Publishing and paying

Does it make sense?

Our astronomer has just resubmitted his paper, the one he’s been working on for years, and has some time to think about other things until the journal replies.  One of them is how scientific publishing makes no economic sense, at least in the context of the Economics that our tutor teaches.  Consider: a highly-skilled worker produces a rare (indeed, unique) object.  He or she has invested years and many thousands of dollars/pounds/etc. to obtain the education and training to do this.  There is no exact substitute for the object, and few near substitutes.  The actual production may have required some of the most advanced sensors and computer algorithms in existence.  According to basic economics, the scientist could (and indeed should) charge a high price to allow a journal to publish the paper.  Instead, even after the peer-review process judges the paper to be worth publishing, the author must often pay “page charges,” typically several thousand dollars.

That’s not the only economically strange thing about science publishing.  Journal subscriptions are expensive for individuals, though still manageable for a good one in the field the scientist must follow closely.  But the scientist must agree never to donate his journals to a library or other institution, for they are charged far more, and donations would cut the editorial income.

Then there’s peer review.  When a manuscript is submitted, it’s sent to a scientist known to have expertise in the field, to judge whether it is original and whether the results are trustworthy.  Not only must the reviewer have skill and training in a specialized technical field, he or she must be familiar with current work there.  Such a person should receive a substantial sum for the task.  But reviewers are not paid.

Well, there are other economic questions we can ask.  The supply of scientific papers is expensive to maintain; what is the demand?  In a word, tiny.  At best, there may be some thousands of people worldwide even able to “consume” the product.  If each was charged a fair fraction of what the paper cost to produce, it would be a prohibitive amount.

That scientific publishing, and indeed science itself, can proceed depends on the fact that someone else is paying for it.  In most countries it’s the government; in the US, there are substantial contributions from philanthropic institutions.  Scientists receive grants to do their research and publish it, and may spend part on journal subscriptions (if their institution doesn’t already carry the one they want).  This makes it very hard to analyze through the medium of our tutor’s Economics textbook.  It also makes it difficult to make objective decisions about the trade-offs that must invariably be made among options.

And the world of scientific publishing is changing.  Funding agencies are now demanding that the papers they pay for be “open access,” meaning the results should be free to anyone; that is, journals should not profit from research that has been paid for by someone else.  Major journals in Astronomy have already gone open access, or will soon.  Those that did not require page charges will institute them.

Our astronomer won’t be able to publish in them.  Grantless, he can’t afford to.