I work in book publishing, not journals, so I may be missing something in Nature's internal structure, but that seems like a lot to spend on one article. As in I think we spend less than that to do a whole book.
Bjoern Brembs has been writing a lot about open access publishing and the costs associated, here he cites a few numbers:
>There is ample material on how much the publication of a scholarly open-access article costs. SciELO publishes for under US$100 per article. SciELO, however, publishes largely in regions of the world where labor and other associated costs are comparatively low. How much costs do other organizations cite? The Open Library of Humanities is on the record with about US$500, Ubiquity, Hindawi and PeerJ are also on record within the US$100-500 range and Scholastica, RIO Journal, Science Open, F1000Research or arpha mention similar figures. Thus, there are now about ten different companies or organizations which all agree that open access publishing costs about US$100-500 and Independent analysts agree: it is established that the actual costs of publishing a scholarly article are in the low hundreds of US$.
Note that he focuses on open access articles, not closed access + open access articles, but I can't think of a reason why closed access would cost more.
http://bjoern.brembs.net/2017/11/is-a-cost-neutral-transitio...
Just a very rough calculation: If Nature has a staff of around 150 [1], each paid $100,000 year, 50 issues per year, 20 research articles per issue. This gives
150 times 100,000/(50 times 20) = $15,000 per article.
My numbers are probably off in more than one way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16339193
Nature drops about 95% of submitted papers somewhere in the pipeline, so part of the costs applies to 20x more papers than you see in the end.
If an editor can survive with these fees even when the paper will be publicly available, how can Nature need $30,000 for a paper people will pay to read?
Ordinary scientific journals don't have reviewers in paid staff. An editor sends an article (without reading it) to 2-4 non-paid reviewers, and makes the publish / don't publish decision based on the reviews. Also the editor is not paid, either.
Also, vetting submissions should be a relatively small part of your time. When you're reading a lot of submissions, you learn how to weed out the weak fairly quickly.
Nature have paid editors who also review articles before they go out for peer review, which means they have fairly obvious costs per article submitted (on top of other things like organising peer review). However, you don't pay to submit, you only pay if you're accepted. Nature accepts, I think, about 5% of the articles submitted to them. That means that for every fixed cost per submission the cost per paper published is 20x higher.
> However, you don't pay to submit, you only pay if you're accepted.
I should have been clearer that the main Nature journal does not, I believe, charge for accepted papers as it charges readers instead. However the general setup is that with open access papers people pay only if accepted.
That page also says ”On submission, the manuscript is assigned to an editor covering the subject area, who seeks informal advice from scientific advisors and editorial colleagues, and who makes this initial decision”
⇒ multiple persons, some of them employed by Nature, read each paper. Nature’s editors are highly educated (https://www.nature.com/nature/about/editors/), so their time won’t be cheap.
That can add up. For example, _if_ it costs a manweek to decide whether to do peer review on a single paper, finding that one accepted paper out and would be a quarter of a man year of work. I guess the actual effort is lower, but still significant. People have to read those papers, and that takes time.
And that is just step 1. Peer reviewers likely work for free, but managing volunteers costs money, too.
Another is that it's not the cost of one article, but also of every article they have had to reject instead of that one. That number is pretty high for Nature (the journal).