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Comment on Timothy Gowers is bent on proving academic journals can cost nothing

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A real estimate is available for JMLR, a reputed machine learning journal, about $10 per article (!): https://blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-j...

See also scholastica (https://scholasticahq.com/) which is also around $10 per article before you add bells and whistles.

Actually for high quality scientific research, that doesn't seem to bad when you consider people will drop 10-20 dollars to go see a movie. Too bad the authors don't see any of it.

In the case of JMLR it's not 10USD per-view. It's 10USD per article published. I'm not sure if that was clear from the comment above.

Commercial journals generally charge far more than that per-view. JMLR charge nothing per-view.

When open access, commercial journals will often charge 1000s to publish an article (compared to the 10USD JMLR says it costs them).

usually I'd agree, but I think academic publishing is different from purely artistic work. Research is funded up front by grants. The resulting product is a piblic good, and should be made available to the publoc with zero margin.

If the research has practical value, the authors can capture that through patents and similar systems.

I agree but one counter argument is that a lot of research is already paid for by government.

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