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Comment by dougmccune | Hacker News Reader

$5k is about the top of the scale. Nature, Cell, etc can get that. More typical is the $1,500 range (OA publisher PLoS One is about that). One of the most interesting things to see is that the big winner of the APC (article processing charge) landrush is Elsevier. The Wellcome Trust published data about who they are paying APCs to, and the biggest player was Elsevier: http://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2014/03/28/the-cost-of-open-acces... So it's interesting to see the (at least short-term) winners in the rise of APC-based open access are still the same big publishers, at least for now.

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Can you imagine if every scientist sent Wikipedia 20% of their journal fees? What would they do with that much money?

Wikipedia is notoriously poor on science, particularly cutting edge. That's the wrong model.

That's surprising, since their math and CS stuff is usually pretty good.

The thing with math (and abstract CS) is that it's generally purely logic. In principal you should be able to write (at least verify) an entire article with no outside references as it is all logical deductions, it's armchair science in that sense (no negative connotations meant).

But if you're going to write an article on say quantum computing or confocal microscopy, to name random things, you are going to need outside references to experimental work, history, best practices, open debates, etc. And that is usually where the errors slip in, how many people actually check the sources properly?

They're also usually pretty terrible when it comes to modern science things, but I suppose that can be attributed to a small group of people actually knowing about those things in the first place.

This is for a very narrow definition of maths. Also it's rare that a paper is completely comprehensive. Some proofs are usually defered to other papers.

Wikipedia - and encyclopedias in general - are good sources for established works, not the cutting edge. I think this applies to computer science as well. The CS material on Wikipedia that you would expect to find in an undergrad curriculum is excellent. But the treatment for the research areas I am familiar with is not good. That, however, is to be expected - we're still figuring it out!

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