So here's something interesting to note. The "buy this paper" price for this article is almost reasonable in and of itself. $22.00. In fact, for somebody who works in the field or even a tangentially connected field, they could probably justify spending the $22.00 for it.
But... hilariously, a one year subscription to the journal, is only $59.00 (for individuals, online only).
Something seems a bit out of whack when the price of one article is about 1/3rd of the price of the journal for an entire yet.
I'm almost tempted to subscribe. The problem with this model though, is that it doesn't scale. Even at "only" $59.00, how many journals can one afford to subscribe to before the aggregate cost breaks the bank? sigh
It scales because nobody subscribes individually. If you can't access a journal, you get your department head to forward things up the chain so your institution can just add another line item to the millions of dollars they spend annually on journal subscriptions for every researcher and student.
AFAIK almost all of that money goes directly to Elsevier [1] who, well, they pretty much run a monopoly.
What I mean is, for those people (like me) who don't have a "department head" (or a university at all) to take care of journal subscriptions, and who might be willing to subscri be individually - it doesn't scale beyond a journal to two.
At most, in years past, I subscribed to maybe a total of 10 journals, but that's when I was maintaining an IEEE membership and a lot of their journals are actually not very expensive, in terms of the marginal cost once you are already a dues paying member.
These days though, I find it hard to justify. I find myself wondering if the publishers would do a better job of providing a model that works for individuals, if they might not actually make more money in the end.
That is so darn insightful! So check it out, if there were a way to pay $20/mo for access to ~5 publications/mo from a list of hundreds/thousands, that would be fantastic! Netflix for research. I'd pay for it.
It wouldn't be terribly challenging to build. The tricks are in making the deals with the content owners, and getting the word out to users.
The trick is that you're making a deal with Elsevier who is either going to kill you or buy you, making this a non-starter for most VCs.
It's tremendously difficult to make money in a space this entrenched. If you go a layer down and try to cut out Elsevier (go to researchers directly) you're asking scientists to basically ignore career-defining opportunities in high-impact publications... so that you can make money and a small market of hobbyists or professionals without a research budget can subscribe to journals. Also, the amount of work that needs to be done around peer-review is obscene and Elsevier (and others) have built a ridiculous moat around related volunteer work that is hugely inefficient but constantly socially reinforced (reviewing can be a status symbol). At that point, the alternative is open access and free for everybody: why not publish there?
I'd be of the opinion that the only way to reasonably attack this space is to build an adjacent content management and distribution platform not focused on journals and edge your way in, like, say, classroom management or MOOCs.
Which, well, there's Top Hat [1] who raised at a $185M valuation last year [2]. Not sure if they care about journals all that much yet though, not a whole lot of insight into their business beyond the pop business news.
Wow, you have a lot of knowledge in this area. Thanks! I wonder if because Elsevier is likely a bigger company it could be a good business to create by partnering with them, then let them buy it. So they don't have to take on the risk of developing it in house, but can still reap the rewards.
With continued pressure from SciHub, I'm thinking this might not be a bad bet to make. Elsevier et al. might just be willing to jump on the occasion, in order to save some of their business.
That said, I still think it's time to double-down on supporting SciHub. Both scientists and the interested public like it.
It's priced that way precisely because they want you to go "uh, but chances are I'll want to read another paper or two so I might as well get a subscription", even though you probably won't find two more papers that aren't available elsewhere that you want to read enough to pay $22 for.
This is very likely not an accident but by design. For a good popsci read on similar topics I can recommend "Predictably Irrational, Revised: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions".
But... hilariously, a one year subscription to the journal, is only $59.00 (for individuals, online only).
https://www.nature.com/neuro/subscribe
Something seems a bit out of whack when the price of one article is about 1/3rd of the price of the journal for an entire yet.
I'm almost tempted to subscribe. The problem with this model though, is that it doesn't scale. Even at "only" $59.00, how many journals can one afford to subscribe to before the aggregate cost breaks the bank? sigh