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>The largest companies, like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Springer and Wiley, typically have profit margins of over 30 percent, which they say is justified becau
by ikeboy 11y ago
>The largest companies, like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Springer and Wiley, typically have profit margins of over 30 percent, which they say is justified because they are curators of research, selecting only the most worthy papers for publication.
> But that financial model requires authors to pay a processing charge that can run anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 per article so the publisher can recoup its costs.
These two facts seem to point strongly to the publishers' being in the right. 30% is not a high number. If they were to lower their prices by 30%, running completely as nonprofits (or whatever number would break even), do you think people's complaints about difficulty of access would go away? If not, your complaining is not about their profit.
And you can't seriously expect them to eat a >$1000 loss on every paper.
Either we need a single party to fund upfront, like the government, or we need some other way to pay for it.
- ikeboy 11y agoThe quote from the The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (not the UN charter http://www.un.org/en/charter-united-nations/ http://www.un.org/en/charter-united-nations/, odd mistake by the nytimes) is also misleading. The very next sentence says >(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
- Blahah 11y agoNote that the authors do not get materials benefit when journals sell their articles. If anything that sentence means that authors can claim back the profits made by publishers.
- ikeboy 11y agoAuthors sign over their copyrights to the journals. Are you suggesting copyright should not be transferable (people should not be permitted to transact freely)? Authors do benefit by being able to publish for much less than it would cost were they to bear all the costs. To be precise, they benefit by the cost of open access that offers comparable service.