Why does a journal article cost $40?

The Watercooler
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I stopped regularly reading academic articles some years ago. Now I just check out an occasional one. The cost! As a non-academic, I would have to pay maybe $40 or whatever to download a PDF of an article on the off-chance that it has something relevant.

But why?

Well, academic writing has this model where the scholar does all the work, then submits it to a journal whose editor works for free, who then hands it to peers for review, also for free, and then gets it published. Then they make a PDF and charge $40 to download it.

But why?

Well, the scholars, supposedly, get something called “prestige” from this. Their jobs, their wages, their positions, depend on publishing articles. So they essentially supply “content” for free to publishers for the sake of social kudos.

Sounds to me a little like social media, to be honest. I wonder if we can see academic publishing as the first implementation of this model? The pioneer in the field of treating creators as disposable and interchangeable, and the quality and meaning of what is said as irrelevant? All is subsumed to the unholy grail of “content”, from which a rich harvest is reaped by the one who owns the content.

But why?

Well, every story has an origin. Sometimes the origin lies in boring facts of economic and technological advancement, the apparently inexorable forces of history.

But sometimes the origin lies in a billionaire superspy for Mossad, MI6, and the KGB, who, after his unexplained death on his yacht in the Mediteranean, was glorified in a fawning state funeral by the nation whose interests he had served in secret since its founding on the lands of other people, while his massive investment in Russian sex-trafficking mafia, revealed after his death, was perpetuated by his surviving daughter, supplying the wealth and connections for the world’s most notorious pedophile, who recruited teenage or prepubescent girls via Miss Teen Universe or Victoria’s Secret to be raped on his private island by princes, businessmen, tech oligarchs, politicians, lawyers, and—in a true full circle moment—some of the most influential scientists and academics of the age, while crime connections and payoffs for law enforcement were handled by a local man so depraved even they thought he was creepy, a notorious, sadistic rapist who would go on to become President.

That superspy was Robert Maxwell, and the story of how he turned academic publishing into what it is today is told by Mark W. Neff.

Whereas scientific norms at the time viewed scientific publishing as a public good that should not be subject to profit motives, Maxwell understood that scientific publishing was a market unlike others because there was an almost ceaseless growth of demand, and free labor. Scientists would pressure their institutional libraries to secure access to any serious journal publishing work relevant to their own. If the generous postwar government funding of science was the push that fueled rapid growth of science, the profit-seeking appetite of publishers was the pull.

It worked well enough that other publishers copied his model, and academic publishing ended up having higher profit margins than oil.

Now the process is being pushed even further than Maxwell could have imagined, as journals are being filled with AI garbage—all created by burning unholy quantities of said oil—and editing and peer review will soon, if it has not already, be fobbed off to AI too, as will the reading of the articles and the writing of the reviews and the articles in response. And if you are naive enough to take the time to actually write something decent, make no mistake, your work will be scraped and used for future models so that they will never have to rely on anything so deadline-averse as a “human” ever again. What a world!

Shoutout to all the scholars, students, and teachers who hate all this and try to ensure quality, meaningful work is published in open-access journals. Keep it honest. And if anyone is reading this, please, I’m literally getting down on my knees and begging right now, please demand that journals you submit for refuse any AI content, or scraping, or involvement in review or editing.

Anyway, that’s why journal articles cost $40.

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One positive contribution from the physics community (specifically the high-energy physics community) was the migration from preprint snail-mail lists to preprint servers. arXiv, https://arxiv.org/ arXiv - Wikipedia started as a mail server in 1991 (my first posts there used that interface) and subsequently migrated to a web interface (which maintains a retro feel to this day…). This development was important in democratizing access to preprints, which are essential in fast-moving fields.

For example, this 2012 paper from one of the CERN teams on the discovery of the Higgs Boson was simultaneously submitted to arxiv [1207.7235] Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC and Physics Letters B https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269312008581 In fact, many journals have an option to import the files that have already been uploaded to arXiv.

Luckily, this development made it impossible for publishers of physics journals to forbid the distribution of preprint versions of articles and this has spread to most fields. For example, here are the Elsevier rules:
https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies-and-standards/sharing. This means that most academics can post preprints and accepted article versions on arXiv (or some other non-commercial server appropriate to their field). Engines such as Google Scholar can easily locate these.

Therefore, in field I am familiar with, authors can quite easily take these steps to make sure that their articles are accessible. Many funding agencies are now requiring this and most universities have their own servers for this purpose.

So why do we bother with journals at all? Because to count our articles as “publications” for employment and other purposes they need to be peer reviewed. That’s the key function of publishers from my point of view, not their actual journals. It’s interesting to speculate whether it would be possible to have a peer-review system independent from the publishers. We can always dream…

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Yes, thank goodness for this. I am getting to point where if it is not available on arxiv, and if the data is not available for reproduction on Github, I can’t be bothered.

Luckily, being part of a university, I get access to some articles that I would otherwise have to pay for, but I seldom access those anymore.

I can’t be bothered to publish anymore, anything I want to publish, it can go to Github Pages. That’s one of the advantages of being “retired.” I get to do whatever I want, without fear or favour.

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There are other legal ways of obtaining pdfs of academic articles without having to buy them. One way is to type the article title in ‘google scholar’ and doing a search - then at the right side bottom, it gives the number of versions available and most often, one of them will provide a pdf. Sometimes this pdf is a post-print that has been shared online by the author/s. The other option of getting an article is by locating the author’s email address online and then writing a personal email kindly requesting the article – most authors are happy to send a copy. The third way is to write and ask someone who has access to a university library.

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Note some editors indicate clearly to authors not to send a copy to any ones/websites during some times.

