RE: Calculating the Cost per Article in the Current

["RAPPAZ Francois" <francois.rappaz@unifr.ch>]

I was puzzled by the discussion on this thread: calculating the cost 
par article for our faculty, a science faculty in a very small 
university (around 10'000 students and 1'000 academic FTE), gives the 
following figures:
 
price per article without electronic access: $ 4'000 - 5'000 (taking 
only into account what is paid for journals or what is published in 
sciences for 2002-2004)
price per article with electronic access: $ 5'000 - 6'400  

These are high prices in comparison with Phil's data, simply because 
Fribourg University is small and publish less (around 160 articles 
adjusted by first author each year). But we *have to* pay a certain 
amount to access journals, and if the number of articles was double or 
triple, we would pay about the same. Aren't Phil's data just showing 
that big universities publish a lot, and hence have a lower price per 
articles ?

In my opinion, comparing the money spend now, for information access, 
and money spend by authors for being published in an OA journal is not 
relevant. The motivations are different.

Fran�ois