5 ms·

Perhaps they should just stop wasting money on physical journals and stick to the web format that 99% of people read? Claiming $10k for a bunch of unnecessary

Perhaps they should just stop wasting money on physical journals and stick to the web format that 99% of people read? Claiming $10k for a bunch of unnecessary work is outrageous. The cost of prestigious journals are the curation and high standard of peer review. Except they don't actually pay their staff for those things...

ineedasername 5y ago
Physical print costs are generally a small part of the costs of the other things I mentioned, although the specifics would probably depend on just how popular the was. But you are right: it's still a mostly unnecessary cost these days. And regardless if the other costs, $150 to $700 per year for a journal subscription is rarely justified by the publishing costs the turn articles into more polished and high quality pieces. The financial model for disseminating scientific knowledge is broken, but I did want to acknowledge that there is good and useful work done in-between an author writing up their research and ultimately making it available online.
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  Don't the journal subscribers cover the cost of their print copy? I'm assuming journals were happy to switch subscriber to digital-only subscriptions. All the revenue without the circulation headaches.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Counter-Intuitively, the need to go digital was what led to behemoths like Elsevier and the downfall of small publishers. Similar to what happened with newspapers, though for very different reasons & economic dynamics: In the very early 00's a small publisher might have a few dozen journals and a dozen books a year, and reasonable but not huge profit margins. At the same time a couple of things were happening: 1) Elsevier was already snatching up small publishers and offering their own digital access. 2) For a small publisher going digital was much more difficult. It wasn't in their existing tech skill set and there weren't much in the way of turn-key solutions to fill their specific needs 3) Royalty agreements weren't built for all-access subscriptions. They were based on purchases of a full issue. They couldn't be shoe-horned into all-access subscriptions so the publisher would have to go back and renegotiate contracts for digital distribution in a process that was extremely time consuming... getting agreements for 30 years of your back catalog wasn't easy. 4) For a small publisher, digitizing content was very expensive. A simple destructive scan where the content was unbound and image scanned to a PDF wasn $0.50 to $1 per page, but you need things to be searchable too. OCR wasn't good enough and OCR w/human correction was very expensive. Common practice was to go for the cheaper image-only OCR and tack on ToC, Titles, abstracts and authors as indexed metadata, which also cost more money. Elsevier was big enough that most of the above were somewhat non-issues for them. They could throw their bulk around and dictate terms on royalties deploying an army of people to work them all out journal by journal. They had plenty of money to build a digital platform and digitize their back catalog year by year at a fairly rapid pace. Library budgets were being cut back, so it looked like a real nice option to subscribe to Elsevier and get instant access to tons of stuff. It became a lot harder for smaller publishers to get their material into libraries. This created a downward spiral, Elsevier picked off small publishers one by one, making their product even more appealing. In the end, we're left with what we have now: A few massive publishers that looked like reasonable options 15 and 20 years ago at those prices, but then the prices rapidly escalated, and after 7 or 10 years of digital subscriptions you almost couldn't go back because you'd have to buy that many years of back catalog.

ineedasername 5y ago

Physical print costs are generally a small part of the costs of the other things I mentioned, although the specifics would probably depend on just how popular the was. But you are right: it's still a mostly unnecessary cost these days. And regardless if the other costs, $150 to $700 per year for a journal subscription is rarely justified by the publishing costs the turn articles into more polished and high quality pieces. The financial model for disseminating scientific knowledge is broken, but I did want to acknowledge that there is good and useful work done in-between an author writing up their research and ultimately making it available online.

Scoundreller 5y ago
Don't the journal subscribers cover the cost of their print copy? I'm assuming journals were happy to switch subscriber to digital-only subscriptions. All the revenue without the circulation headaches.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Counter-Intuitively, the need to go digital was what led to behemoths like Elsevier and the downfall of small publishers. Similar to what happened with newspapers, though for very different reasons & economic dynamics: In the very early 00's a small publisher might have a few dozen journals and a dozen books a year, and reasonable but not huge profit margins. At the same time a couple of things were happening: 1) Elsevier was already snatching up small publishers and offering their own digital access. 2) For a small publisher going digital was much more difficult. It wasn't in their existing tech skill set and there weren't much in the way of turn-key solutions to fill their specific needs 3) Royalty agreements weren't built for all-access subscriptions. They were based on purchases of a full issue. They couldn't be shoe-horned into all-access subscriptions so the publisher would have to go back and renegotiate contracts for digital distribution in a process that was extremely time consuming... getting agreements for 30 years of your back catalog wasn't easy. 4) For a small publisher, digitizing content was very expensive. A simple destructive scan where the content was unbound and image scanned to a PDF wasn $0.50 to $1 per page, but you need things to be searchable too. OCR wasn't good enough and OCR w/human correction was very expensive. Common practice was to go for the cheaper image-only OCR and tack on ToC, Titles, abstracts and authors as indexed metadata, which also cost more money. Elsevier was big enough that most of the above were somewhat non-issues for them. They could throw their bulk around and dictate terms on royalties deploying an army of people to work them all out journal by journal. They had plenty of money to build a digital platform and digitize their back catalog year by year at a fairly rapid pace. Library budgets were being cut back, so it looked like a real nice option to subscribe to Elsevier and get instant access to tons of stuff. It became a lot harder for smaller publishers to get their material into libraries. This created a downward spiral, Elsevier picked off small publishers one by one, making their product even more appealing. In the end, we're left with what we have now: A few massive publishers that looked like reasonable options 15 and 20 years ago at those prices, but then the prices rapidly escalated, and after 7 or 10 years of digital subscriptions you almost couldn't go back because you'd have to buy that many years of back catalog.