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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

>How many people read this research? 1% of America?

If anything, it's 1% of the world. The problem is not limited to the US.

And it's a very significant 1% which is one of the biggest - if not literally the biggest - drivers of the world economy.

>The counter argument to this is you pay to use national parks even though you already pay for it.

Parks have huge continuing expenses. They're also owned in trust for the public.

Journal publishing has almost no expenses at all. It's pure privatised oligoply. It provides no useful public or private service of any kind.

There is nothing academic publishers do that couldn't be done better in other ways.

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> If anything, it's 1% of the world. The problem is not limited to the US.

Probably it's not worth making this point, but I think that would almost certainly be a bigger, not smaller fraction of Americans, since I think Americans are more, not less, likely to read scientific research than the rest of the world.

>Journal publishing has almost no expenses at all.

If their expenses of 60-80% of revenue is "almost nothing", surely their revenue is also "almost nothing", and therefore we shouldn't care about it.

To cite just one example, Elsevier consistently reports over $1b/yr profit on $3b/yr revenue. Not exactly "almost nothing".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier

https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/mit-open-access/open-acc...

If $2b of costs is almost no expenses, then surely $1b of profit is as well. You can't have it both ways, downplaying their costs and complaining about their profit.

Well, the $2bn of "publishing costs" include paying their CEO tens of millions a year[1], paying million-dollar packages to a number of other managers including Nick Luff and David Palmer, and dropping 1-2 million a year on non-executive board members who don't do anything at all.

Besides, do you really think it takes 28,000 people to publish a single company's journals, given that the selection and review process is all being done for them on a pro-bono basis? There are massive efficiencies there - but the CEO of a 100-person non-profit couldn't justify a $30 million package, so there is absolutely no incentive for change.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?p...

If you can do it for less, go ahead. The fact that multiple companies all have similar margins, and even open access (besides for the privately funded/subsidized ones) has the same order of magnitude charges makes me think it's unlikely.

Actually, chemistry and physics do quite well with nonprofit publishers. Compare the profit margins of for-profit publishers with non-profit ones like the American Chemical Society. In 2015, the ACS made a $10m profit on $500m gross revenue, a much smaller profit margin.

http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/about/aboutacs/financial.h...

The smaller American Physical Society made <$100,000 on $53.5m gross revenue in 2015:

http://www.aps.org/about/governance/annual-reports/

So yes, it is possible to have high quality publications produced on much smaller margins. The question is whether it is possible to provide similar services for similar margins in a for-profit context. Given that for-profit companies, by definition, seek to extract the highest possible profits on what they do, one should really question whether it makes any sense for for-profit publishers to have the stranglehold they have on academic intellectual property.

Why does the logic of "taxpayer funded research should be free" suddenly change when the publisher is a non profit? If that logic is valid, why is the $500 million fine?

I should probably have said "similar charges" as I said later. Reducing the margins to nothing can at best reduce the cost by 30% or so, which I doubt would satisfy most open access advocates; given that, the real concern has nothing to do with publishers' profit.

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