Re: A word on calculating costs

[adam hodgkin <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com>]

Google makes an announcement saying that it plans to digitize 15M books at
an average cost of $10 a book. This looks like at least an order of
magnitude improvement in efficiency compared to previous efforts. But I
guess I am not alone in thinking that Google are not bragging and will get
pretty close to that figure by concentrating on doing the job very
efficiently. Just doing what needs to be done.

Google reckons that the cost of digitising an out of print book should be
about $10 and we have serious discussion about the 'real' cost of article
processing being two orders of magnitude more than this? These are
articles which are produced in electronic form by authors who are prepared
to make any reasonable corrections and do not need to be scanned. Pull the
other one....

Publishers (and quite a few OA proponents) would have us believe that it
costs $500 or $2500, or even $3000 on average to process a single article
(when everyone recognises that most of the essential, high quality and
difficult work is done by unpaid authors and referees). This is simply
backward looking cost-preservation. Once efficient modes of publication
and quality control are bedded-in its going to cost orders of magnitude
less to process research publications. We shouldnt be bench-marking the
present production method, which is seriously inefficient (Phil Davis's
research is very interesting and damning of the heritage). The real
question is how can system-wide efficiency be realised when science is
published by 21st century methods.

For example: do we really need a 'market-led' method of quality control
(refereeing through Society and privately funded journals) or would it be
preferable to use an automated system of peer review, entirely within the
control of academic researchers? And another question about the marketing
costs -- Is any really useful purpose served by 'marketing' specialist
scientific and academic journals? The only worthwhile form of marketing of
learned journals is the effective and costless form or marketing which
stems from their reputation in the audience served. The system might be
more efficient if there was less profit to be had from marketing
individual journals.

-- 
Adam Hodgkin