RE: Who gets hurt by Open Access?

["Dr. James J. O'Donnell" <provost@georgetown.edu>]

As founding co-editor of Bryn Mawr Classical Review, I am the seniormost
100% Open Access electronic journal publisher in the humanities, going
back 15 years now.  We fit the profile of what David Goodman described as
a low-effort volunteer operation, and there is an element of truth to what
he says.  We get by on operating costs in the low five figures,
cross-subsidized by a print publication that really only makes sense as a
print publication.  However:

1.  We are a book review journal and run a much lighter peer review system
than an original-article journal would have to run.

2.  Voluntary labor is a beautiful thing, with the acute risk that you get
what you pay for.  We have gone as far as we have because of the zeal of
the founders, but at the moment we are in serious conversations about what
the future of the journal will be like in 5-10 years, when the founders
want to get out of the way, and we are planning ahead.  The answer is:
more people, more overhead, more costs.

3.  When David says "almost no direct cost", he is assuming that a
benevolent force is providing servers, network, sysadmins, and security at
no cost.  Nice deal, when you can get it, but it doesn't mean that the
journal runs "at no cost".

4.  Some capital investment is required from time to time.  We had a
foundation grant in the low 6 figures some years ago that enabled us to
build some discipline-specific web tools.  Even if we assume that next
generations of publishing software will be transparent and easy, such
transitions will generally involve more work than you think in migrating
the existing data forward (that was our biggest headache at the time of
investment).  There are upgrades that we could imagine at this point, but
there's (a) no money and (b) no extra volunteer time, so we let them
slide.  As it happens, we've acquired a strong niche market of readership,
so we're not at risk of being competed out of business immediately. Others
would not be so lucky.

There is such a thing as a free lunch, but you have to line up at the soup
kitchen for it.  Choices range up from there, and we've chosen a fast food
model; others will want more.  Baseball, old Red Barber liked to say, is
more than a lot like life.  So is publishing.

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown U.