Some smaller labs at my tier 1 research institution have their grad students TA (so the university pays their salary) because they don't have the ability to pay them the $30k salary. $11k for one paper is a meaningful amount of money, and other journals can publish for an order of magnitude less.

It doesn't cost $11k to read a paper, send a few emails and do some typesetting. People pay for this kind of thing because having a Nature paper on your resume makes it much easier to get a tenure-track job. It's just a prestige racket.

Yep, $11k is a term’s worth of stipend when I was a PhD student.

I get that but also consider that people are free to publish in other journals.

Although it does make me uncomfortable that its a for-profit company, they only print 7-10 articles a month, so I can understand the financials mathematics of needing to make it this amount per article if they want to continue to have a full staff maintain the journal the way they want to run it. I am just grateful these articles are now open to the public for free.

They can publish in other journals but at the expense of their career. Many publications at leading journals is your only real chance of making a career in academia - it matters more than actual impact because they're much easily measurable :)

A prime example of "what can be measured can be managed". Grim news for science.

Yep! My wife is a postdoc at Stanford and has become completely disillusioned by the whole thing, pretty sad to see after so many years of loving it!

By contrast, another Springer journal, Scientific Reports, charges about $2000 per article… and publishes about 23,000 articles per year. So it’s not all down to high fixed costs. It’s rent-seeking.

This. 11K would be a full tenth of the discretionary money I got for my startup package. The paper would be a sweet get, but this is definitely a "Rich labs get papers in Nature journals, get better grants and become richer labs..." problem.

I'll point you to Fields medalist Tim Gowers, who is kind of a leader in the free academic publishing movement against Elsevier and co. and has launched new journals himself: https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an...

His journals can manage at a whopping $10 per submission, and that's with a SaaS platform in the middle. Throw in a few bucks for arXiv hosting costs too if you will.

So what the hell do these protection racket journals provide at >$10k per submission? And do realize they sell subscriptions to institutions — I highly doubt institutions get better deals when some authors pay for open access — and physical copies on top of that, so it's not like they actually get nothing for these open access articles.

The prestige provides access to jobs/promotions, invitations to talks, and higher scores on grants. The tangible benefits are more than $10k.

Not saying this is right, but nothing will change until scientists stop ranking other scientists by the number of publications in prestigious journals/conferences.

Other than inertia and prisoner’s dilemma, there’s zero reason a cheap journal can’t be equally prestigious. The bloodsucking big academic publishers contribute approximately zero to science for what they charge compared to a Gowers-style journal run by the same editors and reviewers.

> I know people see this as rent seeking, but journals DO provide a service which costs money.

I don't know the specifics of Nature, but the main service provided by journals (peer-review and selection) is usually done by other researchers that are unpaid. Most journals will do little or nothing about typesetting and edition of articles.

What journals do is stand in the middle of a system where researchers need to publish in high quality journals in order to advance their career and also need to access the same journals in order to gain knowledge.

> Clinical trials are in the millions, and research grants are often 6 figures.

Maybe for Nature, but other journals have high open access fees and publish research from groups with lower budgets. You could very well find journals for which the open access fees are in the order of four, five months of salary of the main researcher, just for sending the article to reviewers and hosting the PDF in a website at zero marginal cost.

While I normally defend publishing fees fairly actively, $11K is uncalled for.

...and what service is that?