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

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.

>Journal publishing has almost no expenses at all.

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.

To cite just one example, Elsevier consistently reports over $1b/yr profit on $3b/yr revenue. Not exactly "almost nothing".

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

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

If $2b of costs is almost no expenses, then surely $1b of profit is as well. You can't have it both ways, downplaying their costs and complaining about their profit.

Well, the $2bn of "publishing costs" include paying their CEO tens of millions a year[1], paying million-dollar packages to a number of other managers including Nick Luff and David Palmer, and dropping 1-2 million a year on non-executive board members who don't do anything at all.

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...

If you can do it for less, go ahead. The fact that multiple companies all have similar margins, and even open access (besides for the privately funded/subsidized ones) has the same order of magnitude charges makes me think it's unlikely.

Actually, chemistry and physics do quite well with nonprofit publishers. Compare the profit margins of for-profit publishers with non-profit ones like the American Chemical Society. In 2015, the ACS made a $10m profit on $500m gross revenue, a much smaller profit margin.

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.

Why does the logic of "taxpayer funded research should be free" suddenly change when the publisher is a non profit? If that logic is valid, why is the $500 million fine?

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.