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

[<jean.claude.guedon@umontreal.ca>]

Of course, there are always costs, with OJS or any other tool. 
There is always a learning curve, etc. How it is absorbed is the 
interesting thing. When a lot of people do it because they want 
to make their journal(s) work, then the cost is no longer 
monetized. Perhaps it would be good if people left the 
perspective that all has to be analyzed in purely organizational 
terms that canbe tallied by a good accountant. Doing so is a 
useful exercice but it is not a guaranted path to the realities 
out there...

With regard to grad students, one has to make a choice: cheap 
labor with rapid turn-over or more stable, but costlier, labor. 
Again, there is no hard rule here.

Jean-Claude Guedon


Sandy Thatcher wrote:

> 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