I do wonder how much it actually costs to produce the scientific journals in which we publish our research. Graduate students and faculty prepare the manuscripts for publication, then faculty volunteer their time for the peer review process. The cost of a subscription to a journal then, should come from paying for the editorial staff and overhead associated with printing or maintaining the servers for online publications. I think the question is, do the aforementioned costs incurred by the publishers account for the high cost of journal subscriptions? It seems to me that the publishers are making a hefty profit.

While I think that the cost of journal subscriptions is too high even for us academics, I think it's worthwhile to consider where the burden of paying for publication costs should lay. Taxpayers may fund the actual research, but who should pay for the publication costs? Recently, my graduate student adviser and I published a paper in Angewandte Chemie. We had the option of paying $3,000 to make the publication open access, but we elected not to do so because of our own funding situation. Should faculty be the ones to pay for open access to their own research?