Re: Revision to Physical Review B data

[Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca>]

A couple of comments on David Stern's posting:

On 19-Apr-05, at 4:01 PM, David Stern wrote:

> My article in ONLINE (not Info Today, which is the platform) stated both
> the lowest cost determined by a real publisher of $850
BioMedCentral charges just over $500, last I heard, and Optics Express
under $500 (for short articles).  These are both real publishers in the
relatively expensive-to-produce STM arena; I'm not sure what the costs per
article are in other areas such as humanities, but I'm sure there are very
efficient operations due to the fact they simply have to make do with less
revenue.

> I was using PRB for exactly the reason you state, to demonstrate that
> even the best model will be extremely expensive, so imagine what would
> happen for journals with (at least) four times the profit margin.
PRB is a high-end, highly prolific STM journal.  David is right in
pointing out that there are publishers with much greater profit margins;
PRB does not represent the worst-case scenario.

However, PRB does not represent the best-case scenario, either.  As noted
in an earlier posting, assuming David's numbers in Online on the Journal
of Insect Science are correct, then a group of 500 libraries could support
this journal as open access for $84 annually each; far less than making
even one author payment, no matter how reasonable, and far less than one
average subscription for a biology title.

a personal view by,

Heather G. Morrison