The Open Science revolution and the price of scientific content

“Over at The Crux, Mike Taylor outlines the toxic dynamic between research scientists and the academic publishing giant Elsevier.  Almost 7,000 scientists have joined the Cost of Knowledge boycott, citing a long list of grievances against Elsevier’s journal publishing practices...  The purpose of this post is to answer the question: what are the publishers thinking? Publishers used to be the sole gatekeepers of content, offering editorial, production, and distribution services that authors would not otherwise have access to.  A major publisher like Elsevier also lends enormous credibility to findings that appear under its banner, crucial for those “publish or perish” scientists looking to establish their reputations...  The Elsevier journal Advances in Space Research carries a whopping price tag of $4,923.00 for 24 printed issues.  An electronic-only subscription won’t save you much – that one runs $4,512.75.   Buying a single article costs $31.50.  To justify that to already-incensed scientists and science writers, the journal should have to account for where the money goes.  I can do it on the trade side.  For a standard new release hardcover priced at $26,  the retailer (B&N, Amazon, etc.) will buy copies at a 50% discount.  Of the remaining $13, the author will receive either an 8% royalty ($2.08) if it’s a print book (because another $2 or so will go toward production), or a 15% royalty on an e-book ($3.90).  That leaves somewhere between $8.50 – 9.00/copy, which is diffused into employee salaries, rent, electricity, marketing co-op, etc...  If scientific journals can provide a similar cost breakdown that justifies the nearly $5k subscription price, I’m all ears... The actions [Elsevier’s] we’re seeing lately are not so much malicious as they are bewildered.  Researchers only want publicity and distribution for their findings, not big money... Open access journals would also help chip away at the “ivory tower reputation” that has dogged science for decades.  To a public that howled when Wikipedia went dark last month, it’s clear which side has the upper hand on the PR front... Either way, I won’t pay the $31.50.  But I might pay something, and that’s where an altruistic “pay-as-you-wish” model might make sense.  Instead of operating at one extreme (free) or the other (lots), why not make it a sliding scale?  ‘Paying for something you value, even when you don’t need to, is a mark of a civilized society. The NYT treated its readers as mature and civilized adults, and outperformed internal expectations as a result. Meanwhile, the WSJ and FT are still treating their readers with mistrust, as though they’ll be robbed somehow if they ever let their guard down a little. It’s a sad and ultimately self-defeating stance, and I hope in future they learn from the NYT’s embrace of the open web, even in conjunction with a paywall...’”