Nature has an open-access fee (APC) = $12,193.
Same goes for Nature Chemistry, Nature Physics, etc.
I can imagine this fee can be used to:
- pay for 5-10 conferences for PhD students
- pay a basic salary of a Full Professor for 6 months at IIT Hyderabad
- pay a PhD salary at IISc Bengaluru for 2.5 years (!)
- pay for >200 hours of top-notch electron microscopy
(Some publishers weave open-access fees for low-income and lower-middle income countries. See links in the comments.)
My concerns about academic publishing:
1. Traditional publishers have a profit margin ~ 15% at best. On the contrary, the for-profits academic publishers have a margin of almost 40%. This is higher than the margins for Google, Apple or Amazon. And most of it comes from the tax payers money that could instead go into research and fellowships.
2. Scientific publishing market is HUGE: 19-25 billion USD. This is equal to the entire music industry market!
3. The insanely high profits of publishers cannot facilitate the review process properly. Publishing an article often takes many months/years. Yes, quality control is important. BUT it hugely affects career opportunities of our students & postdocs.
4. Non-academic publishers pay freelancers for articles. But scientific publishers ask YOU to pay instead (through APC or subscriptions, especially for-profit publishers).
5. Papers in Nature, Science and Cell substantially improve your career opportunities. This is WHY the impact factor is so important for young researchers.
6. Peer-review papers are counted in grant applications. This is WHY arXiv can’t become a reasonable substitute yet.
7. Reviewing takes a lot of our VERY precious time. BUT it is still regarded as “community service” despite clearly benefitting publishing corporations and huge margins.
8. “Publish or perish” is still the status quo, despite so many initiatives and declarations on how destructive the focus on metrics is for science.
If the Cosmopolitan magazine can pay its freelance authors despite having small profit margins, why scientific journals make everything so expensive?
Is it to maintain 40% margin? I don't quite understand it.
I do love Nature journals. They offer pretty good content to read.
But there are big issues with academic publishing that can’t go away unless we keep raising our voices.
