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I get that but also consider that people are free to publish in other journals.

Although it does make me uncomfortable that its a for-profit company, they only print 7-10 articles a month, so I can understand the financials mathematics of needing to make it this amount per article if they want to continue to have a full staff maintain the journal the way they want to run it. I am just grateful these articles are now open to the public for free.

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They can publish in other journals but at the expense of their career. Many publications at leading journals is your only real chance of making a career in academia - it matters more than actual impact because they're much easily measurable :)

A prime example of "what can be measured can be managed". Grim news for science.

Yep! My wife is a postdoc at Stanford and has become completely disillusioned by the whole thing, pretty sad to see after so many years of loving it!

By contrast, another Springer journal, Scientific Reports, charges about $2000 per article… and publishes about 23,000 articles per year. So it’s not all down to high fixed costs. It’s rent-seeking.

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