<p>I mean, surely sending articles to paid-subscription journals can't be the main income stream for researchers? Man, sometimes academia seems like the ideal environment to spend your life's work in, full of dedication and innovation, and other times it reeks of conformity and "the machine". </p>
<p>I have to work on a paper that's due a day before graduation (two days!) but I realise I can't access the journal articles I was referring to in my paper from my home computer because I'm not under the cover of my school's subscription from home. Does anybody have any workarounds they might usually use? If you're an incoming first-year college student with an account set up, there any way to use your future school's subscriptions for your home computer?</p>
<p>My college has a proxy server through which we can access college-subscriptions off-campus. We have to log in with our e-mail username and password. I wish the proxy server was more widely advertised on my campus - I only found out about it accidentally when I browsed the library website.</p>
<p>Maybe your college has some similar service?</p>
<p>Search your school's library for the term "VPN." It reroutes all of your internet traffic through the school, so to those websites that require subscriptions, it appears as though you're on your school's network.</p>
<p>Also, as far as I'm aware, you aren't paid for publishing in academic journals; it actually costs money.</p>
<p>Most of the user names I've had to use for that include my first, middle, and last name in addition to my social security number, so no thanks on giving it to you.</p>
<p>My school's library website has a way to sign in to access the websites. If you look there it usually tells you what your access code is. If it doens't have that, just call the library and ask if they can give it to you.</p>
<p>I'd imagine the cost of research journals is just to attempt to cover operating expenses.</p>
<p>There might be some way to do a remote desktop connection into a computer at your future school. Basically the same idea/concept as a VPN, but I'm pretty sure it would be much easier to execute (if it's an option).</p>
<p>This is all a matter of great controversy in academia. </p>
<p>The authors of the paper don't get paid to publish the article in a subscription-fee journal and in fact sometimes they even have to pay to have the article published (especially if there 'extras' such as color pictures in the article).</p>
<p>Publication costs money. For an academic journal that may or may not be selling a good deal of ads--and frankly, in an academic journal, they'd have to pull in a <em>lot</em> of ads--they have to get the money from somewhere... Plus there's editors, web production, layout production if in print, publishers, all sorts of people to pay if their designation isn't a sort of honorary thing.</p>
<p>I'd imagine that if the publication is tied to a society, it may help offset the organizational costs as well and not just the actual publication.</p>
<p>The thing people forget about periodical publications is that the production costs are far from linear and as such there's a strong inverse relationship between circulation volume and issue price. </p>
<p>Printing is generally the least expensive bit of production... the real costs are with the staff required to put the issues together and those costs are fixed regardless of how many copies are produced.</p>
<p>Those trash magazines at the checkout counter are cheap because so many people purchase them and thus the costs are distributed across many more people. Journals, in comparison, have tiny circulation figures and thus a much smaller population of readers must absorb the production costs. </p>
<p>I agree that it's sad that these things are so expensive but they don't put themselves together... somebody has to foot the bill and until someone comes up with a better solution that somebody is going to be the subscribers.</p>
<p>Is editing that expensive? I know some of free journals (e.g. the Sino-Platonic Papers, edited by Penn linguist Victor Mair) and I didn't know that there was so much cost involved in simply arranging articles (I guess it's the equivalent of an "admissions committee" that takes up so much money?).</p>
<p>The other thing I want to ask is whether demand for subscription is that inelastic that the best (revenue-maximising) model is to charge high prices for relatively small demand. I mean, one of the reasons why I won't ever use individual subscription is that the price is just too high; furthermore, the internet would expand a journal's subscriber base IMO if the price weren't that high. </p>
<p>Anyway, I did try my future school's proxy -- woo! Now I can access that bloody JSTOR! Yeah, I wish this was advertised more often -- I mean, I'm probably going to use this proxy server more than the email address they assigned to me. ;)</p>
<p>
[quote]
Is editing that expensive? I know some of free journals (e.g. the Sino-Platonic Papers, edited by Penn linguist Victor Mair) and I didn't know that there was so much cost involved in simply arranging articles (I guess it's the equivalent of an "admissions committee" that takes up so much money?).
[/quote]
There are a few journals that are totally put together by volunteers, but I don't really thing there are enough volunteers to run all the current journals. Most academics already are signed up to far more 'volunteered posts' (grant review committees, reviewing papers, department committees...) and don't have any resources do donate to actually putting together a journal. Most journals do have academics that are 'editors' (e.g. that help decide what articles get published based on reviewer comments) but there are still others that need to copy edit, layout and whatnot. </p>
<p>I know that the physics community has a lot of free sites where articles are written up in LaTex and then uploaded to central servers... essentially without the need for much human involvement but that sort of publishing hasn't really caught on much with many other fields. </p>
<p>
[quote]
The other thing I want to ask is whether demand for subscription is that inelastic that the best (revenue-maximising) model is to charge high prices for relatively small demand.
[/quote]
<br>
I think it is actually quite inelastic. Apart from a few general interest 'big picture' journals like Science and Nature, I don't think most journals have that large of a private subscriber base with most issues purchased by libraries (universities and companies). There is a lot of pressure on those libraries to provide access to as many journals as possible so they're generally never in a very good negotiating position. </p>
<p>
[quote]
I mean, one of the reasons why I won't ever use individual subscription is that the price is just too high; furthermore, the internet would expand a journal's subscriber base IMO if the price weren't that high.
[/quote]
Even with the internet editions, most journals still operate via site licenses so there's not much of a market (and hence need to compete for lower prices) for private subscribers. </p>
<p>One of the reasons that this is all so controversial is because the majority of the research published in these journals is paid for by American taxpayers and thus many argue that the American taxpayer should have free access to these papers.</p>
<p>I guess deciding which articles are going to be published might be very time-consuming depending on how many submissions a journal gets. Picking 20 out of 30 submissions is a lot easier than picking 20 out of 2000. Additionally, I think editors are supposed to verify the content of every article that is going to be published because some poor-quality articles would not only hurt the reputation of the author but also of the journal publishing it.</p>
<p>"I know that the physics community has a lot of free sites where articles are written up in LaTex and then uploaded to central servers... essentially without the need for much human involvement but that sort of publishing hasn't really caught on much with many other fields."</p>
<p>Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology and Statistics all use arXiv.org</a> e-Print archive . The guy I work with now puts up any math paper he does, and regularly scans the site to see if anything interesting is being published.</p>