Yes, it's certainly good, but the fact that we have to pay 2k$ typically per publication is still noteworthy. And that money goes from universities/grants/government/funders to something, but not to referees. I don't quite think that typesetting (given that most articles are submitted in LaTeX form) or serving the articles on the web is worth that much money. So I'll personally still submit to journals without page charges and upload pre-prints on arxiv.
> So I'll personally still submit to journals without page charges and upload pre-prints on arxiv.
All the major journals in astronomy/astrophysics (ApJ, ApJ Letters, A&A, PASP, etc.) require article processing charges. The only major journal that doesn't require publication charges is MNRAS [1], but even they have started charging £50 for each additional page if the total number of pages is more than 20. Of course, article processing charges are ridiculous in the 21st century especially when the journals directly receive TeX sources from the authors. Other physics journals have also started doing this, e.g., The Physical Review Letters, which the is the "premier" journal from the American Physical Society now requires a $815 fee for a 4-5 page paper [2]. The trend is extremely alarming since it is highly biased in favor of researchers in large universities in rich countries, who are the only people who would be able to pay such ludicrous publication charges. Several scientific societies in the US and around the world have upped their "diversity" activism and have jumped on to the woke bandwagon. Yet, no one seems to talk about blatantly exclusionary issues such as this. And it's not even remotely difficult to run a high-quality open-access journal without any publication charges -- SciPost [3] and Discrete Analysis [4] are excellent examples.
AAS is a nonprofit society, though, so while there may be some cross-subsidy of other activities those page charges must reflect to some degree the actual costs to maintain the journal.
My own guess is that the CRUD apps used to host the articles are bespoke enough to be priced more like consulting-ware than commodity software, and the market is too small to attract cheaper entrants.
Journals without page charges simply pass those costs on to readers (or their libraries), which slows scientific progress.
> AAS is a nonprofit society, though, so while there may be some cross-subsidy of other activities those page charges must reflect to some degree the actual costs to maintain the journal.
I've published with ApJ. In late 2016, ApJ charged us around $1500 for a 16-page article, which apart from some minor copyediting, was published as it is. Now, the $1500 fee may not be much for a well-funded research group in a first-world country. However, it is a considerable amount of money for other research groups. If arXiv, which receives over 10,000 submissions and 35 million downloads a month [1] can operate on a yearly budget of $2.5 million [2], I don't see why these journals can operate at a comparable budget.
> Journals without page charges simply pass those costs on to readers (or their libraries), which slows scientific progress.
There is good evidence that scientific progress has slowed down already [3,4] and it has almost nothing to do with lack of open access journals. Science progressed at a much faster rate in early and mid 20th century, where such concepts didn't even make sense. 21st-century science will fair better if funding institutions started caring about the quality of research done.
I would be more sympathetic to cost arguments if they were transparent about it.
In the end I think this starts to raise important questions about sources of costs and benefits of a journal article and who should pay (not about AAS in particular necessarily but in general).
Pay-to-publish will do more to destroy the academic publishing model than anything else. I say this not because I disagree with open access, or because I want to see the current system continue, but I do think it is worse with more perverse incentives than the current system.
Papers published under this model under US law used to have to be labeled as advertisements.
It might actually reflect academic economics more accurately, really. But if so, once people recognize it as such I think it will change things tremendously.
Libraries that used to be supportive of these models have stopped paying for them (at least in cases I'm aware of), and I doubt academics will pay thousands of dollars to publish a paper that is accessible on the internet for free, or through donations.
