The audience is sort of built-in. Within any given subfield there’s only so many people, and we all have to keep up to date.
Really what the journal brings is a certain cachet of veracity. A journal paper has made it through the referee process. That might not mean anything in the humanities, but in math (and presumably hard sciences) it still does.
I worked briefly for an association that published the top journals in its field (measured by how often they were cited in other publications). Being part of one of these journals was worth a lot to the authors and could be a real boon to their careers. Yes, any of them could have self-published, but they would not have the prestige of our imprimatur and they would (theoretically) be less likely to be cited by others, which is very important in the scientific community.
We did assess our authors fees, but they weren’t much of a scam because no one had to pay them. Most authors declined to pay the voluntary fees for the first 14 pages, and they were still published. Longer articles incurred mandatory fees, but most authors found ways to shorten their articles or move portions of them into online appendices which we would include on our site for free. Most of the journals were black and white. Those where color illustrations were deemed essential did not charge for color. Authors were sometimes charged if they insisted on using color in a journal in which color was not the norm. The editors (who were not employees of the publisher) always had the option of waiving fees, and quite often did.
Yowza, I have new respect for my bathroom reading at work.
I work in the periodicals section of my college’s library. My boss has us do some of her busy work, like update amounts paid in the database for journals.
Some of the prices include online access fees, but all the science ones are usually thousands of dollars.
And we have Physical Review A, B, C, D? (someone noted B is around 11k). And we have Nature, and tons of other crazy science journals. Chemistry, physics, other things this psych major does not understand.
They are overall VERY expensive. My eyes often boggle when I see the prices because I shelve everything people take from the current racks, and it’s only ever Time, Newsweek, Der Spiegel, Paris Match, New Yorker, Wired, etc. Maybe some psych journals. No one ever touches the new hard science ones. Least not the new ones, maaaaybbbe the old bound ones.
The older, larger journals have more prestige in their fields. It looks better on your CV to have articles published in the major well-known journals in the field rather than some on-line journal no one has ever heard of. It will take some time before a new model evolves.
The University I’m at doesn’t subscribe to the more expensive and prestigious physics journals anymore. It makes life interesting (and slow) trying to track down specific articles. Often have to use inter library loans which is a pain and you only get access to the article for a limited time period.
Not just that, but the way funding is allocated, through the RAE in the UK, at least, is dependent on where you’ve published. Having academics who publish in the top journals and publish lots implies a higher RAE scoring for the department, which means more government money.
Nobody wants to spend months working on something then choose to send it to some online journal with little reputation.
And don’t forget the more important thing - a reputation. For all that my girlfriend and flatmate (both PhD students in biology) grouse about Nature and Elsevier and their price-gouging arrogance, the fact remains that getting a paper into a prestigious journal is worth far more to your career than publishing in, say, the East London Online Journal of Evolutionary Genetics.
The problem is that this reputation has been built over a long time, and it’s not going to change in a hurry. Social inertia guarantees that.
Not by publishing houses: by employers. If your work is on the web, it doesn’t make your list of publications longer. Some employers expect their employees to publish a given number of articles a year. A longer/posher list of articles doesn’t make someone a better professor, but it will be linked to more self-funding, so an university will like it.
I’ve been in a situation where a coworker with a degree equivalent to mine (both MSs) was talking about her publications in a paid-to-print Spanish journal which doesn’t even translate the articles to English. She asked me if I had any publications. I said yes. She asked how many. One. Oh, where? JACS (Journal of the American Chemical Society, hard to get more prestigious). No way! I googled the reference. She wilted so fast it looked like one of those speeded-up videos of flowers opening and closing - and it wasn’t even something that affected our employment!
Wow. It costs nothing to publish in my journal, and color is $350. Color is free online, so few people use it, which is fine with us. We don’t use color to make money, just to defray the cost. I will not name my journal, but it is considered prestigious in its field.
Are you talking about Tetrahedron Letters and the SPARC equivalent the name of which I forget? When I was in library school (4 or 5 years ago) that was always cited as the big success story of SPARC, my understanding is that libraries were still essentially having to buy both.
Also, when you look at the “subscription rate” in a magazine, understand that the institutional rate is often MUCH higher.
I’d opine that this is because those are magazines that it is interesting to browse through. Paper is only good for 1) stuff that you can read in the bathroom and 2) old issues that aren’t online. Some of the more “general interest” journals like Science and Nature will have something reasonably interesting to me in pretty much every issue, but the more specialized technical journals are practically not worth picking up unless there is a specific article or topic I’m looking for. But in that case I’m finding the articles using an electronic database like PubMed, which links to PDFs, and I read them onscreen or in printouts.
JRB
Most of the journals I’m familiar with, you can opt to have color in the electronic version but not the paper version, for no extra cost. Since nobody ever reads the paper versions any more, this is what everyone in my department does.
And it’s not so much that the old, established paper journals are getting replaced by the new online journals; it’s more that the established journals are turning into online journals. All major journals are available online, and offer online-only subscriptions that are cheaper than the paper ones.
This was an available option, but what can I say, I wanted a hard copy. I guess I paid for it.
Maybe so, but unless you’re an academic, there’s precious little reason to subscribe. Communication as a social science isn’t really taken seriously outside the university setting.
Robin