> AAS is a nonprofit society, though, so while there may be some cross-subsidy of other activities those page charges must reflect to some degree the actual co

> AAS is a nonprofit society, though, so while there may be some cross-subsidy of other activities those page charges must reflect to some degree the actual costs to maintain the journal. I've published with ApJ. In late 2016, ApJ charged us around $1500 for a 16-page article, which apart from some minor copyediting, was published as it is. Now, the $1500 fee may not be much for a well-funded research group in a first-world country. However, it is a considerable amount of money for other research groups. If arXiv, which receives over 10,000 submissions and 35 million downloads a month [1] can operate on a yearly budget of $2.5 million [2], I don't see why these journals can operate at a comparable budget. > Journals without page charges simply pass those costs on to readers (or their libraries), which slows scientific progress. There is good evidence that scientific progress has slowed down already [3,4] and it has almost nothing to do with lack of open access journals. Science progressed at a much faster rate in early and mid 20th century, where such concepts didn't even make sense. 21st-century science will fair better if funding institutions started caring about the quality of research done. [1]: https://arxiv.org/stats/main https://arxiv.org/stats/main [2]: https://arxiv.org/about/reports-financials https://arxiv.org/about/reports-financials [3]: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminishing-returns-science/575665/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminish... [4]: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/34/9384 https://www.pnas.org/content/113/34/9384