This is a very interesting article, I didn’t read too carefully but some thoughts:

Our calculation of per-article publishing costs in a conventional pre-publication peer-review (50% rejection rate) scenario where all editorial duties are performed by in-house staff (Scenario B) ranges from US$643.61 for a journal that publishes 100 articles per year down to US$565.15 for such a journal that publishes 1,000 articles (or more, as the indirect costs become increasingly negligible around this value). These values consist of US$266.53 direct publishing costs (i.e., Similarity Check, DOI for an article, DOIs for two or more reviews, copyediting, typesetting, formatting figures/graphs/tables, Altmetric badge, indexing, XML and metadata preparation), US$ 289.91 for editorial staff and US$8.72 to US$87.18 for 1,000 to 100 articles, respectively, in indirect costs (i.e., Web OA platform and hosting, digital preservation, memberships).

It would be helpful if any editors (including open access journal editors) in philosophy could confirm if this compares with philosophy journals. The Journal of the APA published 43 articles this last year. If the per-article cost estimate for a journal that publishes 100 articles a year is about right, it should have cost ~$27k to publish those articles. The APC fee for the publisher, Cambridge University Press, is $3255, meaning the APC fees for about 8.5 of the 43 articles published last year (or 20%) would have covered the complete costs of publishing the whole slate of articles. There seems to have been 30 open access articles published in the last year, even if only half were funded by APC fees rather than waivers, etc. that would be almost 100% rate of profit (making back twice what was spent). This seems consistent with an estimate given by the authors of the article.

Finally, taking a ballpark cost figure of US$600 for a scholarly article with full editorial services (i.e., scenario A/B) and comparing it to the low end of the average price estimate for a subscription article of about US$4,00010–13,22,23, it becomes clear that publication costs only cover 15% of the subscription price (Figure 1). Assuming a conservative profit margin of 30% (i.e., US$1,200 per article) for one of the large publishers24–27, there remains a sizeable gap of about US$2,200 in non-publication costs, or 55% of the price of a scholarly subscription article (Figure 1).

Now the authors go in to consider some “non-publication costs” that journal may have, but they still do not seem to cover the gap—maybe in the case considered above, some of the excess profit goes to the APA (i.e. what isn’t going back to Cambridge).

I’d like to see more society based journals (like the new Philosophy of Physics) move to a diamond open access model supported by member costs. I do not see why an organization the size APA could not raise fees or move around some of its current spending (even giving up one of the yearly meetings) to make the journal diamond open access. Both large and small societies could consider other cost-cutting measures: e.g. (1) we likely don’t have to pay market rate for editors, a postdoc or dissertation stage grad student could likely handle the duties of a managing editor for cheap rather than teach (I could certainly use pandoc and LLMs to handle typesetting and copy editing at the rate of 500$ per article 😉 ); (2) more barebones journals could be built on repos like philarchive or philsci-archive, removing some hosting, etc. costs.

Likely I’m missing something and I welcome criticism or explanations of my naivete, or else advice on how to short academic publishers. More forthcoming explanations from editors would make things clearly regarding philosophy in particular. (Was there an APA vote on the form of the journal that I am forgetting/missed?)