$32 seems steep for one article. Does anyone know if Nature allows authors to publish on their websites? Nothing so far on Hinton's, LeCun's, or Bengio's page.
Their editor-in-chief estimates their costs to be ~$30-40,000 per article. Much higher than other publishers, it seems, probably in part due to their high rejection rate (92% in 2011).
I expect prices for everything could be reduced with enough effort, but I think that all businesses have an incentive to reduce internal costs. They apparently publish roughly 1000 articles per year[0] so that suggests internal costs in the range of 30-40 million.
> The work that counts, ie. the research and the peer-review, are free and not compensated at all by the publisher.
The peer review is done for free, yes. I don't think I'd class the research as free though, unless you mean free to the publisher, the scientists are still generally paid.
Again, I'm not arguing for paid journals, just pointing out that they do have costs to run.
