Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

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I am not sure there is any requirement that your price be based on the cost of your bill of materials. Would shut down a lot of companies that are like "$30,000 per year for SSO". It probably costs them less to let you log in with Google than it does to store your password hashes, and yet it's always the "no, you have to pay us more" option.

The thing with these journals is that they have name recognition that makes people want their research to be published in them. Getting published is good for their career. Combine that with a desire to support open access, and you have a product that you can charge for.

It's doubly good, because it's not like authors are using their own personal funds to pay this fee. It just comes out of their grant. Whenever someone buys something with someone else's money, you know you're going to be ripped off. See also, Wifi at businessey hotels.

Anyway, if the taxpayers are paying for this, we should ask authors to just host the papers on their websites. If you need the $5 for a VPS or whatever, I'll give you the $5 personally.

Incidentally, https://sso.tax

In a well-functioning market, the price of goods should eventually shrink to their cost of production. If they do not, that's a monopoly.

Only for undifferentiated goods or commodities. Differentiated products can certainly command a premium to the cost of production. Those aren’t monopolies.

1. There is no such thing as a "well-functioning market", that's an ideological construct.

2. In a market of commodities, prices are determined by multiple aspects of the surrounding social power relations.

3. In a market, there tends to be a concentration of capital leading to an oligopoly or monopoly; this is more likely than a shrinking of prices to the cost of production.

"social power relations" are an ideological construct too, that's the idea, that we use ideologies to ideate better explanations, simpler explanations for things. No shit, in other words. Nice try, though.

The point is that by publishing in nature, one of the things you're paying for is prestige. Prestige has a very high market value.

Another point is who pays. If the paper is submitted by a huge Consortium that received more than 2 millions for a given research, all the interests are aligned to pay 10K in publishing fees: Nature is very interested in publishing a less-than-perfect work if they pay 10K. The Consortium is very interested in publishing in Nature and Open Access to give the work a maybe undeserved push. And the money comes from other pockets.

I think you mean Nature is capturing some of the rents bestowed upon authors for publishing in Nature.

Honestly, I wish more journals mandated open for a fee—I want my work open, but the choice makes it easy for universities to decline to pay—if mandatory, they would gladly pay 3x to have their researchers publish in top outlets (I’m in administration for a large R1)

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