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The problem is that science journals are run as for-profit companies, even as they exercise an effective monopoly over their markets. No matter how high the price goes, no academic library can possibly cut its subscription to a major scientific journal like Science or Nature. You don’t have to be an economist to anticipate the result: prices that bear no rational relation to the cost of production. For decades the soaring cost of science journals has been devouring the acquisitions budgets of academic libraries, forcing them to gut the rest of their collections to keep up. Social science and humanities journals, by contrast, are run as non-profits, and continue to charge very reasonable subscription rates even as they shoulder the costs of peer review and continue to publish first-rate scholarship.
For the sake of argument, let’s suppose there is some unknown reason why publicly funded science research has to be published by private for-profit companies. How then can we keep the companies honest and prevent price gouging? There are really only two options: either strict governmental regulation, or market competition.
New cheaper alternatives like PubMed Central and Public Library of Science should be congratulated for finally forcing long overdue innovation on a venal and fossilized industry. Throughout history monopolists have argued that, paradoxically, monopolies are actually good for society. And throughout history monopolists have been wrong, wrong, wrong.
