Lately, my friends ask me how much it costs to make a scientific journal. Well, here is the simple calculation:
1) Asking for E-ISSN and P-ISSN (International). Usually, the registration fee varies in each country, from 0 costs to 2000 USD.
2) If you don’t have a legal institution, you need to make one (private or public). At least 3000 USD for a starter.
3) Web hosting starts from 100 USD; the higher price, the better the server/service.
4) If you can’t make a website on your own, then you need to hire one. It varies from 300 to 5000 USD, depends on what you want.
5) There is a free web system, called Open Journal System (OJS), free of charge, but it needs your web skills. Otherwise, you need to pay another provider like Editorial Manager, Manuscript Central, Wolters Kluwer, start from 1000 – 7000 USD per year. More products, more costs.
6) You also need to spend the money for web maintenance, like 100-300 USD per month, unless you can manage yourself for free.
7) Cost for proofreader and layout editor. Like 100-200 USD per article.
8) You also need to pay for Plagiarism check services, such as Turnitin, Ithenticate. A personal account (19.9 USD per year license) and an institutional account (3 USD per screening article).
9) You need to pay membership for Crossref for the DOI prefix and DOI number assignment. The annual membership fee per year is 250 USD, and 1 USD per article.
10) You also need to use a third party for archiving the article contents, such as LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, Portico, etc. Start from 250 USD per year.
So, you can calculate how much you need to spend per year. It will be around 5,000 – 20,000 USD.
And you still ask for a free publication fee considering the cost? Therefore, many publishers use a subscription model. You need to pay to get access to the published articles.
Or a certain publication fee for Open Access publishing model. Unless if the publisher is rich or getting more supports. That’s a different thing.
It just needs your simple common sense to understand.
Hope it helps!
This is an open access article distributed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
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