To get the hardcopies of the aps physics journals it will cost a library something like 20-30 thousand a year depending on the size of your institution.
And chances are, at least in the States, you just pull up the journal article on the interwebs and print it off. Obviously the servers and such to host these journals also cost the publishing company money, but the mark-off for a library subscribing to just the online access version is only a couple thousand bucks.
There’s no question it costs money to produce a journal, but the amounts being paid are kind of mind-boggling, and its really hard to see why. I don’t think some evil CEO fat-cat is getting using the money for hookers and blow, but the system has become massively inefficient over the years, and the money is coming out of funds that could be used to produce more actual science if it weren’t being burnt on publishing, as well as limiting access to what is largely publicly funded results.
Actually, this is quantifiable, I think. The yearly budget of arxiv, which I imagine dwarfs any individual scientific journal, is some 400,000$ a year. So I’d take that as an upperbound of what it takes to host a large number of frequently accessed articles. So the APS is basically charging something like 5% of their total operating costs to for their online component to each institution. And given that basically any National Lab or Research University with any meaningful physics program will need access to Physical Review, I’d say there must be at least 1,000 subscribers across the globe.
So a really conservative estimate is that the APS is overcharging by a factor of ~50.
It isn’t read by fewer people that matter (to the scientists). Journal articles are written in such a way that a non-scientist could not really get much out of them. The intended readers are other scientists in the field, and those readers have free access to the journals though their institutions’ subscriptions.
I would assume the journals have quite a large full-time staff dealing with submissions. In 2009, the APS journals sent more than 99,000 articles to referees, and 95% of articles were delivered to the referees within 14 days. (This includes first selecting and then successfully soliciting the referees.) This process would take a couple dozen employees, at least, neverminding the actual publishing. Some employees will need to be highly skilled and thus competitively paid. Throw in subsidies for other APS mission goals (say, 25% of journal income), and you quickly get to a multi-million dollar annual operating budget.
This is the same order of magnitude as the subscription income (maybe 300 research institutions paying about $25k/yr for the full suite of APS journals, and smaller institutions subscribing to only a relevant subset of them at significant discount).
$20k-$30k per year doesn’t really affect research. At my university, making the journal subscriptions free would increase the sponsored research budget by 0.009%.
Except that the cost of managing the referee process is supposed to come out of the money Scientists pay to have the article published, not subscription fees. The cost is ~1,000 bucks per article, so thats another 10 million dollars of revenue to hire people to manage the peer review process. That again seems pretty excessive for what amounts to forwarding papers and feedback from one person to another. And again, thats totally separate from the subscription revenue.
Well, its not huge, but aps isn’t the sum total of journals that a research institution is going to subscribe to. And again, they get you “coming and going”, taking money not just in subscription fees but also absorbing grant money for publishing fees.
Prestige, status, which means tenure, promotion, getting grants and on and on.
If you just post your paper to an arXiv type site only, no one will likely care about the paper at all. Not only will it not help you get tenure, if will actually hurt if that’s all you do. If you get a paper in a major journal in your field, that means the research has been reviewed and found notable. That will help your career significantly.
Note that there are separate issues between who “owns” the research and who owns the copyright on the write up of the research. I can assure you that the two are very distinct concepts. Maybe the data and such belongs to whoever funded it, but once the researcher starts to write it, things get murky very fast. Since the grant funder doesn’t always pay 100% of the profs salary (I never got over 2/3), the university might have a stake in this. So a lot of mutual ignoring-the-fine-print stuff happens. All by tradition. The money people and the university and the researcher generally all tacitly agree that the copyright is held by the publisher and the publisher lets a lot of stuff slip like the researcher keeping a copy of the paper on his/her webpage. They pretty much have to let things be this way or it’s mutually assured destruction.
But then some people start trying to “fix” this and it’s not going to go well. In addition to the mandates listed earlier, some people funded by drug companies are finding out that they can’t publish what they want where they want which is against the tradition. That’s not good.
Around here, not only do we have a few dozen professors in my department who get paid entirely from their grants, but there’s actually a net flow of money from them to the University. Whenever a grant comes in, the University takes a hefty slice off the top for “overhead”, which mostly means providing the prof with an office.
It is a scandal, that’s what it is. The journals get the paper written and pay nothing. The referees are paid nothing. In most cases only the editor-in-chief gets any pay at all and not much. Then the journals publish them and hang on to the copyrights forever. I doubt there is any money for them in any publication more than a year old, but they hang on anyway. Around 1995, I stopped using these commercial journals and have helped edit an online journal that is absolutely free for anyone.
Around 1990, I chaired the publication committee of the Canadian Math. Soc. We were charging about 40¢ a page for subscriptions. That is, if a journal was publishing 1000 pages a year, the sub cost $400. We were essentially running the society on the profits. The U. of Toronto Press was charging us about 10¢ a page for printing, mailing, maintenance of the subscriber list, etc. We were using TeX to provide camera-ready copy and that has a significant cost. Meantime the commercial journals were charging between $1.50 and $2.00 a page.
Publicly funded does not mean ‘bitch to the public’ Universities and individuals are given and accept money based on contracts and conditions. If your elected officials are not requiring the studies be made freely available and it is an issue to you, take up with them.
It costs money and/or time to make things freely available. Did the public give them money to do that? If they it would have been specified in the contract.
Studies cost money to do. One of the ways even those that are publicly funded pay for their studies and/or future studies is to market their findings. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to do that?
This probably deserves its own thread, but its another source of mystery to me. My advisor pulls in many times his salary in grants, and the university takes a huge chunk of that off the top. He also ends up paying my tuition at the university, despite the fact that I don’t take classes so its not really clear what the university is being paid for. And beyond office space, utilities and some of the HR resources, we don’t really use any “overhead”
I’m surprised the grant granting institutions allow this. Again, it seems to redirect a decent sized chunk of money earmaked for research to things that aren’t research.
Then you would also be surprised to find that the situation is identical for businesses getting government grants for research. It would certainly surprise the OP to find out that private companies only publish once a patent is assured. Unlike in academia, the unpatentable government funded research remains a proprietary secret. Of course academic research gets patented as well.
Given the cost of modern research, it’s really the only way research can get done. There is no such thing as an advanced country that doesn’t significantly fund research, private or public.