$1000 for what? The research and paper writing was already funded by the tax payer. Peer review is done for free by other researchers today. Journals provide very little value for the money they extort for paper access.
>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.
Edit: also, I don't expect margins of 30% from companies producing very low value. Do you really think that if they'd lower their margin to 0, with prices of around 30% less, everyone would stop complaining?
Given that peers review a paper for free and it costs fractions of a penny to host a pdf, why should we care about the publishers? What value do they ultimately bring to the table?
We should be rethinking how this is done entirely.
This is off the cuff, but...
Perhaps researchers applying for public funding should be required to register as peers. Each researcher submits their publication to a public service like data.gov (maybe research.gov?). Peers are automatically assigned according to area of expertise. The peering process proceeds much like it does today.
On completion of review and approval, the paper and any materials needed to reproduce the research is made public and available to anyone.
The cost for all of that would be relatively trivial.
Also, many of those journal fees are paid for with tax dollars to begin with. An expense that would no longer be necessary.
1. Their margins are extremely high, 90% range. 2. Open access journals can charge orders of magnitude less
Neither is broadly correct.
Regarding the claim that ~30% margins are excessive: do you think that if their prices went down by 30%, everybody would be happy?
It is insane that they go after people who wrote the paper when they try to give it away on their own website.
A little reading goes a long way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier
Claiming that they're just extracting rent ignores the cost, which even at a 40% margin is still 60% of what they charge.
Do you have any information on their legal costs that would reduce the cost above?
Do you think everyone complaining about prices would be happy if they would reduce prices by 35% across the board, thus making no profit? Or would you still want it to be free? If the latter, your complaint is not solely based in Elsevier's "rent extraction", but in something else.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jan/16/academic-pub...
It's hardly surprising that publishers would fight dirty to hang on to a business model where scientists do research that is largely publicly funded, and write manuscripts and prepare figures at no cost to the journal; other scientists perform peer-review for free; and other scientists handle the editorial tasks for free or for token stipends. The result of all this free and far-below-minimum-wage professional work is journal articles in which the publisher, which has done almost nothing, owns the copyright and is able to sell copies back to libraries at monopolistic costs, and to individuals at $30 or more per view.