it seems that CEO of taylor & francis, Roger Horton [2], wanted to charge nearly 3000 USD to publish an article accessible without paywall in their "journal of library administration" [0]. they belong to informa, with its CEO, Peter Rigby [1].
would 3000 usd in future be then a fair price the wikimedia movement should offer scientific authors and reviewing groups to publish an article as cc-by-sa? i was trying to get some information to calculate if this number does make any sense [3][4][5][6][7]
* 15'000 - 25'000 peer reviewed journals
* 1'300'000 peer reviewed papers published a year
* 3.5 % of them open available, further 4.6 % after some embargo period
* 4'000 publishers
* 2'200'000 books published a year
* 2012 reed elsevier numbers:
* total revenue: $9bn
* profit: £2bn
* revenue scientific publications: £3 bn
* electronic revenue: 54%
* user&subscription revenue: 70%
* 30'000 people
* 2011 informa / taylor francis numbers:
* total revenue $2 bn
* profit $511 m
* publishing business 54% of total revenue
* publishing business 69% of profit
* 67% of publishing revenues is through subscriptions
* part of it academic information (AI)
* 25% of groups revenue
* 35% of groups profit
* 20% of groups employees (<1600, out of 8300)
* 1'600 academic journals
* 3'500 new books published
this would mean, if one paper costs $3'000 * 1'300'000 = 3'900'000'000 ... the peer reviewed scientific publishing market would be a $4bn market in 2013. 2003 the guardian reported the "scientific publishing market" worth £4.5bn. [8] and, it would mean 1 person at a publisher works full time for one academic journal published. "open access" et al is listed as "external risk" e.g. in reed elseviers annual report. profit in the academic information domain seems to be > 30% of the revenue.