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Comment by dibujante | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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