The following research paper (preprint) was recently shared on arXiv.
Title
The Cost of Reading Research. A Study of Computer Science Publication Venues
Authors
Joseph Paul Cohen
UMass-Boston
Carla Aravena
UMass-Boston
Wei Ding
UMass-Boston
Source
via arXiv
Abstract/Intro
What does the cost of academic publishing look like to the common researcher today? Our goal is to convey the current state of academic publishing, specifically in regards to the field of computer science and provide analysis and data to be used as a basis for future studies. We will focus on author and reader costs as they are the primary points of interaction within the publishing world. In this work, we restrict our focus to only computer science in order to make the data collection more feasible (the authors are computer scientists) and hope future work can analyze and collect data across all academic fields.
Direct to Full Text Paper (14 pages; PDF)