Editor—The main issue I see about professional journals is their greed.1 I once wanted to download an article from one of the major US journals because I was too lazy to walk down a flight of stairs to go to the department library, and the paper seemed interesting in a train of thought I didn't want to interrupt. The charge asked was $40 (£22; €33). Considering the cost of a yearly subscription and the number of research papers per year, the cost per printed research paper was about $0.40 (online cost without paper, ink, or postage could be much lower).
I did not pay the $40: I walked down to the library, and photocopied the article, which cost me less than a dollar, at no profit to the journal. I could also have asked a colleague with a subscription to download it for me and email it.
Had the online paper been for instance at $0.99 (as the songs on iTunes or other similar services) I would have paid that amount without any qualms and without noticing it, probably spending overall much more on the journal at the end of the year than the $40.
By charging too much per paper, the major journals are shooting themselves in the foot. It would be interesting to see whether a business model charging a small sum ($0.99 or €0.99 or £0.69) would lead to increased downloads of papers. And for that sum, most people would not try to find an illegal copy.
Free is better of course, but not always realistic. Exorbitant is bad. It works for music, why shouldn't it work for science? The models are out there.
Competing interests: NDM does not feel the need to subscribe to journals for just a few papers per year and doesn't want to pay 100 times the actual cost of the papers online. Application of this model could benefit consumers, including himself.
References
- 1.Lenzer J. Medical societies react against public access to findings. BMJ 2005;330: 1104-d. (14 May.) [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]