RE: Sub-sidy/scription for ArXiv

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

There should be no mystery about what the actual costs of 
operating a scholarly journal are. There are hundreds of such 
journals published by university presses, whose finances are 
transparent to their parent universities and--for those that are 
public institutions--to the general public as well.  So, anytime 
universities want to come up with hard numbers to compare with 
the costs claimed by commercial publishers, they have a ready 
source of information at hand.  One easy point of comparison is 
that most university presses do not have the costs for space that 
many commercial publishers--especially those based in high-priced 
real estate markets like New York City--do.  For some presses, 
indeed, the cost of office space is entirely subsidized; for 
others it is not.  But even for the latter, it is likely to be 
less than what most commercial publishers pay, because of the 
lower-cost real estate markets in which they operate.

Sandy Thatcher


>Sorry, I just returned from a conference, so I'm just thinking
>about this now.  I don't disagree with any of your points,
>although I continue to have an issue with the perceived cost of
>peer review. I'm sure that the American Physical Society made a
>good faith estimate of their costs (the link from your article to
>the slideshow didn't work, so I can only guess) and other
>publishers can probably whip up even higher costs, depending on
>the formulae they construct and the dead weight they carry, but
>continue to think is necessary or can't think of operating
>without and maybe really can't operate <as such> without.  As I
>said, I think there are all sorts of ways to make publishing, or
>any enterprise, expensive.
>
>I've seen many numbers fresh out of the opposite end of
>somebody's blackbox, back when I did financial work, and I've
>learned to believe in not a one. Aside from simplifications,
>estimates, etc. that go in, the actual operations are generally
>assumed.  My experience is that you have to knock hard on every
>single number that goes into a financial formula.  Usually, you
>can come up with a list of priorities for saving (just on
>operations), if you don't end up also finding mistakes or
>exaggerations hidden in the formulae themselves.  (Honestly,
>though, I think you need to be inside the walls of an operation
>for some time before you can see what or who, within an
>operation, is a structural support and what or who is an
>expensive decoration).
>
>Many (most, all?) library and university hosted OA journals do
>not pay editors or staff to manage peer review and thus do not
>pay money for peer review.  We can assign an imaginary dollar
>figure for the cost of this peer review, but that would be like
>coming up with an imaginary dollar figure to describe the cost of
>writing the article -- it just isn't meaningful (although we
>could talk meaningfully about the cost of the research). Scholars
>choose to serve as OA editors for journals probably for 2 main
>reasons: 1) it is helpful for their careers, 2) open scholarly
>communication matters to them; regardless of motive, however,
>they are generally providing the value at no dollar cost (how
>many OA journals pay a stipend?).
>
>You know this already.  It is beside your point.  Yes, more and
>more open access journals are appearing.  More and more libraries
>are getting into the business of hosting journals and providing
>the 'publisher' infrastructure and staff to support peer reviewed
>journals in varieties of fields (where the cost conversation has
>more meaning, but many library publishing specialists are simply
>adding this work to what they already do; or, in any case, the
>costs are much lower as shown indirectly by page cost studies for
>NFP and OA journals).  This has been much of the growth of OA
>which, while really quite impressive, you have elsewhere
>described as glacially slow.
>
>I know you already know this, but I wanted to stress it again
>because this is what I was largely thinking about when I posted
>my earlier comments -- as library and university publishing
>programs continue to grow, and there's no reason to believe they
>won't (there are several big university libraries now in the
>business), they can and should think about economies of scale,
>shared standards (efficiencies, as well as improvements in such
>areas as metadata), further sharing infrastructure, and yes, I'll
>say it again, improving the value chain.  Also, as you point out
>(and which I called overhead and profit-taking), there are lots
>of other reasons why commercial publishers are expensive -- and
>generally, these causes of expense do not apply (or apply as
>much) to OA publishers.
>
>Until we see the mandates and the effects you describe, the
>journal-by-journal growth of OA is extremely valuable.  I
>understand OA pursued in this fashion is unlikely to overtake the
>fact of big-name retail journals, except perhaps on a long time
>scale, but change does happen / has happened ( in the past three
>days, I heard interesting stories about library faculty liaisons
>in the *humanities* getting the go ahead from faculty to let
>print go -- now, if that is finally occurring ...).
>
>Coming back to your assertion that there is and will be no need
>to re-build peer review providers: I don't know.  It is just too
>easy to pluck a number from the clouds and say it is real and to
>base fees on it -- you might as well tell me peer review costs
>$1300 per article as $500 or $200.  Given the stark fact of
>commercial journal inflation over the past x years and the
>sometimes ludicrous defenses of that inflation, universities have
>no reason to continue trusting those out-sourced service
>providers, regardless of whether the numbers are really real for
>those particular publishers.  Yes, I understand, we still largely
>have no choice but to buy retail journals in my scenario, given
>the fact that peer review is not the only value being added in
>the chain by publishers (the other big one being reputation or
>career effect ... sorry, I'm retreading over the ground of my
>previous memos), but universities only benefit by building
>internal services (which can also be yardsticks for external
>service) and by seeking to make such internal operations as
>efficient as possible -- the better both to judge external
>service providers and, perhaps too slowly, to replace those
>providers as opportunities arise.
>
>Coming back to my science fiction based on arXiv:  I do think an
>innovative OA subject repository slash journal platform
>(...depending on the enhancements, as I said) could impact the
>pace and direction of OA growth. Not only would such a platform
>provide further proof of concept, but it could enhance
>collaboration in building better underlying/ shared systems, thus
>perhaps making further advances more likely at an increasing
>pace, a bit like the way factory production lines increased the
>pace with which horseless carriages replaced horsy carriages ...
>but I won't go down this path a third time, since I see your
>point that immediate mandates would get us further faster.
>
>Let me re-frame my position this way:  I think you are and have
>been proposing the way of the hare, while I continue plodding
>along with the tortoise (seeing opportunities for the tortoise to
>move along a little faster).  If either wins, we both win.
>Since I'm not convinced yet that the hare won't stop to take a
>nap, I'll continue walking with the tortoise, but I do hope to
>hear cheering up ahead.
>
>-Nat