RE: ArXiv Grows Up, Adopts Subscription-like Model

[William Park <wpark@deepdyve.com>]

Actually, $7 per article seems very high.  At DeepDyve, our cost 
for ingesting content from over 30 publishers, indexing it, 
making it searchable and displayable is less than $0.10.

I'm sure we don't support all the capabilities/functions that 
ArXiv does, but on the other hand we've also developed features 
not available at ArXiv, and must also support marketing, bus dev, 
etc - so it might be a wash.  That being said, I'm not suggesting 
$7 is due to poor execution.  I'm assuming it's due to lack of 
scale advantages.  The cost for DeepDyve to index 30M articles is 
not altogether different than indexing 300,000.  Allow me to 
pivot this discussion in a different direction:

Most publishers have invested substantial sums of money into 
their own platforms.  The industry must collectively spend 
hundreds of millions per year in silo'ing their content...to 
benefit who?  Yes, certain audiences may want advanced bells and 
whistles, but by and large, 90% of the need is the same:  help 
the user find articles and read them.  However, the overall user 
experience is quite poor as the user must navigate across many 
sites, each of which are different, and the content is very 
expensive in no small part due to the cost of supporting 
expensive silo's.  Therefore, I will end my post with 2 
questions:

-Would the end-user and the industry not be better off 
consolidating access and discovery onto a single, industry 
platform?

-Conversely, would Apple, Amazon, Google etc. not be better off 
having the industry fragmented so they could be the platform, 
control the end user, and extract the lion's share of the value?

William Park
CEO, DeepDyve


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Sandy Thatcher
Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2010 5:24 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: ArXiv Grows Up, Adopts Subscription-like Model

Uh, it's the peer review that is the most expensive part of the
whole process, and arXiv is not in the business of peer
reviewing.

>What really struck me about the arXiv business model is the
>phenomenal cost-effectiveness of arXiv.
>
>At under $7 per article (that's the total cost!), arXiv manages
>all of the technical aspects of disseminating scholarly articles
>-including storage, sustaining a heavily used system, developing
>the search interface, and even working with publishers so that
>arXiv also works as a submission platform for some journals.
>
>wow!
>
>Heather Morrison, MLIS
>The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
>http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com