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0 pointskevviiinn3y ago0 comments

Covered by downloads? Definitely not, they're more than covered by the contracts that they have with academic libraries to sell back the published papers to the institutions

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jltsiren3y ago· 2 in thread

Of course most of the money comes from subscription fees, and of course both the publisher and university monitor the number of paper downloads. While the actual numbers are not public, it's reasonable to assume that the subscription fee divided by the number of paper downloads covered by it is within an order of magnitude of the price of an individual paper.

kevviiinnOP3y ago

My point was that it's covered irrespective of the number of times a paper gets downloaded or read. The papers could get read 0 times but they're still making bank as long as they have those library contracts

jltsiren3y ago

And my point was that the average number of times a research paper gets read is low, regardless of whether it's behind a paywall or freely accessible. Given the costs of commercial publishing, the average cost of reading a paper must be high, no matter who pays for it and how.

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