RE: Taking Our Academic Medicine

["Matthew Cockerill" <matt@biomedcentral.com>]

I agree that this would be fascinating information, as it would give a
real sense of what was the 'overall cost to the community' of publishing
an article in one journal, versus another.

I too suggested this to the researchers - I think there's a consensus that
it would be interesting information, but it would also be very difficult
and labour intensive to figure out accurately.

Of course, that in itself is in a bit of an indictment of the current
system - the funders and the scientific community in general don't have a
clear sense of whether or not they are overpaying, because they can't
easily compare the value delivered by one journal in terms such as
'dollars per article' or 'dollars per article download' or 'dollars per
citation'. Transparency on these things is very much in the interests of
the scientific community, but not necessarily in the interests of
traditional publishers, some of whom may find the opacity convenient.

For article processing charge-based open access journals, it is of course
very easy to work out these figures.

Matt Cockerill
Publisher, BioMed Central
 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> [mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu]On Behalf Of Ahmed Hindawi
> Sent: 15 November 2005 23:56
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Subject: RE: Taking Our Academic Medicine
> 
> I would be interested in any study of the total "revenue" per page,
> article, citation or use of not-for-profit journals versus commercial
> journals. Such data of course will require knowing the number of total
> paid subscribers to the journal which would be harder to get or
> estimate, but will be useful in addition to the price a single
> subscriber (per page, article, citation, or use) pays. Are there any
> data available on this?
> 
> Ahmed Hindawi