It was (predatory) pricing policies like this that led Knuth and the entire editorial board of the "Journal of Algorithms" to resign en masse, and start a new journal with the ACM.
This happened again, more recently, in the machine learning community. Here is the resignation letter from the editorial board of the _Machine Learning_ journal, as they left to start an open journal:
http://www.sigir.org/forum/F2001/sigirFall01Letters.html
I consider the ACM just as bad. Their membership pricing is restrictive for casual users and their conferences are worse.
I also consider their restrictions on who is able to become a member insulting (though they don't apply to me). Wait, so a physicist who's taken up programming in the last year isn't supposed to be able to read papers on computation?
RE: restrictions on who is able to become a member:
"Membership Qualifications
You must satisfy one of the qualifications below:
1. Bachelor's Degree (in any subject area); or
2. Equivalent Level of Education; or
3. Two years full-time employment in the IT field." --- https://campus.acm.org/public/ProfQJ/qjprof_control.cfm?form...
I know a number of OSS contributors that would fall foul of that. Think for instance of somebody that dropped out college and is working in something non-IT, but still likes to sling code. It's just a really useless requirement, especially given that you have to pay $200 on top of it. If there were real, you know, proficiency requirements or something that would be one thing, but anybody who's had any job in IT for two years?
Furthermore, where else do content creators pay for the privilege of publishing their work (over $1000 usually per paper), then have those outrageous rates for visitors to access that work?
That's $34B. While surely there's alot of private R&D (and more government), it's rare that I see a paper from industry, but then my field is biased against it. And there are private foundations. Does enough published research come from those private sources to outweigh publically funded studies? I wouldn't bet on it. Remember, there's a perpetual cycle in most public funding with publications. In order to get funded, you have to show a record of publishing. The priorities of private research would seem to be a very different threshold.
Still, it's a solid point. You've paid for our research. Why should you have to pay to access our reports?
To be fair though, I have yet to hear about complaints from journals regarding researchers who post their reports on their public websites. But that makes it hard to find things. Journals would surely squawk if there were alternative repositories.
Don't forget the Department of Energy and the various military funding agencies -- they fund an awful lot of external research as well (in addition to any unpublished stuff they might be doing internally). I'm sure the Department of Agriculture etc are also handing out plenty of grants in the relevant fields as well.
Sure - that's what I meant by "more government". Problem is, I don't think you can simply look at their budgets - they do other things besides research - and their research efforts are likely much smaller. It would be interesting to see the research grant lines in their budgets if anyone knows or finds them.
I'm not sure what field you're in, but I'm very certain Nature does charge some fees (e.g. color) if there's not page charges. Here from their website:
£700 for the first color figure, £250 for each thereafter.
On each of my papers - in very reputable neuroscience journals - we've paid publication costs and fees at about $1000 per paper. And color was essential in each.
Nature (and most journals, so far as I know) charge for colour figures, but they don't have page charges. I just ran through a list of ten well-known physics journals, all from different publishers, and none has page charges, suggesting it's pretty uncommon. Most will charge for colour figures, though, and several request (but do not require) a contribution to publication costs. I've never paid that contribution.
I'm told Physics is very different. They're also moving quickly away from peer-review, right? We just had a discussion on that. There are alot of costs in the review process (time and effort). If you decide to sample more broadly across disciplines, I'd be very interested in the results.
My dad is a chemistry professor and I've never heard about the journals charging the authors. To the contrary, good journals do pay some symbolic fees to the authors.
OK I'll ask him when I talk to him, but I'm 90% sure that Chemical Reviews is one of the journals which pay. Not Science or Nature, to be sure, but not exactly bad impact factor either.
They're called "page charges", they are absolutely real, and yeah, they're often like $100 to $150 per article page, plus extras. Here's the price quote for the Journal of Dairy Science (which just won the Google lottery and is being rewarded with a link):
Forgot to mention that for the privilege you also give up publication rights. So, let's review:
You pay to publish.
They charge outrageous fees for access.
You retain the copyright, they retain the publication rights.
To be fair, I can't imagine their business model is making anyone rich. They pay professional editors and they pump out alot of PR that's good for science. But the original complaint - access on old manuscripts - is very valid.
I dug this out of Reed-Elsevier's last financial report, for a book I'm writing. Reed-Elsevier is Elsevier's parent company, and is publicly traded. I don't have the reference immediately to hand (found it several months back), but I started with Google. It took me quite a bit of time to track down.
The whole problem of scientific publishing is entangled with what I call the evaluation problem: just as it is easier to set an exam and sort students by the grade they get (despite being nearly void of actual meaning), it's also easier to assign a value to each published paper (the infamous impact factor of the journal that swallowed it) and then sort applications for a professorship position by their "score".
Of course direct interviews can tell you a lot more of the real capabilities of both student and applicant, but the inherent laziness and carelessness of bureaucratic systems (like universities and ministries of science and the like), added to the excess of applicants for any given position (in most cases), leads us to the present situation in publishing: abuse of power. Scientific publishers do what they do, unchallenged, because they can.
PLoS and BMC are a first attempt to create real competition in scientific publishing. They are succeeding: both got rated high, and are respectable and well-known. Are you a scientist? Consider sending your paper to these two publishers. All your readers will get free access to your publications.
The catch, though, is that publishing has a cost. Both PLoS and BMC charge anywhere between $500 and $1500 for a published paper. Then they don't charge the readers. All other journals charge subscription fees (for libraries, the fees are in the tens or even the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year), while not charging the authors one single dime (most subscription-based for-profit journals, at least in biology, do not charge for publishing). So researchers are enticed to send their papers there and be done with it, not draining grant money for the purpose.
When looking at tax dollars spent, though, those researchers who publish in subscription-based for-profit journals are committing a disservice to the public that funds their research.
I seriously believe that this -- the fact that you need access to a university library, a research grant, or several thousand dollars worth of discretionary income just to read the primary source materials of the last 70 years of science -- is the reason why so much of the planet is scientifically illiterate.
We ask why the hilarious notion that science is just a species of religion -- a collection of essentially arbitrary dogmas handed down by priests in white coats -- has taken such hold among the populace. But, really, what does the public see of modern science but dogma? The state of the art -- the debate, the argument, the statistical calculations, the brilliant conclusions, the idiotic conclusions, even the raw data itself -- is all locked up behind paywalls and private conferences and university tuitions. 99.5% of the world never sees actual science being done. At best, they do toy science in their classrooms and read prepackaged science-flavored PR in their magazines.
The best the public can hope for is a bunch of documentaries and popularizations, some of which are great. But nearly all of them are second-hand, many of them contain major omissions, mistakes, or distortions, and they feel constrained by their need to maintain their mass audience of businesspeople on planes -- they tend to not publish graphs or, god help us, equations.
Of course, most of the public wouldn't understand Nature even if it became free and open tomorrow. Many of the papers are written in barely-comprehensible jargon. But that's not a coincidence; it's a side effect of allowing journals to evolve into niche publications for a handful of graduate students. Perhaps, in the world where scientific publications are available to anyone to read, journals will slowly evolve toward a standard of writing that allows interested fans to follow along. Or a genre of annotated journal articles might arise.
Alternatively, people will just start publishing online, on blogs or wikis or something else. It's already starting to happen; math is leading the way. Much of my website is somewhere in the space between 'blog entry' and 'paper'.
Yes. One way around this whole 'who pays' mess would be a Wikipedia like site for papers. Anyone can publish, anyone can review. If you added voting to that and some level of authentication of users it could be very interesting.
For those interested, the statement from the board can be found at http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/s.pdf, and Knuth's (long, fascinating) letter to his colleagues can be found at http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf