The reasons for author fees by Chris Biemesderfer
The AAS’ business model focuses primarily on two groups of stakeholders in scholarly research: those who produce research articles and those who consume (read) them in the course of their scientific investigations. We tend to label those groups as “authors” and “librarians”—the librarians being proxies for researchers studying the literature—since those are the customers we interact with in our publishing business. Those are also the groups in the academy that benefit most from the publication of research journals, and our business model entails getting revenue from each group, in the forms of fees from authors and subscriptions from libraries.
Source: AAS Newsletter, September/October 2012, Issue 166 – Published for the Members of the American Astronomical Society, pp. 6-8
