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When you are feeling all touchy feely about this move, keep in mind the profit margins at academic publishers are higher than Apple. Yes, THAT Apple.

Source: https://alexholcombe.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/scholarly-publ...




I've looked into these numbers and it's really hard to parse what revenues and expenses are coming from their journal publishing. The publishers listed are also have huge amounts of revenue in textbooks and other book markets (to be fair, another awful scam). It might be better to look at non-profit publishers such as ACS and AAAS, which are also mainly closed-access. For example, AAAS which has Science magazine and a few other journals brought in 48M w/ 42M in expenses [1]. That said, they bring in 11M as well in member dues, which more than anything else gets you subscription to AAAS journals. It's harder to tell with ACS, because it also includes revenues for CAS and other services [2]. PLoS, an open access publisher, seems to generally have lower costs based on an author pays model FWIW.

[1] pg 50 of http://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/AAAS_2013-Annual-Rep...

[2] https://acswebcontent.acs.org/annualreport/financials_financ...

[3] http://www.plos.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/2013-2014-Pro...




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