‘Why is publishing so expensive?’

For many of us who work in scientific publishing, the title of this Editorial is a question we hear all the time when we're out talking to academics. And it's a perfectly reasonable one. After all, researchers produce the content, for free, and act as peer reviewers to assess whether it's ‘worthy’ of publication – also, in most cases, for free. Biology Open (BiO) is a notable exception to this latter principle since we are financially compensating reviewers for their work (Gorelick and Clark, 2025), but we are one of only a very few journals to do so. In general, though, if most of the work is done by academics and ‘all’ the journal does is put the final version online, how can that possibly cost US2500 the current Article Processing Charge (APC) for BiO? In this Editorial, we (the Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor of BiO and the Publishing Director of The Company of Biologists, our not-for-profit publisher) provide details and context on BiO's finances, and hope to dispel some of the myths around the economics of publishing. For those of you who want the take-home message up-front, the two key points we want to make here are firstly that quality editorial assessment and publishing involves a lot of people (meaning our largest costs are staff salaries and Academic Editor and reviewer stipends), and secondly that publishers have had to invest heavily in technologies to support professional and trustworthy online publishing – there's a lot more to it than just posting an article on a website. But before we get into the details, here's how a typical conversation with a researcher might go when talk turns to money: Preprint servers are fantastic, but they're not journals. Preprints don't incur the same costs because they don't go through the kind of rigorous screening that happens at a journal such as BiO – both through peer review and through the technical and integrity checks we perform, which help to ensure that readers can and will trust your work. And thanks to our ‘Fast in-house versus outsourced production processes). One factor that's often under-appreciated is the selectivity of the journal, i. e. what percentage of papers received are eventually published. An OA journal that publishes the majority of its submissions receives income for most of the time and money expended in assessing those manuscripts. By contrast, a highly selective journal spends a lot of time processing papers that won't get accepted and therefore bring in no money. Many publishers have tried to get around this problem by providing trickle-down cascades to keep papers (and the income they represent) within the same publishing house, but at an individual journal level, the more selective you are, the more you have to charge to recoup your costs. Of course, you can argue about the value of such selectivity, but that's a whole separate conversation…In years gone by, the traditional subscription-based publishing model typically provided healthy revenues for publishers big and small. For The Company of Biologists (which publishes four journals in addition to BiO: Development, Journal of Cell Science, Journal of Experimental Biology and Disease Models we therefore offer a generous waiver scheme for authors unable to cover the costs of the APC or benefit from an R&P agreement. Given BiO's history as an APC-based OA journal, and because the APC level also feeds into R&P pricing (becoming an increasingly significant contributor as the proportion of OA articles grows across our portfolio), we aim to set the APC at a level that begins to cover our costs per article, ensuring financial viability of the journal. It is important to note that as a small not-for-profit publisher of only five journals, we do not benefit from any of the economies of scale that can be achieved by larger organisations. We publish our journals ourselves (rather than partnering with a larger publisher, as many society and non-profit journals do) because this gives us full control of how we operate and the quality of our product. These are significant benefits to going it alone, but the financial challenges are exacerbated by not being part of a large stable of journals with common resources and opportunities for collaboration. We also note that BiO's costs are significantly lower than our other journals, partly because BiO does not have a significant ‘front section’ (review-type articles) or the staff associated with producing this. Our biggest direct cost area is in salaries and stipends (Fig. 2). The BiO in-house team consists of three people (2. 4 full time equivalents) – the Managing Editor, a Production Editor and an Editorial Administrator. Producing the journal also requires work from our Technical Operations department, including graphics and proofreading teams. Without these committed staff members, manuscripts wouldn't move through the assessment and peer review process, and accepted papers wouldn't get copyedited (checked and corrected for accuracy, clarity and compliance with key journal policies) or scrutinised in-house for integrity issues. In short, BiO just wouldn't get published. Equally important are our team of Academic Editors, who are compensated financially for their time and dedication to the journal – reading submissions, selecting peer reviewers, making decisions on which articles to publish, supporting authors through the publication process and contributing to the overall strategic directions of the journal. For BiO, costs have recently increased due to the implementation of our ‘Fast & Fair’ initiative, which adds £440 in direct costs for each manuscript undergoing peer review. Costs that can be directly attributed to Fast & Fair (reviewer payments and software costs associated with managing our reviewer pool) are specifically shown in Fig. 2 and make up 12% of total per-article costs. It's all very well producing a journal and papers to go in it, but we also need to make sure that people can find and read them, and this is where our Sales and Marketing department comes in. As mentioned earlier, The Company of Biologists has been very successful in growing its OA content through R&P agreements, but this has required significant investment in our Sales team. Meanwhile, we rely on our Marketing staff to help us promote the journal and its papers, to reach new readers and authors and to gather feedback on what we do well and where we can improve. Finally, of course, there are all the general expenses and overheads – like any organisation, we need to manage and develop the business and its people, we need finance and HR support, and we need to keep the lights on and the laptops running. As well as our people and facilities, we are also reliant on a host of technology partners and platforms – from our manuscript submission system to our typesetting service provider to our online hosting platform. And it's not enough just to put up a PDF: as noted above, we need to keep on top of emerging standards and evolving expectations from readers and librarians, providing, amongst other things, fully accessible XML, play-in-place movies, archiving, indexing and appropriate linking to relevant databases. Increasingly, we've also had to invest in software solutions and staff time to detect and address publication integrity issues, including plagiarism, inappropriate image manipulation and papermill submissions. The age of AI will only exacerbate these issues. Publishing, done well, is an expensive business. For every paper you read in BiO, at least four different in-house staff – an Editorial Administrator, the Managing Editor, a member of our graphics team and a Production Editor have been involved in its journey from submission to publication, as have at least one Academic Editor, two peer reviewers (the majority of whom are now paid) and the (outsourced) typesetting team. And across the whole organisation, we employ 62 full- or part-time staff whose roles support our publishing operations (not counting those solely dedicated to our charitable activities). We are proud to be a people-centric organisation, and while we're actively assessing options to streamline processes and reduce costs, the quality you expect from BiO will continue to be at the forefront of our thinking.