[Anechoic]

On the other hand, a well run, professionally edited journal costs money to produce

But how much? I'm not familiar with ACM/IEEE but looking at the journals and standards bodies that I do contribute to, I know that they don't pay authors for contributions (in some cases the authors have to pay the journals) and they don't pay editors or reviewers. As far as I can tell, they only thing they pay for is administrators and the materials to publish hard copies.

If it were a case where the content producers were getting paid for their labor, I'd have a much easier time justifying the cost for papers and standards, but paying $50-$200 per PDF is a bit ridiculous.

[oiuyhtgyhuj]

The reason is that live on institution subscriptions. If they switched to an iTunes $5/paper download then there would be less pressure on university libraries to pay $1000s/year for a subscription (the library pays a lot more than members for a journal)

It's like the cable companies, they want your $100/month irrespective of whats showing - they don't want you to pay $1/show for what you actually want to watch.

[drallison]

Even a $5/paper fee is too costly. On an average day I probably read 5 papers and browse another 5 papers. That means my research habit would cost $17,250. And that is too expensive for just casual reading.

[chalst]

I wouldn't trust Apple to maintain an archive of peer-reviewed science for the next 100 years, which is what librarians aim to do. Institutional subscriptions are part of this picture: libraries receive all the publications of the journals they subscribe to and archive them.

[te_chris]

You should be upvoted more. These organisations exist to extract millions of dollars of subscription fees out of University Libraries each year.