RE: Open Access to Research Is Inevitable, Libraries Are Told

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

With all due respect to John Willinsky and the OJS software, 
which is good and getting better all the time, there are still 
significant costs involved in using the software; it is not so 
sophisticated as to do all the work involved in managing peer 
review, and there is also a significant learning curve (hence 
cost) involved in training people to use it (or any of the 
commercial counterparts like Editorial Manager, used at our 
Press), which is exacerbated when those running a journal come 
and go frequently, as happens when graduate student labor is 
used. I suspect those "hidden" costs are seldom tallied up when 
estimates of OA publishing are made.

Sandy Thatcher


>Indeed peer-reviewers do their work for free, at least in the
>case of journals, and there exists excellent free software to
>manage the peer review process (for example John Willinsky's
>OJS). But publishers continue to treat this as if it were
>sooooooooooooooooooooo expensive and soooooooooooooooooooo
>difficult.
>
>The main point of all this is that significantly digitization
>lowers a number of expenses and, as a result, many tasks
>previously out of reach for small groups are now quite easy to
>organize. There are costs involved in publishing, to be sure, but
>many are never monetized, and they are not as high as some
>estimates claim. Look at what SciELO is doing and with how much
>money, and then ponder... As a result, the perimeters within
>which publishers used to work are gradually shrinking, raising a
>number of professional anxieties that interfere with the clarity
>of the objectives - namely developing the best communication
>system possible for researchers.
>
>Jean-Claude Guedon