This analogy is completely wrong. The money you pay in admission to the parks go towards the parks in order to maintain and improve the parks, even though you already do that with your taxes.

The money you pay to scientific publications goes to the publisher alone, it does not, in any case, end up financing science.

The only thing that would be needed are people in charge of formatting and such, because some fields do not use LaTeX yet (this need concerns mostly biology, chemistry, and medicine). But that could be easily covered by small local businesses for a teeny tiny fraction of the costs of current subscriptions.

The other thing that costs money already exists: archives that take care of making papers available and preserve them for the future. These services would need to be reinforced but that cost is also ridiculous compared to what is currently spent as subscription (the operational cost of arXiv for example are only a bit more than what a mid sized university pays for Elsevier subscription alone…).

Second, I know what I said is possible because some journals already do it, and there is no scale issues at all here. Journal management is entirely decentralized. One journal = one editorial board.

Let me illustrate this with one of the possible models which is called "overlay journals".

In an overlay journal, papers are uploaded for example to arXiv, and submitted for review by giving the link to the paper on arXiv. Then the editorial board (composed of researchers) does its job as it would in a traditional journal: it sends the papers to review to other researchers of the relevant field (well, at least they try). The reviewers also do their job as they would in traditional publishing. And papers are accepted as is, with modifications, or rejected, again, as usual.

Now what constitutes an issue of the journal is a list of links to the accepted versions (repositories such as arXiv can keep track of the successive versions of a paper) of the paper in arXiv.

There, same level of scientific requirements, no publishers, literaly no costs for anyone except arXiv (which is already paid for by public institutions), and researchers time, that is already spent and not paid for in the traditional system.

If you really want double-blind peer reviews you can use one of the open journal systems free software or as people currently do, public services such as easychair or scienceconf to organize the reviewing phase.

The only thing that is still necessary for some fields, as I already said, is the proper layout work. The ideal situation is that each university or group of university hires a few professional in charge of this work and who can do it in close contact with the authors of the paper. A few salaries costs less than the millions currently spend each year by each university for journal subscriptions, and the job would be done better than it currently is by publishers who often outsource it to low-salary regions of the world to increase their profits.

By not granting any copyright to publicly funded work. That doesn't actually prohibit a publisher from charging readers for access, but it would require them to charge the market price for publication of digital works out of copyright. Then we see if competition can significantly drive down costs.

Which we all know perfectly well that it would.

Definitely the number of grants would go down as the cost of publishing starts being factored in, although this may be partly or fully outweighed by the reduction in universities' costs.

Universities are paying essentially all of the cost one way or another now, how could it not be fully outweighed? It would be more than fully outweighed because the universities would no longer have to pay the publishers the amount that constitutes the monopoly rent from the copyright.

Meanwhile the public gets free access to the research which increases its utility.

2. There are many places to put extra money in a university (add to endowment, expand, etc).

>It would be more than fully outweighed because the universities would no longer have to pay the publishers the amount that constitutes the monopoly rent from the copyright.

Why do you think profit margins would go down? The "rent", to the extent a 30% margin is rent, is from the need to publish in prestigious journals. Copyright just affects how that rent is collected, but it's not clear to me how that would reduce the rent. (It may go down because people become more hesitant to publish due to the increased cost which forces them to lower their price to get more papers. But that wouldn't be such a good thing.)

Regarding profit: sure, you could set up a nonprofit to do the same job. You'll end up reducing costs by 20-40%, even assuming you don't have higher costs because of lower scale/lack of experience/etc.

For other essentials like food, I've seen stories about nonprofits that get large groups together and buy in bulk. Co-ops are basically the same idea. Using a non profit to reduce costs has been done.

It's also not even obvious that (anonymous pre-publication) peer review is better than just publishing everything and letting anyone and everyone comment on it just like anything else shared publicly on the web. I mean, for just one example, it's a big deal that researchers don't already publish everything!

You may think peer review is over-rated. The response should be to convince others of that and get them to stop using it, not complain about the high cost of peer review/journals/etc.

The peer review process is entirely independent from publishers and can (and do!) exist without them.

> not complain about the high cost of peer review

Peer review is not paid for by publishers. It is organized by researchers who are part of editorial boards of journals or of program committees of conferences. And it is done voluntarily by researchers as part of their normal work / duties to their scientific community.

