What Does It Actually Cost To Publish a Scientific Paper?

ananyo writes "Nature has published an investigation into the real costs of publishing research after delving into the secretive, murky world of science publishing. Few publishers (open access or otherwise-including Nature Publishing Group) would reveal their profit margins, but they've pieced together a picture of how much it really costs to publish a paper by talking to analysts and insiders. Quoting from the piece: '"The costs of research publishing can be much lower than people think," agrees Peter Binfield, co-founder of one of the newest open-access journals, PeerJ, and formerly a publisher at PLoS. But publishers of subscription journals insist that such views are misguided — born of a failure to appreciate the value they add to the papers they publish, and to the research community as a whole. They say that their commercial operations are in fact quite efficient, so that if a switch to open-access publishing led scientists to drive down fees by choosing cheaper journals, it would undermine important values such as editorial quality.' There's also a comment piece by three open access advocates setting out what they think needs to happen next to push forward the movement as well as a piece arguing that 'Objections to the Creative Commons attribution license are straw men raised by parties who want open access to be as closed as possible.'"

Comments

u r a moron

[Anonymous Coward]

It costs to have editors and proofreaders to make sure the ms is ok
It costs to have editors who can find the right scientists to review the paper, and then it costs to have editors to deal with biased referees and authors who won't accept referee criticism
It costs to have some one smart to filter the huge amount of dreck, and as a PhD molecular biology, I mean dreck, that comes in
it costs to maintain the servers with the pdfs so people can find things (question: who pays for the servers at "free" places like xarchive ? surely those servers don't run on free electrcicity, do they ?

Now it may not cost as much as publishers currently charge, but the idea that it costs nothing is just plain wrong, so why don't you shut up until you know something