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How are their costs significant? Web hosting is extremely cheap. As far as I can see their only really cost is staff to arrange reviews (which is surely a very low paid job).

Everything else they might do - collating papers into a physical journal, complaining about bibliography formats, etc. is superfluous nonsense that nobody really cares about.

Look at arxiv - the only thing it's missing that journals have is reviews.




AirBnB -- How are their costs significant? Web hosting is extremely cheap.

Yelp -- How are their costs significant? Web hosting is extremely cheap.

Twitter -- How are their costs significant? Web hosting is extremely cheap.


This would be a good reply, except you've failed to acknowledge arxiv's existence.

Is the value of journals over arxiv worth the price? (market says yes, but markets are sometimes wrong).


>This would be a good reply, except you've failed to acknowledge arxiv's existence.

Or SciHub's, for that matter.


Come to think of it, what does pay arXiv's bills?


Universities and foundations, etc.

https://arxiv.org/help/support/faq#2B

https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/arxivpub/arXiv+Budget...


Are you seriously comparing the web hosting needs of Elsevier and Twitter?


No, they're comparing the cost structures, which both do not consist only of web hosting.


Web hosting is cheap enough that Wikipedia runs entirely on donations.


Wikipedia definitely it not cheap, the donations that it receives are not a little, and web hosting are not its only costs.


Wikipedia only spends $2m on hosting out of a budget of $91m. It's biggest expense is salaries ($33m).

But this is one of the biggest sites in the world. Something closer to what Journal Publisher's would need is Arxiv.

Arxiv's budget is $1m of which they spend $60k on hosting and basically all of the rest on staff and staff support.

Eslevier's revenue is £2.5b. billion. Their profit margin is over 50%. What a monumental waste.


Their profit margins is usually between 30-40%. Which is still a monumental waste.


>Look at arxiv - the only thing it's missing that journals have is reviews.

That is a pretty significant difference.




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