[ordersofmag]

The journal appears to be published by an office with 7 FTE's which presumably is funded by the money raised by presence of the paywall and sales of their journals and books. Fully-loaded costs for 7 folks is on the order of $750k/year. https://www.kentstateuniversitypress.com/

Someone has to foot that bill. Open-access publishing implies the authors are paying the cost of publication and its popularity in STEM reflects an availability of money (especially grant funds) to cover those author page charges that is not mirrored in the social sciences and humanities.

Unrelatedly given recent changes in federal funding Johns Hopkins is probably feeling like it could use a little extra cash (losing $800 million in USAID funding, overhead rates potential dropping to existential crisis levels, etc...)

[arghwhat]

> Open-access publishing implies the authors are paying the cost of publication and its popularity in STEM reflects an availability of money

No it implied the journal not double-dipping by extorting both the author and the reader, while not actually performing any valuable task whatsoever for that money.

[drdeca]

> while not actually performing any valuable task whatsoever for that money.

Like with complaints about landlords not producing any value, I think this is an overstatement? Rather, in both cases, the income they bring in is typically substantially larger than what they contribute, due to economic rent, but they do both typically produce some non-zero value.

[vasco]

They could pay them from the $13B endowment they have.

[evanelias]

Johns Hopkins University has an endowment of $13B, but as I already noted above, this journal has no direct affiliation with Johns Hopkins whatsoever so the size of Johns Hopkins' endowment is completely irrelevant here. They just host a website which allows online reading of academic journals.

This particular journal is published by Kent State University, which has an endowment of less than $200 million.