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JoshuaZ comments on Knowledge is Worth Paying For - Less Wrong
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Servers take resources to keep up. Printed physical copies take paper and take employees to work on the publishing and typesetting end. Open access journals are nice but sometimes there are actual costs involved in running journals and that needs to come from somewhere.
The overhead is minimal. One of the 'charities' I've looked at was JSTOR, which hosts many journals. Their hosting and ongoing costs are trivial - employee compensation eats the entire budget; and they make next to nothing on gatewayed articles:
No they don't!!
If you gave me a million scientific articles in PDF form that were previously unavailable on the open web, which could be redistributed without legal problems, then I would host them somewhere and pay for it until the day I die. The benefit to humanity is way bigger than the trivial cost to me, and I also gain some much needed geek karma :-) Are there any LWers who wouldn't do the same?
You're a good human.
Wait, what do scientific articles have to do with paperclips?
Not that I disagree.
You don't know what scientific knowledge has to do with making more paperclips from the same inputs? Are you a dumb human?
Those are pretty trivial compared to the costs the researchers bear to run the journals, and they're not the reason that the pay journals charge so much for an electronic version. We're basically just dealing with vestiges from a time when publishers really were necessary; now, all that a journal exists for is to certify quality, which you don't need to pay a third-party publisher for.
Yeah, your point along with cousin_it's point seem to be valid. The cost being charged by many journals is much larger than the actual cost of running them. I don't know if that is completely relevant since Yvain's statement doesn't seem to be ok with even a journal that was charging at or near cost.
Moreover, the journal doesn't even certify quality itself. Journals ask academics to peer-review articles. I'll admit that this requires a certain amount of organization, but it's nothing that a slightly-motivated volunteer organization couldn't handle. It's certainly not worth the prices that journals demand.
(grrr, argh.)
Technically true but a red herring nonetheless.