Re: A word on calculating costs

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

I think that Jo must be right -- the 'true' cost of an OA model is very
hard to predict when so many factors have to be considered. He is right
the situation is very dynamic!

However, it is not necessary to predict the actual exact cost of anything.
The point surely is that there are many reasons to expect the cost (per
article-published or per researcher-reading) of the increasingly OA system
to be significantly (yes at least an Order of Magnitude) lower. We dont
have to get a 'correct' answer to know that the ground has a decent slope.
Weather forcasting is very complex, but we now have sufficient evidence to
be sure (?) about the reality of Global warming.

I didnt mention the Google 10$ per book figure because I thought that OA
journal technology would be done in the way Google will scan library
books. Of course not. The surprising thing about the Google approach is
that they are NOT apparently doing most phases of the process
dramatically/technologically different from the way Gale or ProQuest have
done large scale digitisation projects in the past and they STILL expect
to get this massive cost reduction.

re Anthony Watkinsons points. Are we interested in seeing BMC's audited
costs? Possibly, but even without sight of this audit I do know that the
way they are building their Refereeing and Production systems is intended
to be scaleable in the sense in which a web-based publishing system should
be scaleable. Vitek Tracz in a recent interview said that they expected
their throughput to double each year. Will BMC's cost base move at
anything like the same rate? My guess is that they are tooling up to
handle four times the papers very efficiently (ie with not many more
people than now). Perhaps Anthony can tell us if any of the big
conventional publishers are yet on top of this?

Adam

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 18:52:04 EST, Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com> wrote:

> These various attempts to get at the "true" cost basis for research
> publications all assume that the costs are static, but they are not.
> Were the world to move from a user-pays (the current) model to any of
> the various forms of author-pays currently being bruited about,
> everything would change:  the number of articles, the number of fields,
> the nature of journals themselves, the role of prepublication peer
> review, and so on. Modelling this economic system will be as complicated
> as predicting the weather.
> 
> Joe Esposito