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Perhaps in some fields it is forbidden. As I said above, in physics, chemistry, etc, there is no issue with posting the submitted version of your articles (i.e. your own typesetting) to non-commercial or personal websites. There is also usually no issue with emailing copies of the published article to colleagues.

If there are fields where this is not the case, the scholars in those fields need to be more organised!

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This is why I walk and not read! :dove:

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The few thousand so called elites in each country control the politics and information, they only put out what they want us to see. We now have mass misinformation and it is making people confused and isolated. Who can we trust?

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In the 90s I worked for the organization that publishes Science (the competitor to Nature). Project work required socialization with other scientific societies/organizations that publish the major peer review journals in the hard sciences (and some soft). There’s too much infrastructure not related to publishing the journals that the journal fees also cover. The role of the scientific society as an influencer and so forth.

Also, a good chunk of the peer review infrastructure itself (including editor roles, e.g.) costs money.

That’s only speaking to the major journals in those sciences. I understand that all that infrastructure isn’t there or even needed for smaller journals with fewer subscribers.

I went to Science today to see what they’re charing by-the-drink for a single article – $30 – compared to a one-year subscription that costs $79.

Well that tells us a lot there. They want you buying the annual subscription, not by-the-drink. It’s the aggregator platforms like jstor that end up making tons of money. Believe me, Science doesn’t make a lot of money. Just a case in point.

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Thank for your reply. I know that posting on websites is not allowed. However, I haven’t encountered any journals that tell not to email pdfs to individual people. I publish papers too and whenever someone requests, I send them the article right away. I have also requested articles from others (when they are not easily obtainable from the local university library).

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It depends what you are posting. As I said, in fields I’m familiar with, you can put your as-submitted papers on non-commercial sites, such as arXiv or university web sites.

In this post I gave the example of the Higgs Boson paper from the CMS collaboration, which was simultaneously submitted to journal and placed on arXiv: Why does a journal article cost $40? - #2 by mikenz66. I also linked to Elsevier’s policy.

In fast-moving fields, preprint servers, such as arXiv, are where researchers actually read new research. The publishing system simply validates it. It also makes a ton of money for huge commercial organisations such as Elsevier and Springer Nature. In the old days the published papers looked a lot nicer than typescripts, but for many decades we’ve had tools like LaTeX, so preprints are indistinguishable in print quality from published papers. Of course, the review process weeds out some errors, and the better journals do some useful copyediting.

Neither have I.

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Right, the money flows nicely to the top of the system, from those who do the work. Elsevier, for example, made over $2 billion profit last year.

https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-europe-infrastructure-2024-2-elsevier-parent-reports-10-hike-in-profits-for-2023/

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Wow, that article certainly speaks to the question.

Still curious, I checked out the 2023 annual report numbers for the Science publisher. Expenses:

Journals: $29.3M + Publishing: $21.8M = $51.1M

(I assume “journals” refers to everything leading up to actual publishing.)

Revenue – Publishing: $71.5M

So that’s like 30% profit. And that’s a non-profit entity in the US. Then they use the profit to cover other organization activity expenses.

Have to think Elsevier aims for higher profit than that. :thinking: A they are not in a similar tax category, likely.

Finally, I decided that they probably want to hook people with annual subscriptions that carry over automatically year-to-year. I imagine that’s where they get the most revenue. The very high by-the-drink consumption is likely meant to encourage this. Ho hum.

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In the Humanities, in top journals, posting preprints or postproduction is strictly prohibited, if you don’t pay Open Access ($2500), for one paper.

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That’s outrageous situation. Can you give us a few examples?

I don’t know of any reputable science journals that don’t allow the posting of preprints. Here’s the policy from Nature:
Initial submission | Nature.

Preprint servers

The Nature journals support the posting of submitted manuscripts on community preprint servers such as arXiv and bioRxiv. We do, however, ask you to respect the following summaries of our policies:

  • The original submitted version may be posted at any time.
  • The accepted version may be posted 6 months after publication.
  • The published version—copyedited and in Nature journal format—may not be posted on a preprint server or other website.

Hopefully, the fact that many funding agencies are now requiring the accepted version to be made available (an embargo period, such as the above is acceptable) will eventually force a change in policy in humanities journals.

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For instance, the Journal of Indian Philosophy

https://link.springer.com/journal/10781/articles

They have such politics. One will be able to upload the papers on the personal site after the embargo period (one year).

And many other top journals still have the same rules.

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Yes, there is an embgo period on “accepted manuscripts” but they don’t forbid uploading preprints: Springer Nature’s Guide to Licensing, Copyright, and Author Rights | Open science | Springer Nature
In fact they encourage it: Editorial policies | Policies | Springer Nature

Preprints
We believe that sharing preprints can accelerate research and help advance discovery.

We achieve this by ​​​​​​​having a unified policy that encourages posting of preprints on preprint servers, supports citation and open licensing of preprints with the expectation that authors will respect our policies on communications with the media.

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Hi Mike, you are right; this seems to be the case.

Springer also says that preprints can be freely uploaded.

What I meant is embargo for the AM.

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Hi @ Sphairos,

It’s good to see that preprints and uploading accepted manuscripts (possibly after an embago of a year or so) is not forbidden in that case. This uploading is now encouraged by institutions but often not done.

When researchers do do this (Bhikkhu Analyayo is a good example - he obviously has upload agreements----with a year or two embago—for most of his books—not just articles), it reduces the problems that those, like Bhante @Sujato has with access:

Search engines, particularly Google Scholar, will point you the various available versions (journal, uploaded to institution, preprint). This sort of arrangement means the publishers can still make money, but the general public is not locked out from the information forever.

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Yeah, I like this model. Was sad to see the NYT podcasts will be getting a reverse embargo: the latest will be free, but the back archives paywalled.