Moreover, the people conducting the research pay to the journals too. There's sort of an application fee for submitting your paper to a lot of big-name journals.
The open access journals charge thousands. Journal publishing has costs, and they need to be born by someone. If not from access fees, they'll need to be paid upfront, which means each study costs more, which means either less studying gets done, or funds come from elsewhere to fund it.
The first fact you need to deal with is that open access journals, started to explicitly counter the cost problem, have similar costs. If it was as simple as you think it is, open access journals would be much cheaper. (Arxiv is not peer reviewed, and does not count.)
The second point is that publishers costs are around 70% of revenue, as the article says margins are around 30%. That means there's a limit to how low they can go and not lose money, and I doubt many of those complaining would suddenly stop if prices were 30% lower.
> (Arxiv is not peer reviewed, and does not count.
Oh it does count. Peer reviews in journals are done by scientists for free. Peer review adds completely negligible costs (or even ZERO) to a journal. ArXiv is the perfect example.
They just increased the fees for their general purpose publication, PLOS ONE. Here's their reasoning:
"PLOS ONE has not increased its Article Processing Charge (APC) since 2009, for the past six years absorbing increasing publishing costs without raising author fees. Its new price reflects the work involved in shepherding the volume of papers PLOS manages from submission to published work; PLOS invests significant resources to improve the quality of PLOS ONE output, thoroughly checking for ethics, competing interests and robust science."
They also say they're updating their terrible article submission system. I don't see how any of this costs as much as it does. PLOS ONE alone publishes ~30,000 articles a year, that's a huge amount of money in fees, even if not everyone pays. On top of all of that, they accept and publish 70% of all articles. That's a really leaky sieve that shouldn't be so expensive to maintain.
I don't know why PLOS charges more. The point I'm trying to make is that - just because there's an OA journal out there which charges $100 per article; it doesn't mean that the costs are justified.
Do you have any compelling evidence that the costs for OA journals is one or two orders of magnitude less than everyone claims they are? (See e.g. http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie... which also shows a wide variety in publishing costs.)
From searching on the web it seems like the only open access journals who charge thousands are the traditional publishers (Wiley, Springer) with an "open access" option. They probably have internal conflicts around cannibalizing existing business. Exclusively open access journals seem to charge $USD500-1000. Happy to be corrected with other examples though.
I stand corrected, thank you. Furthermore, the journals seem to have many more articles than I thought - I had estimated 20 per journal, but most PLOS journals seem to have 30-40 articles. In my original $ estimate I also assumed 10 issues a year, most PLOS journals seem to do 12.
So consider $2250/article as a representative price in the PLOS suite, by 35 articles by 12 issues - About $USD950,000/annum revenue per journal. I wonder how that compares to revenue/issue for the traditional subscription model augmented by online fees? I looked at Elsivier and Wiley's financial statements but there wasn't enough info broken out to guess.
EDIT: closer reading of Wiley's statements [1] suggest $1.385 billion revenue from journal subscriptions with 1600 "scientific and professional journals" in print, for revenue of $865,000 per journal.