They are "still being used" mainly by researchers and grant agencies. But this is only a fraction of the number of people who care to read the results of the research work.

Researchers think of their research first, public access second. They think they need to publish with the incumbents to secure their future research. This is because the incumbents own the most respected journal names and have them in tight grip. For most researchers, there is currently no easy alternative way to get credit for their work.

But there are alternatives, it just isn't as easy and convenient for researchers to explore and start using them. The reason most of the people oppose current publishers such as Elsevier is not that researchers do not need them, but it is that society does not need them. It is because business has injected itself in a place where it prevents rather than enables society to benefit from the research.

If anything, it's 1% of the world. The problem is not limited to the US.

And it's a very significant 1% which is one of the biggest - if not literally the biggest - drivers of the world economy.

>The counter argument to this is you pay to use national parks even though you already pay for it.

Parks have huge continuing expenses. They're also owned in trust for the public.

Journal publishing has almost no expenses at all. It's pure privatised oligoply. It provides no useful public or private service of any kind.

There is nothing academic publishers do that couldn't be done better in other ways.

Probably it's not worth making this point, but I think that would almost certainly be a bigger, not smaller fraction of Americans, since I think Americans are more, not less, likely to read scientific research than the rest of the world.

If their expenses of 60-80% of revenue is "almost nothing", surely their revenue is also "almost nothing", and therefore we shouldn't care about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier

https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/mit-open-access/open-acc...

Besides, do you really think it takes 28,000 people to publish a single company's journals, given that the selection and review process is all being done for them on a pro-bono basis? There are massive efficiencies there - but the CEO of a 100-person non-profit couldn't justify a $30 million package, so there is absolutely no incentive for change.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?p...

http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/about/aboutacs/financial.h...

The smaller American Physical Society made <$100,000 on $53.5m gross revenue in 2015:

http://www.aps.org/about/governance/annual-reports/

So yes, it is possible to have high quality publications produced on much smaller margins. The question is whether it is possible to provide similar services for similar margins in a for-profit context. Given that for-profit companies, by definition, seek to extract the highest possible profits on what they do, one should really question whether it makes any sense for for-profit publishers to have the stranglehold they have on academic intellectual property.

I should probably have said "similar charges" as I said later. Reducing the margins to nothing can at best reduce the cost by 30% or so, which I doubt would satisfy most open access advocates; given that, the real concern has nothing to do with publishers' profit.

However, what's the extra cost in distributing the journal article? Hosting fees? A simple website where the paper author uploads a PDF? It seems like those costs are pretty small

What's actually ludicrous is that you pay private, profit making companies to allow you to read taxpayer-funded research.

Moreover, taxpayer-funded bodies have to pay these companies to allow them to read taxpayer-funded research from other taxpayer-funded bodies. That is the epitome of private sector wastefulness spreading its tentacles into the public sector.

The point is that taxes pay for people produce the content, and to allow people to read the content. If the publication of the content were also a public service, then no-one would be syphoning off profit in the middle. All of the money taken by that service from the consumers would be rolled back into saving taxpayer money at some stage in the process.

Suppose a park contracts with a company to provide food, and that company makes a profit; is that bad?

We could also consider workers "making a profit" from their labor, and decree that government workers must make only as much money as the minimum to feed themselves; any more would be "syphoning off profit".

I just don't see how you can make a principled distinction that says publishing margins of 30% are bad, but allows for subcontracting to private companies.

Part of the core business of universities is the production of research artefacts. Why shouldn't that core business also include making those artefacts available to others? Why not a subsidiary owned by a consortium of universities? Why not an organisation like EPSRC or AHRC, or even a national pan-discipline service provider?

Profit is what's left after the expenses have been taken care of. Salaries are an expense. Workers earning a salary are not making a profit, they are being remunerated for their labour.

Subcontracting to private companies is a good thing when your need for their services is subject to surge, or when your need for their services is so low that the overheads of DIY are prohibitive (Don't set up a whole in-house printing and binding facility just to do your glossy annual report, don't hire a full-time cleaner to keep your 5-desk office clean). If you are paying another company to provide a full-time, predictable service that is strongly aligned with your core business, then that is wasteful.

