Time to return to the issue I brought up the other day regarding the open-access debate. Some people think that publishing firms rip people off by taking scientific information from the community and selling it back to the very providers of this information. This ignores, of course, that some journals such as the Nature titles, Science and the Cell Press stable add value to the content they publish by filtering scientific information in such a way that their imprimatur is (in most cases) guarantee of quality. Ironically, as these journals have professional editors, who are the public face of the titles, they tend to receive most of the negative feedback regarding our business model.

But, fine, let’s play along and ignore the fact that we at the Nature journals add value to what we publish. The purpose of this post is to illustrate that, even though we charge for our content, our publications are very cost-effective for our readers.

Take a look at this figure from an independent study by Credit Suisse/First Boston. It shows how much the University of California system (a very important user in terms of sheer volume) had to pay every time a member of their community used our journals online, and it compares this cost across different publishing companies.

As you can see, whereas the cost of using our journals is approximately one nickel per use, other publisher’s products cost well over an order of magnitude more (almost two orders of magnitude in one case).

I’m sorry that I had to blank out the name of the other publishers; I didn’t feel comfortable fully disclosing them. In any case, I’m sure you suspect who they might be.

So, next time you think that the Nature journals rip you off, think about this graph. Do the Nature journals really deserve all the flak they receive, or do we actually give people their money’s worth?