Open-access publishing at what cost?

Abstract

Dylla replies to Phipps: It does seem inappropriate to pay $19 for a one-page download of an 18-year-old article. But one has to dig below the surface to understand the economics of scientific journal publishing as a context for the pricing of such journal products by nonprofit publishers.The American Institute of Physics (AIP) publishes several of the most highly cited and subscribed-to physics journals (for example, Applied Physics Letters and the Journal of Applied Physics ), and also provides publishing services for many of its member societies, including the American Physical Society and the American Association of Physics Teachers, publisher of the American Journal of Physics. Producing a high-quality, peer-reviewed archival journal such as AJP involves significant costs, including those for a reliable online platform that has made AJP and other member-society journals available to a much wider audience than did the former print-only subscriptions. AIP has also made major investments to digitize and make available electronically journal issues that were published in print long before the industry made the transition to digital. Those real costs are recovered, by and large, through institutional subscriptions paid by libraries and research institutions. The cost of producing one typical article is between $1500 and $3000. Considering the average journal subscriber base, a $20 price for a non-subscriber to download an article is not out of line.AIP’s online platform, Scitation, already provides free access to full abstracts, index terms, and search capabilities for more than a million articles. Our journal prices are significantly lower than those for similar journals produced by commercial publishers, and we invest the modest return in outreach services such as lay-language translations of important research results, subsidized programs for students, and subsidized student and member-society subscriptions for Physics Today. © 2008 American Institute of Physics.