I know a little bit about the academic publishing business from my mother’s experience working in the field. This analysis is missing a critical factor.
In the old days, many journals were paid for by individual subscriptions. Professors, mostly, would buy a subscription to be sent to their personal home or office. Back in the days of dead-tree journals, having a copy of your own was more convenient than trekking to the library to see if they have one. But, with the internet, there’s no need for a personal subscription, and almost everybody gets journal access from a university library.
Because the library fees have to cover more users, obviously, to stay in business, academic publishers have to charge more for library fees. This is terrible if you’re not affiliated with a university, of course. But it’s made necessary by the drop in individual subscriptions.
University presses may be charging a lot, but they’re not living high on the hog; mostly, they’ve been cutting journals in the past two decades. Like the rest of the publishing world, they’re finding it harder to stay afloat in an environment dominated by the internet’s amazing ability to copy and share content.
Why do you bring up university presses? No one else singled them out. Usually when people do, it is as the baseline reasonable journal cost, an order of magnitude less than commercial presses. In this context, of single articles, they use the same pricing as commercial presses, but that’s probably incompetence on both parts.
I know a little bit about the academic publishing business from my mother’s experience working in the field. This analysis is missing a critical factor.
In the old days, many journals were paid for by individual subscriptions. Professors, mostly, would buy a subscription to be sent to their personal home or office. Back in the days of dead-tree journals, having a copy of your own was more convenient than trekking to the library to see if they have one. But, with the internet, there’s no need for a personal subscription, and almost everybody gets journal access from a university library.
Because the library fees have to cover more users, obviously, to stay in business, academic publishers have to charge more for library fees. This is terrible if you’re not affiliated with a university, of course. But it’s made necessary by the drop in individual subscriptions.
University presses may be charging a lot, but they’re not living high on the hog; mostly, they’ve been cutting journals in the past two decades. Like the rest of the publishing world, they’re finding it harder to stay afloat in an environment dominated by the internet’s amazing ability to copy and share content.
Why do you bring up university presses? No one else singled them out. Usually when people do, it is as the baseline reasonable journal cost, an order of magnitude less than commercial presses. In this context, of single articles, they use the same pricing as commercial presses, but that’s probably incompetence on both parts.