Weighing in on the cost of research papers

The story entitled “A nuclear bomb worth more than its weight in gold?” (Physics Today, December 2013, page 26 ) caused me to consider other specific cost comparisons (dollars per gram) that could be made.

For example, one could ask a typical science or engineering department to calculate the specific cost of its published refereed papers by dividing the department’s total annual budget (in dollars) by the mass (in grams) of the published refereed papers for the same year. (No cheating! Use only standard-weight journal paper.) Ignoring for the moment that a department’s publications might be entirely in electronic form—weightless soft copy, in which case the specific cost would be infinite—I believe that the specific costs of published technical papers would greatly exceed the cost of gold, currently about $46 a gram.

I actually did a similar measurement some years ago for an organization I headed. In that case, the specific cost of refereed papers turned out to be midway between that of small diamonds (relatively cheap at about $30 000 per gram) and high-quality large diamonds (about $1 million per gram). In comparison, lunar rocks returned by the Apollo program in the 1970s cost about $80 000 per gram in 1975 dollars.

Thus, relatively speaking, gold and nuclear weapons are quite cheap.