{"id":1521,"date":"2009-07-16T13:03:31","date_gmt":"2009-07-16T12:03:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=1521"},"modified":"2009-07-16T13:03:31","modified_gmt":"2009-07-16T12:03:31","slug":"the-ridiculous-high-prices-of-online-journal-articles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=1521","title":{"rendered":"The ridiculous high prices of online journal articles."},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m a lucky guy!\u00a0 I work for a major UK University and one of the perks of the job is that I (along with every other member of the University) get access to a massive array of academic journals and this is close to priceless as far as I am concerned.\u00a0 I’d rather take a salary cut than lose that particular perk (shhhh, don’t mention this to my bosses) and I don’t <\/strong>even do any formal research<\/strong>!<\/p>\n

I have been blogging for almost two years now and one thing I have learned from the whole experience is that the world contains legions of amateur scholars – people who do research for personal rather than professional reasons.\u00a0 These scholars (and I like to think I am one of them) don’t want to publish papers or get qualifications, they simply want to learn about and discuss whatever subject takes their fancy.\u00a0 In my case I focus on subjects such as mathematics and physics since they are (and always have been) the subjects that float my boat and they are also the subjects I studied both at school and at University.<\/p>\n

Without having the journal access that I get via my employer I would find this hobby significantly more difficult and expensive to pursue.\u00a0 Occasionally I get to see just how expensive it would be when I come across a journal which my University doesn’t have a subscription to.\u00a0\u00a0 One such journal is Physics Teacher<\/a> and earlier today I wanted to get hold of a 2 page article published back in 1981 – almost 30 years ago.\u00a0 The cost was $18.<\/p>\n

$18 for two pages of work almost 3 decades old and I wasn’t even asking for it to be sent to me printed on gilt edged paper.\u00a0 All I wanted was a pdf file which would cost almost nothing to send me.\u00a0 For comparison, that $18 could get me one of several different maths books on my Amazon wish list.\u00a0 If the journal had made it $5 or less then I wouldn’t be writing this – I would have just bought it.<\/p>\n

I know that journals aren’t charities but surely this kind of asking price is simply too high.\u00a0 If the work had only been published recently then I might be able to understand it – that $18 would go towards paying for editorial staff, peer review, publication etc but surely older articles aren’t worth this amount since all of their costs were covered years ago.<\/p>\n

Why not learn from something like iTunes and make the cost of many articles so low that people don’t even stop to think if they want to spend the money or not?\u00a0 If every article in Physics Teacher more than 25 years old only cost $1 then I (and probably many others) would buy lots of them and the journal would get a decent amount of cash.\u00a0 Bandwidth is cheap so it wouldn’t really cost any more to send 20 files then it would to send 1 but I am a lot more likely to spend $20 on 20 files than $18 on 1.\u00a0 Would it be better to charge the higher prices for the first 10 or 20 years from the publication date and then drop to $1 or so for older articles?<\/p>\n

I’m not just picking on Physics Teacher though – many other journals seem to have a similar policy.\u00a0 What do you think?\u00a0 What would the best business model be?\u00a0 Would you buy more journal articles if they only cost a dollar?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m a lucky guy!\u00a0 I work for a major UK University and one of the perks of the job is that I (along with every other member of the University) get access to a massive array of academic journals and this is close to priceless as far as I am concerned.\u00a0 I’d rather take a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-math"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-ox","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1521"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1526,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1521\/revisions\/1526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}