This is an easy calculation: for each subscription article, we pay on average US$5000. A publicly accessible article in one of SciELO’s 900 journals costs only US$90 on average. Subtracting about 35% in publisher profits, the remaining difference between legacy and SciELO costs amount to US$3160 per article. With paywalls being the only major difference between legacy and SciELO publishing (after all, writing and peer-review is done for free by researchers for both operations), it is straightforward to conclude that about US$3000 are going towards making each article more difficult to access, than if we published it on our personal webpage. Now that is what I’d call obscene.
Just to break the costs of legacy publishing down in detail:
| Publisher profits | 1750 |
| Paywalls | 3160 |
| Actual costs of typesetting, hosting, archiving, etc. | 90 |
| Sum | 5000 |
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Posted on July 30, 2014
at 18:16
There are also payments to editors at different levels, marketing, maintaining the (mostly unnecessary) infrastructure of the publisher, etc. I agree it is hard to see how that adds up to $3K per paper. Why are they not making even bigger profits? They seem quite lazy. Maybe it is mostly going on unnecessary salaries.
Of course, you are correct – I just didn’t want to make it even worse by adding assumed inefficiencies of legacy publishers. Moreover, those are just assumed, while there is ample evidence for the components I did explicitly mention.
You are paying for the vanity (and the associated hoped for promotion/tenure/extra citations/keynotes at big conferences) of being published in a prestigious journal. When people talk about “vanity publishing”, they should be referring to “Science”.