The topic of academic journals comes up repeatedly on HN (which is great) and is inevitably filled with an echo chamber of people saying that publishers add zero value, produce a literally worthless product, and they should all be put out of business. I’ve grown tired of the hyperbole, but sometimes (like now) I try to add a bit of perspective from within the industry. FWIW I serve on the board of SAGE, which is an independent but relatively large academic publisher.

Publishing articles has real costs. This is not about hosting PDFs, it’s about everything that goes into editorial curation, managing peer review, marketing a journal to build a brand, copy editing/formatting, and then yes, finally at the end of the day hosting a PDF. Those tasks do indeed have costs. They range from anywhere from something on the order of $500 - $5,000 per published article. Nobody is publishing at scale for cheaper than that. The argument that it should only cost something like $30 to publish an article is a complete fantasy. So if you want to argue about the value add and that all publishers do is sit around collecting rent for doing nothing, you have to check your hyperbole and come to the debate with reasoned arguments about the realistic costs of performing the very real tasks that are performed.

There has never been a better time to try to be an academic publisher for cheaper than the incumbents. The tech infrastructure is there, clearly the PR and anti-publisher sentiment is on your side. So why aren’t there millions of publishers springing up to publish articles for $30 a pop (or even better - free!)? It’s because it’s not possible to do the job that’s required for free or for that low a price. But there are literally no technical barriers to someone trying. Come up with a complete alternative to the journal system for publishing research, or figure out how to magically do it for free. There’s nothing technical in your way, but there are still major hurdles. You’ll find that doing the job a publisher does in fact involve work. You can deride that work all you want, but you cannot deny that publisher do indeed spend the money to do that work. So if you think that work is truly worthless you should launch a competitor that doesn’t do any work at all.

But the biggest barrier to radical changes in business model is all cultural. Academics are slow to change, and you cannot underestimate the importance of reputation. So any competing product has to address the cultural role that journals play (working as proxy for quality measurement and assessing academic job applicants). So yes, you can put PDFs online for basically free. That’s not the job of journals. To replace journals you have to solve the content curation and bestowing of prestige issues in some other way. There are loads of people trying (or startups that have died trying), and so far nothing has done much to dislodge the journal (and particularly Impact Factor) as the sole arbiter of academic quality. It’s a heroic task to try to tackle, because largely I think the world would be a better place if there was some real disruption in how academics judge other academics.

Now onto Gold OA. From my perspective Gold OA, which means the author funds the publication of the article, typically through baking it into the research funding grant, is making HUGE progress. Gold OA publishing is one of the fastest growing segments (both by revenue and number of articles published) for all major publishers — at least in STM fields. In fields where there isn’t readily accessible grant money (the humanities and social sciences) there isn’t nearly as much progress on Gold OA (and the path forward isn’t clear either). But Gold OA is so mainstream now that I can imagine it gobbling up the entirety of STM publishing in 10-20 years (god I hope before that, but this industry moves slow).

I’m happy to talk more about academic publishing from the counter perspective to most people here, although a lot of these discussions can be more productive outside of the HN forum. Feel free to email me (details in profile).