3rd party javascript is not taking the whole URL including the hash part and sending it for analytics. I have seen at least one analytics company do that.
Right. The scenario I'm considering is not a hostile attacker but simple an overzealous analytics script which also tracked hash strings. Heck, since some sites used to do AJAX navigation that way it wouldn't surprise me if some analytics services were configured to track hash strings.
Good publishing costs money but there are alternatives to the established models. Since 2021 we use the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model where libraries subscribe to journals and at the beginning of each subscription year we check for each journal whether the collected revenues cover our projected costs: if they do we publish that year's content Open Access, otherwise only subscribers have access. So no fees for authors and if libraries put their money where their mouth is then also full OA and thus no barriers to reading. All journals full OA since 2024. Easy.