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Comment by kss238 | Hacker News Reader

What exactly do these publishers do that causes them to charge so much? Aren't they just hosting some pdfs and keeping editors on staff to look over the papers?

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Journal prices were already high in the 1990s, but then the scientific societies, who had more reasonable prices, sold off the publishing arm to commercial publishers, and subscription prices went completely stratospheric. Greed in action, in short. Prices closer to what the market will bear and farther away from what it costs to provide.

> What exactly do these publishers do that causes them to charge so much?

Bean Counting. Captive audiences are always at risk of extortion.

> Aren't they just hosting some pdfs

The internet has been happy to provide that particular component of their empire for free.

> keeping editors on staff to look over the papers?

That's mostly outsourced (for free) to other researchers.

Even the copy editors do little work - they always are very insistent upon the author themself working through all of the style guide to make sure it conforms.

I think the main work they do is to lie about accepting LaTeX and scraping the PDF output instead so as to introduce new errors into articles.

Not really, in the sense that the reviews and editors are usually volunteers. Their main function seems to be negotiating and coordinating emails. Even for journals my university subscribes to, I'll often just get the paper from arXiv since it's easier.

I've seen the books of some professional societies and it really costs between $1000 and $3000 per article to publish. You need a skeletal secretarial staff and archival server. Most editors and reviewers work gratis in hopes others will do samewise when it is time they want to publish. Some journal collect this cost front end, e.g. Public Library of Science. Then reading is free online. Others charge an annual subscription three figures for individuals and four figures for libraries. Lots of scientists have a communication component in their grants for conferences and publication. Library subscriptions come out of the overhead tax on research most institutions add.

> I've seen the books of some professional societies and it really costs between $1000 and $3000 per article to publish.

If it costs $1000 to publish a scientific article, your first task is to fire everyone involved in publishing.

The review of the scientific papers is done by volunteers, almost without exception. Most organizations expect camera-ready results. Few people want physical paper anymore; they're too inconvenient. PDF, please.

What we're talking about is "put a PDF on a static website, so that search engines can find it". The price actually necessary is vanishingly small. The prices here reflect the fact that various organizations have managed to gain exclusive rights over results they didn't fund to develop. Since there's a strong demand and a monopoly on supply, prices skyrocket. Econ 101.

https://www.plos.org/publication-fees:

”PLOS offsets publication expenses – including those of peer review management, journal production and online hosting and archiving – by charging a publication fee, also known as an Article Processing Charge (APC), to authors, institutions or funders for each article published.”

Their cheapest journal is PLOS One, at $1.595 per article.

Also, ”Manuscripts submitted to PLOS Special Collections may incur an additional fee”, which seems t be between $500 and $1.000

I think there's a useful analogy between these publishers and those companies that buy the rights to medicines developed by small research labs, and then raise the prices several fold. The question is not "why do they charge so much?", but rather "what was it you thought would stop them?" If there is no market-based restriction on their ability to raise prices, and there is also no government-based restriction on their ability to raise prices, then it is not too surprising if they raise prices. Not that this makes it right, of course.

Right? The answer to the question "Why do they charge so much?" is always "because people will pay them that much"

While I agree that the publishers are asking for too much, what they provide is the infrastructure and procedures for publishing. I think we'd both agree startups like Yelp and AirBnB provide some non-zero value, yet I can also ask, "What exactly do AirBnB and Yelp do that causes them to have a billion dollar valuation? Aren't they just hosting some images/reviews and keeping editors on staff to look over the posts?"

I feel like this is an unfair analogy. AirBnb and Yelp charge reasonable prices and take a mostly reasonable cut, if any at all. The publishing houses are charging enormous amounts, far beyond the value they add. Or so the argument goes.

Sure, I think we both agree that the price is not proportional to the service as I already stated. The grantparent post (and other posts here) was asking in a way that implied they weren't doing more than hosting pdfs. I was just pointing out that many of our lauded startups basically are just nothing more than network effect and content hosting as well. And in fact, if they could get away with charging Elsevier-like prices, they would immediately do so and be celebrated for it.

> our lauded startups basically are just nothing more than network effect and content hosting as well

I think it would be more accurate to call them "controversial", at best, rather than "lauded" or "celebrated", even here on HN.

To be fair, though, I don't think the controversy has tended to stem from them not providing/creating value and merely being rent-seekers. Rather, it's tended to be more regulatory issues (especially with AirBnB and the "gig economy"). Yelp may be the most notable exception, as it's in hot water for alleged extortion, which is easily rent-seeking, its content is user-generated, and it depends on popularity, if not the network effect.

That said, with all those startups, it's relatively easy to point to what they actually do that's of non-trivial value to their users and/or customers. With Elsevier, that's hard to identify, presumably because it simply doesn't exist.

EDIT: "Infrastructure and procedures to publish" is extremely thin, IMO. Procedures are just a one-off document, and something the authors and the volunteers that they outsource to do, not the "publisher". As for infrastructure, I'm willing to believe it, but, so far, all I've heard is that they just take papers and send them back out, without providing anything like publishing tools.

AirBnb adds 20 to 25%, it's really not reasonable.

How much do you think it should be? I personally believe if elsevier et al only profited 25% from publishing, prices would be much lower than they are now.

How much it should cost to put an entry in to database? It shouldn't be 30% of your revenue! The whole business model here is to gain customer eyeballs and once you get momentum, you do outright theft in to fruits of other people's labor.

Imagine amount of work done by a single AirBnB host to maintain his/her property, taking bunch of risks and trying to make whole transaction successful. In what world AirBnB is eligible to get 30% of that labor for merely allowing to insert a database entry in to their system? This whole trend was popularized by Steve Jobs where Apple is somehow eligible to get 30% cut for mere privileged of publishing app on their platform. Much of the reviews they do is automated and tiny amount of labor involved is often housed in India (just like Elsewiser). For adding an entry in to database, there should be fixed price and businesses shouldn't be stealing 30% from other people's work.

Competitors are closer to 10%.

You are completely free to not use Yelp or AirBnB, not the case for Elsevier. They can charge too much because they have a monopoly.

Why aren't you free to now use Elsevier? There isn't some law saying you have to publish with them.

> There isn't some law saying you have to publish with them.

It's not the publication that costs money.

Because they are able too, one of many reasons why we should go back to approving corporate charters only when they aren't detrimental to the public good.

Prices are set more by supply and demand than what a supplier does. In this case, government-enforced monopolies called copyright limits supply, which inflates prices.

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