mtraven comments on The Shabbos goy - Less Wrong

35 Post author: PhilGoetz 26 March 2010 04:16PM

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Comment author: PhilGoetz 26 March 2010 04:56:49PM *  4 points [-]

People wouldn't have a problem with an academic journal that they believed charged a reasonable fee. But consider a typical journal published by Springer-Verlag or Mary Thomas Liebert:

  • Subscription fee: $100 per issue, $1200/year
  • Cost per article for non-subscribers: $30
  • Fee paid by the author of each article: about $3000
  • Advertising fee: I'd guess at least $5,000/page, based on the fact that each full-color page in your article usually adds $1000-$2000 to its cost
  • Salary paid to reviewers: $0
  • Cost of electronic publishing: about $100 per issue, divided among all subscribers

They have a problem with having a small number of subscribers. But many hobbyist groups manage to publish quality journals to equally-small audiences at a cost of under $10/issue.

The fact that people aren't jumping in to compete with lower-costs journals makes me suspect that it isn't that easy. But it's still not at all obvious why academic journals cost so much.

(The big ones, Science and Nature, are relatively inexpensive.))

Comment author: mtraven 29 March 2010 12:18:12AM 0 points [-]

The fact that people aren't jumping in to compete with lower-costs journals makes me suspect that it isn't that easy. But it's still not at all obvious why academic journals cost so much.

Huh? People are most certainly jumping in with zero-cost (to read) journals such as PLoS and others. The open-access publishing movement is not obscure and I'm surprise to see that people here aren't aware of them.

The reason existing journals cost so much is that publishers can charge monopoly rents based on their ownership of a high-status imprint. That game is not going to last very much longer, IMO.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 29 March 2010 01:57:05AM 0 points [-]

PLoS is a non-profit, and I'm certainly aware of it. If, however, for-profit academic journals charge much more than it costs to produce them, I would expect to see for-profit startups competing with them.

The "impact factor" measure is a part of this; you can't just start up a new journal and have a high impact factor.

Comment author: MichaelVassar 29 March 2010 05:59:37PM 2 points [-]

PLoS claims to be sustainable on internally generated revenue at this point. I was just at their conference.

Comment author: cupholder 30 March 2010 05:20:45AM 0 points [-]

If, however, for-profit academic journals charge much more than it costs to produce them, I would expect to see for-profit startups competing with them.

Possible explanations for not seeing that:

  • There are for-profit startups competing with the big boys, but we just don't know what they are, because of course they're smaller and less visible than the big publishers
  • Startups get bought out by big publishers
  • Social barriers to entry like the impact factor issue you mention
  • Social barriers to entry amplified even further because startups are a bunch of entrepreneurs breaking into the field from outside, so they don't have the same connections as scientists working in the field (less of a problem for big publishers because they can buy existing publishers)
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