Comment by anton_tarasenko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anton_tarasenko | Hacker News Reader

anton_tarasenko

Professors don't care about high prices. Universities pay for subscriptions. The pricing is political in Europe where education is funded by the public. US universities pass high prices over to students. Students pay with debt since good universities have oversupply of applicants anyway.

Elsevier had been buying academic journals for decades. A typical scheme is like Cell's story.

A professor establishes a journal under a big university's publishing arm. Then the professor thinks how to make money. Elsevier makes an offer and the professor accepts it. The journal becomes the property of Elsevier and the editors keep reviewing papers for free because it's good for their CVs.

Looking at older HN posts[1], Elsevier becomes another Comcast. That said, boycotts have not reversed the Group's profit trend.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=elsevier&sort=byPopularity&pre...

At my university, professors certainly do care about high prices. Our library seems to contact my department every few years, to ask which journal(s) we choose to drop in order to meet upcoming budgetary constraints.

I would be surprised if students are funding the library to any substantial degree.

Most research universities charge F&A ("facilities and administration")/indirect costs on sponsored projects. This is essentially a "tax" on grant money that is supposed to cover things like utilities, the library, and so on. While the details vary a bit from place to place (and funder to funder), this is often a pretty sizable amount. Yale, for example, charges a bit under 70%, so if you need $100,000 for a project, you'll need to get the funders to pony up $170,000.

If the F&A is 70%, you'd need to raise $333k to have $100k left for your research budget...

The details vary a lot, but it's usually calculated as percentage of the direct costs (like a sales tax). If your grant involves spending $100k on salaries, reagents, services (etc), the total outlay from the sponsor is closer to $170k (at 70% F&A). Here's an example from UW: http://f2.washington.edu/fm/maa/fa/facosts

In practice, the rate varies a bit. Capital equipment, like a really expensive microscope, is often exempt from F&A, but salaries sometimes have an extra charge (for benefits) attached.

Okay, i stand corrected! I was being intellectually lazy and assumed that what you were saying was that 70% of the raised funds were taken by the faculty, but thanks for the detailed example!

In Germany, 20% is charged.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com