What the AGU charges authors for publishing their work in its journals is and should be, to a certain extent, self regulating. It would be economically suicidal to charge less than necessary to meet the deficit beyond the income from subscribers, and it would also be self‐defeating to charge more than necessary and therefore discourage potential contributors. Costs are already sufficiently discouraging.The arguments given by Harrison in the November 6EOS, 60(45), for the differential in cost between copyrighted and public domain articles, however, concern the equitable sharing of those costs, and I take issue with the validity of the reasoning therei