On 3/26/2012 6:48 AM, Ahmed M. Abou-Setta, MD wrote:
> With web-publishing, advances in computer technology and automation,
> why is the price per article still so high.
That's a fair question to ask about Open Access journals, but it is also
a fair question to ask about any journal. Why doesn't a subscription to
a medical journal cost a lot less than it did a decade ago? After all
the commercial publishers have access to the same advances in computer
technology and automation. If anything, the subscription costs of
journals are rising and not by a trivial amount:
* http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-California-Tries-Just/65823/
* http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC442172/
* http://www.library.upenn.edu/scholcomm/costs.html
If you work out the math from the second citation, a 32% annual increase
means the price doubles every three years. The 10% annual increase cited
in the third reference means the price doubles every seven years.
What's worse is that if you let the annual subscription lapse in today's
era of electronic access, you lose access not only to the journals
published in the future, but to those journals that you paid for with
your previous years' licenses. It seems the innovation of moving to
electronic access means that you can hold your entire electronic
collection hostage if a library refuses to pay the huge subscription fees.
Sure it's outrageous to have to pay over $5,000 dollars to get a paper
published. But there are worse outrages.
Steve Simon, [log in to unmask], Standard Disclaimer.
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