To be honest, the more information I get on this topic, the more confused I am. There seems to be too many factors at play, and it is difficult to judge their relative importance. I believe what I wrote is true; problem is, the important parts may be still missing. Here are the little details I learned yesterday:
The system encourages winners and sabotages new players. Yet, there is more than one winner per field. Depending on the field, there are like 15 journals that can give you points for publishing. Is this competition not enough to bring down prices? Prices can be as high as reader’s $30 for reading a single article, or author’s $1000 for removing a paywall from their article. I still have problem to believe these numbers. For comparison, $60 gets you a big paper book from the same publisher.
There are some “open journals” that give away articles freely. Before you say “open source FTW”, let me remind you that these journals also ask like $1000 from the author. Hard to believe it’s justified by their expenses.
Some publishers publish many journals, some of them being winners, some of them non-winners. Perhaps the money gained from winners is used to support non-winners; with the ultimate goal of winning in every scientific field?
These publishers also publish scientific books. Could there be some relation between book costs and article costs? For example, could the articles be very expensive to make the books cheaper? Just a speculation.
Economically speaking, from reader’s point of view, each journal is a monopoly. (It does not matter that other journal is cheaper, you cannot buy the same article from another journal.) On the other hand, from publisher’s point of view, most articles are commodities. Is perhaps this enough to explain the prices?
Also, in the article market you have very strong third degree price discrimination. For a layman, the cost may be $30 for an article; for a student in poor country it may be like $2 for yearly access to the whole library; for a scientist the cost is virtually zero, because the employer pays the costs. Of course there is a ‘black market’ solution: make friends at university and let them download the articles for you at lower price. Also if you are a university student, it is good to make friends in other universities, because each university may have access to different databases.
Let’s not forget that this whole thing is a signalling market. By publishing in prestigious journals you signal that you are a good scientist. Also, if you are a good scientist, your employer pays the costs. So you don’t care about the prices; you may even like them, because they help you signal better.
tl;dr—Scientific article market is very unusual. Our intuitions about typical markets may be completely wrong.
Prices can be as high as reader’s $30 for reading a single article, or author’s $1000 for removing a paywall from their article. I still have problem to believe these numbers.
PLoS reckoned that it might cost PLoS Biology $20 to manage each submitted manuscript given 100 submissions a month. Assuming only 1⁄10 of those get accepted, that leads to a $200 starting cost per published article.
Published articles also have production costs. For an 11-page article the paper guesstimates costs for:
applying pre-editing macros ($10)
copy editing ($220)
preparing figures ($150)
layout ($176 for text, $138 for graphics)
handling proofs & corrections ($52)
XML markup ($36)
PDF creation ($17)
figure conversion to JPEG ($18)
“XML upload/QC” ($41)
article deposit in CrossRef or PubMed Central ($13)
These costs add up to $871, or $1071 after adding $200 for manuscript management. The manuscript management cost seems fair (I can easily picture an editor spending $20 worth of time per manuscript coordinating authors & reviewers), as do the first couple of line items. I’m less sure about the rest, but suspect that cost cutting would leave most of the $1000 price tag intact (and probably all of it if I factor in costs like office space, marketing, non-editorial staff & web hosting). I doubt this automatically justifies charging $30 to buy an already published article, though.
Thanks for the list of production costs; I did not realize all those parts were necessary. Now it makes more sense, though it still seems a bit exaggerated—I mean, $700 just to proofread and convert one DOC file with pictures into XML + JPEG + PDF? That’s a monthly salary of an educated person here in Eastern Europe. Let’s be generous and pretend it is a week’s work of one person. Sure, if you include office space, marketing, etc., then it grows… but why not use volunteer work instead? You could pay volunteers by giving them a free access into database… eh, now I am probably just trying to deny reality. Anyway, even if we succeeded to reduce the four figures to three, it would not change much.
(Now calm down, breathe deeply, and find out why are you not satisfied, even after you got a rational explanation...)
I think this is what makes it all feel so wrong: We live in the age of internet, in the age of blogs, in the age of free software. You can have a web page for $0, or just a bit more if you need a top-level domain. You can have a CMS or blogging software for $0. You already have a personal computer, and you can have a word processor for $0. You can make a PDF file by clicking on the “export to PDF” button, and then clicking “OK”. That’s it!
And then we increase the price by $1000, because we require professional book-level quality for the articles. Because “Times New Roman 10pt” just ain’t good enough for serious science!
I guess this is where the whole process slowly got out of control. Surely, if you do science, you need to publish. If you publish, there are experts that will make your article nice to read, and it is basically a good thing. But these experts are going to cost you something. Either you will pay the costs, or the readers will. … And now we ask scientists to pay for the privilege of publishing their discoveries, and we slow down the scientific progress by thousands of paywalls, just to make sure that the science comes in a nice professional PDF layout.
So, as an alternative (maybe it already exists) I would suggest an online journal that publishes any article exactly as they get it. If it is a PDF, publish the PDF. If it is anything else, do a straightforward export to PDF and publish it along with the original files. Have a team of volunteers willing to polish some of those PDFs for free. Then either let authors pay $20 per submission, or solicit for donations to cover manuscript management costs, or again leave the editorial work to volunteers.
EDIT: Alternatively, let authors choose if they want to pay $1000 for having their article edited (because now we know it is an editing cost) or if they prefer to publish their article as it is. This decision should not influence the journal’s decision whether the article will be published. For example, the editing should be done by external company. Journal’s guardians should not participate in publishing business. Simply, let’s separate “PDF layout” business from “scientific article filtering” business; otherwise we have a conflict of interests here.
Thanks for clarifying how this works!
To be honest, the more information I get on this topic, the more confused I am. There seems to be too many factors at play, and it is difficult to judge their relative importance. I believe what I wrote is true; problem is, the important parts may be still missing. Here are the little details I learned yesterday:
The system encourages winners and sabotages new players. Yet, there is more than one winner per field. Depending on the field, there are like 15 journals that can give you points for publishing. Is this competition not enough to bring down prices? Prices can be as high as reader’s $30 for reading a single article, or author’s $1000 for removing a paywall from their article. I still have problem to believe these numbers. For comparison, $60 gets you a big paper book from the same publisher.
There are some “open journals” that give away articles freely. Before you say “open source FTW”, let me remind you that these journals also ask like $1000 from the author. Hard to believe it’s justified by their expenses.
Some publishers publish many journals, some of them being winners, some of them non-winners. Perhaps the money gained from winners is used to support non-winners; with the ultimate goal of winning in every scientific field?
These publishers also publish scientific books. Could there be some relation between book costs and article costs? For example, could the articles be very expensive to make the books cheaper? Just a speculation.
Economically speaking, from reader’s point of view, each journal is a monopoly. (It does not matter that other journal is cheaper, you cannot buy the same article from another journal.) On the other hand, from publisher’s point of view, most articles are commodities. Is perhaps this enough to explain the prices?
Also, in the article market you have very strong third degree price discrimination. For a layman, the cost may be $30 for an article; for a student in poor country it may be like $2 for yearly access to the whole library; for a scientist the cost is virtually zero, because the employer pays the costs. Of course there is a ‘black market’ solution: make friends at university and let them download the articles for you at lower price. Also if you are a university student, it is good to make friends in other universities, because each university may have access to different databases.
Let’s not forget that this whole thing is a signalling market. By publishing in prestigious journals you signal that you are a good scientist. Also, if you are a good scientist, your employer pays the costs. So you don’t care about the prices; you may even like them, because they help you signal better.
tl;dr—Scientific article market is very unusual. Our intuitions about typical markets may be completely wrong.
Those numbers felt a bit high to me too, so I did a very quick search to find something suggesting why an article might cost a thousand-odd dollars. I found an old white paper from the Public Library of Science — it lists some costs that might help to explain why open access publication costs run to four figures.
PLoS reckoned that it might cost PLoS Biology $20 to manage each submitted manuscript given 100 submissions a month. Assuming only 1⁄10 of those get accepted, that leads to a $200 starting cost per published article.
Published articles also have production costs. For an 11-page article the paper guesstimates costs for:
applying pre-editing macros ($10)
copy editing ($220)
preparing figures ($150)
layout ($176 for text, $138 for graphics)
handling proofs & corrections ($52)
XML markup ($36)
PDF creation ($17)
figure conversion to JPEG ($18)
“XML upload/QC” ($41)
article deposit in CrossRef or PubMed Central ($13)
These costs add up to $871, or $1071 after adding $200 for manuscript management. The manuscript management cost seems fair (I can easily picture an editor spending $20 worth of time per manuscript coordinating authors & reviewers), as do the first couple of line items. I’m less sure about the rest, but suspect that cost cutting would leave most of the $1000 price tag intact (and probably all of it if I factor in costs like office space, marketing, non-editorial staff & web hosting). I doubt this automatically justifies charging $30 to buy an already published article, though.
Thanks for the list of production costs; I did not realize all those parts were necessary. Now it makes more sense, though it still seems a bit exaggerated—I mean, $700 just to proofread and convert one DOC file with pictures into XML + JPEG + PDF? That’s a monthly salary of an educated person here in Eastern Europe. Let’s be generous and pretend it is a week’s work of one person. Sure, if you include office space, marketing, etc., then it grows… but why not use volunteer work instead? You could pay volunteers by giving them a free access into database… eh, now I am probably just trying to deny reality. Anyway, even if we succeeded to reduce the four figures to three, it would not change much.
(Now calm down, breathe deeply, and find out why are you not satisfied, even after you got a rational explanation...)
I think this is what makes it all feel so wrong: We live in the age of internet, in the age of blogs, in the age of free software. You can have a web page for $0, or just a bit more if you need a top-level domain. You can have a CMS or blogging software for $0. You already have a personal computer, and you can have a word processor for $0. You can make a PDF file by clicking on the “export to PDF” button, and then clicking “OK”. That’s it!
And then we increase the price by $1000, because we require professional book-level quality for the articles. Because “Times New Roman 10pt” just ain’t good enough for serious science!
I guess this is where the whole process slowly got out of control. Surely, if you do science, you need to publish. If you publish, there are experts that will make your article nice to read, and it is basically a good thing. But these experts are going to cost you something. Either you will pay the costs, or the readers will. … And now we ask scientists to pay for the privilege of publishing their discoveries, and we slow down the scientific progress by thousands of paywalls, just to make sure that the science comes in a nice professional PDF layout.
So, as an alternative (maybe it already exists) I would suggest an online journal that publishes any article exactly as they get it. If it is a PDF, publish the PDF. If it is anything else, do a straightforward export to PDF and publish it along with the original files. Have a team of volunteers willing to polish some of those PDFs for free. Then either let authors pay $20 per submission, or solicit for donations to cover manuscript management costs, or again leave the editorial work to volunteers.
EDIT: Alternatively, let authors choose if they want to pay $1000 for having their article edited (because now we know it is an editing cost) or if they prefer to publish their article as it is. This decision should not influence the journal’s decision whether the article will be published. For example, the editing should be done by external company. Journal’s guardians should not participate in publishing business. Simply, let’s separate “PDF layout” business from “scientific article filtering” business; otherwise we have a conflict of interests here.