5 ms·
The open access movement seems connected, in many minds, to the rise of the Internet. But these academic associations could have done the same long ago; a few c
by hackuser 11y ago
The open access movement seems connected, in many minds, to the rise of the Internet. But these academic associations could have done the same long ago; a few college students can get together and produce and print magazines by the thousands on a shoestring, so certainly these associations could have printed their own journals. I don't understand how they ended up paying these high prices in the first place. Does anyone know the history of it?
- shas3 11y agoTypesetting of research papers was way more complex (for authors) in the pre-personal computer days (pre 1990, say). So you needed publishers to pay and employ people to do this. And then you also have the logistics of mailing the journals to thousands of libraries across the world. The time and effort involved in this certainly justifies at least some of the conventional costs, given that the cost scales almost linearly with the number of subscribers, number of pages, etc. The big 'step-change' with the internet is that this linear scaling doesn't exist any more, we are reduced to a fixed cost and it is price-gouging for publishers to charge per page, per article, etc. etc. Ninja edit: In the internet era, here is one post that describes how much it costs to run a journal, the prestigious Journal of Machine Learning Research http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-journal/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficien...