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He claims that digital distribution isn't cheaper than analog. I don't doubt that, given the amounts of money it probably costs to build effective DRM and payw
by secabeen 8y ago
He claims that digital distribution isn't cheaper than analog. I don't doubt that, given the amounts of money it probably costs to build effective DRM and paywall systems. Were all journals open-access, their costs would be a lot lower too.
Sci-Hub hosts 85% of the articles published in paywalled scholarly journals on a shoe-string.
- ben_jones 8y agoI think it should be acknowledged that there are likely a number of accessibility and similar requirements that at scale bear non-trivial costs. I.e. building a website with top of the line accessibility, providing resources for auditory and visually impared, etc. I'm not saying current publishers are great at these things, just that they should not be forgotten and should be improved on if a new order was to take shape.
- secabeen 8y agoThat's a good point, and accessibility of science is a big issue across the academy, as the Berkeley captioning case shows. The DRM/subscription piece of digital publishing is still probably the biggest cost of their model. I remember but can't find a citation for an apocryphal story that the administrative overhead of metering, tracking and billing phone calls in the Ma Bell days was more than 50% of the cost.