There's a certain irony to a post criticising 30% profit margin being popular here, when many of us are in the tech industry where profit margins of 70%+ are the norm.
The difference is that scientific publishers are pure middlemen: scientists themselves are the content creators, consumers, and peer reviewers. As peer reviewers they are unpaid, and as authors they often pay to publish their work. No wonder they are pissed off at the price they pay as consumers.
The difference is that YouTube are pure middlemen: users themselves are the content creators, consumers, and reviewers. As reviewers they are unpaid, and as creators they often pay to publish their work.
The difference is that Facebook are pure middlemen: users themselves are the content creators, consumers, and reviewers. As reviewers they are unpaid, and as creators they often pay to publish their work.
Interesting point; in the scientific community some are quite honored by being chosen as a peer reviewer. It's like a rite of passage.
The only difference I can see is that the YouTube/Facebook reviewer title is a lot easier to come by. I thought it more akin to Amazon Vine, but at least then you get to keep the things you test!
Your ISP/you don't have to fork over an upfront cash subscription/ppv to watch youtube. Institutional journal subscriptions can run to 100's of thousands of dollars a year+.
I don't think people would be upset if the industry operated at a higher profit margin. What is upsetting is that the industry has a strangle-hold on the market. If you want thrive in academia, you need to publish in top journals. This gives the top journals immense leverage over researchers. In effect, academics pay the journals to publish, and the Universities later turn around and pay a second time to have access to those same journals.
You're not adjusting for risk here. In tech, the norm is for industries to die within decades - how many tech giants are still around from the '80s? IBM, Microsoft, Apple (after a near-death experience), Oracle and... that's about all I can think of.
On top of the mortality rate, unlike a publisher or a journal, a dead tech giant leaves behind nothing that will still be valuable decades later: the technology is long-since obsolete, the brand irrelevant, and what intellectual property do they have? Their patents expire within 20 years while the publishers and journals' copyright on anything written since the 1930s will last what might as well be forever.