Re: Institutional Journal Costs in an Open Access Environment

[Jan Velterop <velteropvonleyden@btinternet.com>]

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It is sort of flattering when someone takes the trouble to
explain what you assume. Though sometimes it's puzzling and it
can be wrong. So perhaps it helps if I interpret my assumptions
myself.

I know (don't need to assume) that not all grant money coming
into a university stays in research. The percentages may be
different in different circumstances and countries, but at
Cornell it is apparently a whopping 58% that doesn't go to
research. Phil argues that that makes redistribution more
difficult ("we don't just have reallocation issues to deal with,
we have a major shortfall"). I argue that that it makes
redistribution potentially easier. A system in which 58% of a
grant can be spent on other things than research (including
"mowing the law"  [sic] - copyright law?), is a system that
should be able to deal with 59% not being spent on research per
se. Especially since, after a transition period, the 1-2% of that
money which now goes into the library, could be put back into
research and compensate for the one percent research loss. That
may not even be necessary. Just using low-energy light bulbs
throughout the university or turning the heater down a notch in
winter and the air condition a degree up in summer may cover the
shortfall. Better for the environment anyway. But the more
pertinent point is that publishing *is* part of the
infrastructure for research. If paying for literature via the
library can be an infrastructural provision, then paying for the
literature via article charges can be.

I do take the point that researchers may not happily part with
money. They are people, after all. They may not happily part with
money for lab glassware or chemicals, either. Or with money for
mowing the lawn. That's why we have infrastructural provisions.
Publishing is integral to research, and thus the cost of
publishing is integral to the cost of research. Those who don't
see it that way should try not publishing their research.

The fact that researchers didn't like page charges in Phys Rev D
ten years ago is neither here nor there. They didn't get open
access for it, they were as aware of the prices of journals as
cats are aware of the price of cat food (i.e. not, and they
probably couldn't care less), and it wasn't an infrastructural
provision (which it should have been, even then). They could
rightfully see the latter as unfair. After all, researchers don't
have to pay for library subscriptions, either.

Jan Velterop

On 26 Apr 2006, at 14:00, Phil Davis wrote:

> Jan Velterop wrote:
>
> "Assuming that the total amount of money involved in the
> aggregate remains the same, redistribution of costs has the
> important academic and societal benefit of enabling full open
> access. Given that the funders (mostly governments) inject this
> money into the system anyway, this could be a winners-only
> game, the funders, academia, and society as a whole being the
> winners."
>
> Phil Davis responds:
>
> Jan's response assumes that all grant money coming into a
> university stays in research.  There is nothing farther from
> the truth.  At Cornell University, a leading research
> institution and a net producer of research, the overhead rate
> for incoming grants is 58%.  This means that only 42% of
> incoming grant money is directly allocated to the researcher.
> The other money goes into a big pot of money that covers
> everything from heating and lighting, to mowing the law.  The
> library (part of the overhead of an institution) gets about
> 1-2% of university operating costs.  Having 58% of
> federally-funded research costs going to institutional costs
> that don't directly cover research means that we don't just
> have reallocation issues to deal with, we have a major
> shortfall that would need to be picked up by research
> institutions to support publishing.
>
> Secondly, Jan's argument assumes that researchers are happily
> willing to part with some of their research windfall to devote
> to publishing costs.  Given that page-charges are mostly an
> historic relic, kept alive in a few fields like biology, this
> seems unlikely.  In spite of large grants in the Physical
> Sciences, physicists appear to be quite intolerant of having to
> pay to publish. Just over ten years ago the journal Physical
> Review D (High Energy Physics) reinstated page charges for
> authors. In the words of the Editor-in-Chief of the American
> Physical Society;
>
> "What happened was that people started boycotting our journal
> and started publishing in Nuclear Physics [a journal published
> by Elsevier], which did not have page charges but which cost
> about 10 times as much on a per page basis to the institution.
> If page charges and article charges have to be paid out of the
> authors' grants, as happens in the U.S., then the authors are
> faced with a dilemma. Either they pay the page charges or they
> send a post-doc or a graduate student to a meeting. The cost
> would be about the same It is not going to be easy to convert
> to [the author-pays] mode of operation." [1]
>
> [1] R. Ramachandran, =93We Have to Be Able to Recover Our Costs.
> Interview with Prof. Martin Blume, Editor-in-Chief, American
> Physical Society.=94 Frontline 21.2 (17-30 Jan. 2004): http://
> flonnet.com/fl2102/stories/20040130001308200.htm
>
> ****************
> Institutional Journal Costs in an Open Access Environment
> by William H. Walters
> http://www.library.millersville.edu/public_html/walters/
> journal_costs.pdf
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