From the abstract:
Journal literature has long played a prominent role in the scholarly communication chain. In recent decades, however, the scholarly communication system has been facing a crisis due to the ever-escalating costs of journals. This paper examines the reasons for the high costs of scholarly journals. … Two of the features of the journal publishing industry cited a decade ago and still valid today are a “lack of competition” and “perverse incentives.” The “first-copy cost” is reported to be the main reason for high journal prices both in print and electronic publishing
For more information take a look here at Resource Shelf.
Didn’t the National Humanities Alliance produce a recent report on that suggesting that humanities and social-science journals are more expensive than science journals because a lot of their cost is in the reviewing cycle (they reject a higher proportion of submissions)? There’s also the real cost of editing.
It’s not only scholarly journals that are more expensive but even very slim college coursebooks are ridiculously priced. I was interested in a linguistics text that I had seen advertised by Cambridge University Press. When I checked on it, the price for the current, 2nd edition is $105; the first edition is available for $34. I wonder what has changed in lingusitics in the past 8 years to justify both a second edition and a high price?
Our local university library is having to cut back on journal subscriptions because of budget cuts. There was one journal subscription that costs $5,386 per year.