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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

Trivial

Obviously that's your opinion, but since when does the effort it takes to create something matter about the price? It's pretty trivial to move product from a factory to a retail store, yet people have no problem paying for that.

And again, if it's trivial, then there is nothing stopping anyone from starting their own journal. But amazingly, nobody has done that.

What's the saying about "find out why the fence is there before you tear it down"?

Most journals are not "high quality.

Who cares about most journals? Nobody reads them anyways. I'm talking Nature, Science, etc.

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The effort to create something has always factored into the price. It's not the only factor, but it's there. Additionally, I take the main point of the response of "trivial" (in the case of typesetting it's often just providing a bundle of extra tex files to recompile your paper with) as less a remark on the price, and more a remark on the work. The question you answered was what work the publishers are doing, with the underlying qualifier of [to justify/correlate with their price] and the direct followup you didn't speculate on asking about what they charge for each item of work. It's like answering "what do doctors do to command such a high price?" with "scribble on a piece of paper". OK, let's assume that's really a good description of the work they provide, how much specifically do they charge for it? The full fee? Great, this exercise wasn't helpful at all. Can we break the work down into smaller units and try to estimate costs for each, whether those costs are "reasonable" or "unreasonable"? When I pay $30 for a single paper, what parts of the work endeavor does each dollar go to? We can even take into account fuzzy second-order fees like "well you're really paying back into the massive amount of work they did beforehand so they can scribble the right things now" when we're out of other ideas, but I can't imagine much of that $30 going specifically to the work of "typesetting" because it's so trivial.

The effort to create something has always factored into the price.

Absolutely not and there are plenty of examples. If I buy land and find oil underneath, it's zero effort for me to rake in the dollars. If I come up with a super complex device that takes me 1 year to build, the price is zero if no one wants it.

Price is driven by supply and demand.

Nature, Science, etc.

You should know they are sometimes called "Tabloid journals" for a reason. Actual 'high-quality' or 'flagship' journals are most the most part unknown outside their discipline.

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