[0]http://phys.org/news/2015-06-companies-academic-publishing.h... [1]https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-univ...

Then solve that by creating a new non profit that charges costs, or remove barriers to entering the business, and so on.

Complaining about the profit margins of a business while ignoring the reasons their profit margins are high (it's almost always because of barriers to entry) isn't useful.

>Why shouldn't that core business also include making those artefacts available to others? Why not a subsidiary owned by a consortium of universities?

That's a good idea, and I'd be all for it if they can do it. But while there isn't such a thing, complaining about high profits by companies providing a service is pointless, except to the extent you have an alternative or are pushing for one to be implemented.

That's necessarily true. It's true that universities pay for journal subscriptions, but I guess a significant portion (or even all) of that expense is covered by the overheads universities charge grants. Given that a significant number of grants are taxpayer-paid, it's likely that tax payers are already paying for the journal subscriptions. So making them open access will shift the costs around, but it isn't immediately obvious that it will cost the taxpayers more than it currently does.

Anyone have any rough numbers on what this would cost Joe Schmo to buy?

There's a huge variety. An individual subscription to Nature is $200/year[0], but they often charge $30 for electronic access to individual articles.

An institutional subscription to the Astrophysical Journal is $2000/year[1], though if you're a member of a professional society, you can buy an individual, electronic subscription for $25[e.g., 2]. As a point of comparison within astronomy, a similarly prestigious journal, the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society institutional subscription is $9400/year[in the csv link in 3].

[0] http://www.nature.com/ecommerce/subscribe.action?productId=n...

[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/0004-637X/page/Pricing%20...

[2] https://aas.org/individual-membership/dues-subscription-fees

[3] http://www.oxfordjournals.org/en/access-purchase/pricing-and...

You would have a case if the publishers did not make huge profits from the research and contribute nothing back to the research. When you pay for access to a park, you know that money is going towards the running and improvement of the park.

Current profits are extortionate, to say nothing about the bullying tactics employed by Elsevier, who abuse a monopoly and force libraries and other institutions to take a lot of publications they do not want to access those they do want.

Some journals calculate internal costs of up to $40,000 per paper (see http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie...). You seem to be skeptical of such claims, but simply asserting that the expenses don't exist isn't enough.

Is that true? If so, what is the use of that? I don't see any scientific added value. I never even noticed such an activity myself. We can get rid of it where it still exists.

> Some journals calculate internal costs of up to $40,000 per paper

$40k per paper ? Haha sorry but I just don't buy that.

I'm not asserting these expenses don't exist. However (see my other comments in this thread), I'm showing that you can avoid them, and how the same quality control of publication can be obtained without having publishers around. And in the example I took close to everything is done in the traditional way. Which in turns is a demonstration that publishers added-value is minimal.

To prevent bad papers from getting through. Editors at a paper are the first filter, peer reviewers are the second.

¹ In some other cases such as with Nature, what you said is true. But the point is that the model you are describing is far from being the only one, and there is no evidences that it is better. In computer science for example, the most prestigious venues are conferences not journals, and in that cases the publishers does nothing until the very end of the process, where its work often consists in putting PDFs online and that's it.

If you're going to throw around phrases like "vast majority", can you cite numbers?

Of course, this whole argument implies that all the research produced is only being viewed by 1% of the population then much of it is worthless and never used, therefore the public funds put into using the research were largely wasted - which we know is definitely not true. And if only 1% of the population is viewing the material, then it seems a bit unlikely that it would be so highly profitable for people like Elsevier.

I mean, this argument breaks down even further because if even only 1% more people were to use the research because it was free, the benefit to society would be worth many orders of magnitude more than the funds that would have been gained from selling the material.

The final, fatal flaw in the argument, however is that the money paid into National Parks is given to the Government, who use it to pay for the upkeep of National Parks. The people who are charging to access research are doing so to make a profit and relying largely on research funded not by the publishers, but by the U.S. Government who give grants! They are hardly contributing their entire profits into research.

My fellow researchers firmly follow the, "citizens paid for it, we are gonna share it" mentality so all results and source material is made available for free online. if someone wants everything organized into a strict 10 page limit, they can have it, but they arent getting anything more than what everyone already has access too.