if there's any good to come from $10K APCs at Nature and Cell, it's that they are finally opening peoples' eyes to the absurd economics of journals, which they conveniently ignored for decades while happily sticking the rest of the world with the bill for their glam papers

everyone complains about APCs - and i don't think they are how we should fund publishing moving forward - but they provide free access for the entire world for significantly less than what paywalled journals take in for each of their papers

so if you're going to whinge about journal economics - and you should! - don't focus your ire on APCs, focus it on a feckless scientific establishment that has let this problem fester for decades

just to give some perspective - subscription journals take in an average of $5,000 per article across all science publishing - that money if funneled through libraries, but ultimately comes mostly from research funders and research institutions

that $5,000 covers the cost of editorial handling and publishing - and provides ***VERY*** healthy profit margins - but buys access to the finished product for only a tiny fraction of the world - locking out many researchers, students, teachers, etc...

APCs are on average a lower - but even if they were the same - they cover the same expenses, but buy access for everyone in the world - from a systems perspective it's a much much better deal for science

that's not to say there aren't problems - institutions have generally failed to move their spending from subscriptions to APCs, leaving individual researchers to foot the bill from grants that don't provide funds for these expenses

and there are a lot of people whose grants don't come close to being able to cover such costs, or who do science without funding at all - many APC journals realize this problem and waive, or provide steep discounts on APCs - but it's not a perfect fix

i've said it before and i've said it again - the right system is one where funders just subsidize publishing and there are no transaction costs associated with publishing or access

but the way to move forward is not - as i've seen far too much of lately - pine for the good old days of subscription journals when access to the literature was severely curtailed, and instead leverage frustration with publishing economics into creating a new & truly fair system