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Why are scientific articles so expensive?

They should face lower-cost competition, and since that's happening already we should just wait and see.

Lower cost means lower quality. Anyone can do a "study" and post their results on the web for free.
 
Thats what I do. Email is great for that.
 
It's simple demand and supply. Scientific journals (and even college textbooks) have a very low reader base since their core audience is mostly other academics and students. They most probably use vanity publishers (or are themselves one) which spike up the costs considerably.

Technology has caught up to print publishing, and anyone can do it now via channels like Amazon KDP, D2D, etc. Academics ought to take advantage of it, but there's probably an old boy network monopoly that's resistant to this sort of change.

And peer review has been proven to be unreliable at times, and is no guarantee of authenticity.
 
Lower cost means lower quality. Anyone can do a "study" and post their results on the web for free.

True in the great majority of cases. But a higher price tag does not mean better quality. For sure it does not.
 
First off, not every paper that is submitted is published. Many times the peer review process reveals errors or weaknesses in the paper (that is what peer review is all about) and the paper is rejected. Consequently, the publishers may go through several papers to find those that warrant being included in their publication

Second, most reputable peer-reviewed journals are not supported by advertising revenue. The costs are typically included in whatever research grant money is available to the researchers, whether it is government or private funding. And BTW, that is typically disclosed in the paper.

I know this firsthand, because my work has been published in peer-reviewed journals.
 
My evidence is the prices Elsevier and such charge, for online articles. Subscriptions are cheaper per article, fit to the purpose of universities, but we the taxpayers are paying for that too.

Elsevier is a Dutch-based company that publishes academic content from all over the world. If a scientist in Strasbourg is funded by a French Government research grant, then where is the incentive for Elsevier to give that scientist's work global exposure without charging for the content?
 

They get subscription fees from universities around the world.

I'm just questioning why individual articles cost so much. Are they concerned that universities will stop paying subscription fees and academics would buy individual articles instead? Are they distrustful that academics will provide pirate copies to their students?
 
You do not have to pay to read peer-reviewed papers. You can always obtain a free preprint of the paper from a wide variety of different sources. For example, I will often start with https://arxiv.org/ at Cornell University when looking up a peer-reviewed paper. They are by no means alone. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and many other universities all have sources where you can read peer-reviewed papers for free.

I frequently read the titles and abstracts in the Astronomical Journal and Astrophysical Journal, and if the topic interests me I will look up the preprint and read more about the subject.
 

But why would the universities continue to pay subscription fees if there were no paywall?

I don't know what to tell you, Ug.... I just get individual subscriptions to the Journals I reference a lot and for that, I get unlimited access to their archives. It gives me a huge leg up in my work and it saves me a lot of time in not having to track down obscure scientific papers from all over the world. It's well worth the price. The way I figure it, the production of scientific knowledge - whether publicly funded or not - is an entirely different proposition than its dissemination. When I buy a car, I don't mind paying for both the engine and the transmission. It's a package deal.
 

I'm sure you can do better than an analogy to physical goods. Information is not diminished by being copied, so fundamentally different rules of sale or use must apply.

I never said there should be NO PAYWALL. Only that it should be more reasonably priced for the general public ... who in many cases have already paid through their taxes. Your argument of convenience still holds up for subscriptions, in fact it leads to the idea of just patronage: journals provide a service to academics, therefore universities should pay for it.

Something I've learned in this thread is that academics sometimes have to PAY to be published. This is horrifying to me. Imagine if we treated fiction writers or musicians like that!
 
For the same reason we have to pay tolls on roads we have already paid for.