Re:Universities spend millions on accessing results of publi...
by Vinnl on Wednesday December 13, 2017 @02:46PM
(#15916975)
That's actually how the UK and the Netherlands have been pushing for Open Access: by paying the publishers for publishing an article.
The problem is that this keeps the barrier to participate high - instead of paying to read research, you're paying to publish it.
Now, this isn't necessarily a problem: research costs money, and publishing that research is just part of that. However, the prices are widely considered disproportionate: ranging from $3000 to $5000 per article in the traditional journals (that researchers feel obliged to publish in because that helps their careers), with profit margins of 30% to 40% (comparable to Apple's, which sells luxury products).
Considering how technology has drastically lowered the prices of most other types of media publishing, it's suspicious that prices of academic articles have only risen.
There's a huge movement to improve this situation, but it's a pretty difficult market with many different actors with different incentives. I've written some about why it is difficult to change this at [1].
The problem is that this keeps the barrier to participate high - instead of paying to read research, you're paying to publish it.
Now, this isn't necessarily a problem: research costs money, and publishing that research is just part of that. However, the prices are widely considered disproportionate: ranging from $3000 to $5000 per article in the traditional journals (that researchers feel obliged to publish in because that helps their careers), with profit margins of 30% to 40% (comparable to Apple's, which sells luxury products).
Considering how technology has drastically lowered the prices of most other types of media publishing, it's suspicious that prices of academic articles have only risen.
There's a huge movement to improve this situation, but it's a pretty difficult market with many different actors with different incentives. I've written some about why it is difficult to change this at [1].
[1] https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...