In January 2026, my professor (Andrea I. Schäfer) posted on LinkedIn about the cost of a paper, specific for our field and her lab situation. The result of her estimates is €90–180k. An enormous amount of money.
This makes me think from time to time about the tough reality of founding a new lab and producing good papers.
As LinkedIn posts can disapppear, I provide an extract of her post below.
COST OF A PAPER
A question that intrigues me, is how much a research paper costs, not publication charges, but research and writing. This is hard to calculate and inevitably field and situation specific. IAMT is a small institute with a clear boundary, and this is a ‘back of an envelope’ calculation.
To determine the writing cost, take a typical journalist rate of €1–2 per word. Count figures as 500 words, then a typical research paper (5k words & 10 figures) would come to €10–20k. A review paper (20k words & 25 figures) €32.5–65k. Note that this is a person with average level of training, not a highly skilled researcher, who would have a higher rate.
If one now considers the actual cost of doing the research—experimental water process engineering!—one needs to consider all costs. At IAMT, I bring the money to do research through a competitive Helmholtz scheme (lifelong €600k/yr), third party funding (let’s estimate €365k/yr), [research] requires infrastructure—a lab that was built for IAMT (if divided by 10 years €250k/yr) and IAMT has an overhead rate of 117% (estimate €585k). This adds up to €1.8M per year, and for an output of 10–20 papers per year, the cost would be €90–180k per paper!
The output varies with the productivity of each (learning) researcher, the efficiency of the work (bureaucracy plays a huge role) and then other tasks such as teaching (this is low as IAMT is research focused). Writing grants is part of the funding required to do research and with low success rates, waste time, the cost per paper increases.
Institutions that maximize science potential by providing support for tasks that researchers are not trained for, reduce bureaucracy, streamline processes, focus on efficiency, etc. will increase performance and reap benefits in excellence and international ranking. Availability and efficient use of facilities, support and resources are at the heart of high performance.
The main point here is though, that we researchers give this expensive work for free to publishers, provide free review service to each other (publishers do not have the required expertise), and then pay to have the work—even graphics and covers—published and generate huge profits. Scientists become graphic designers and many publishers delegate the supervision of basic typesetting back to the researchers. While publication costs are single and double k€ figures, huge, but they pale into insignificance compared to the actual cost of producing (good) research papers. It should be a privilege to publish such work!
Given that these research costs are predominately covered by tax payers, I would hope that the argument that the profits get reinvested into research are convincing. All this said, the salaries of those in ‘publishing’ should not exceed those in research. All else is exploitation of science—and tax money.
May such dummy economics stimulate some discussions on how to do improve publishing practices to benefit science—and society.