bjoern.brembs.blog » New England Journal of Medicine – and you thought Nature was expensive?

"The New England journal of Medicine has come out strongly against Open Access. Apparently, this journal does not seem to value access to medical information very highly. This lack of valuation could be due to several reasons. For one, the NEJM is leading the medical publishing industry in retractions....

Finally and perhaps equally likely (the reasons are, of course, not mutually exclusive) it could simply be about money....

Salary sum: 4,088,010....

This would amount to an article processing charge (APC) for NEJM of around US$314,000.

Or, phrased differently, the current business model of NEJM entails the tax-payer paying more than US$300k for each research article in NEJM, which, at the same time:

• pays their management staff the 3-7 fold income of one of their professor-authors
• for each research-type article, cross-subsidizes about four other news-type or opinion articles, some of which insult scientists
• pays for the rejection costs of 95% of all submitted articles
• overpays the actual publishing costs by about 1,200-fold ..."