RE: Costs of peer-review (Was: May issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter)

[Richard Feinman <RFeinman@downstate.edu>]

I would love to see a breakdown of costs.  One of the reasons I 
left Nutrition & Metabolism is because of the limited 
remuneration for the editors: $2,000 for two editors.  We did not 
pay any of the reviewers. Of course, we only had 100 or so 
submissionts but scaling that up comes to $ 40,000 (although it 
is unlikely pay for editors would increase proportionally to 
submissions).  Where did the other $ 660,000 go?

Richard David Feinman
Professor of Cell Biology
SUNY Downstate Medical Center
NOTE: This mailer sometimes creates .DTF files. Please ignore.


Peter Davenport <peterr.davenport@gmail.com>
Sent by: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
05/07/10 11:31 PM
RE: Costs of peer-review (Was: May issue of the SPARC Open Access

Richard Dodenhoff, American Society for Pharmacology & 
Experimental Therapeutics has said:

>The notion that peer review is free or low cost is based on 
>misinformation.....

>We publish four journals that have "volunteer" editors and 
>editorial boards.  It's a rather bare-bones operation with 
>minimal staff who handled 2,508 submissions in 2009.  Peer 
>review for those journals for 2009 cost about $700,000.

Would any other publisher on this list care to comment on how 
these figures stack up against their experience? What does 
Elsevier spend on Editors for instance? Do any hard data on 
editorial (staff) costs exist in the public domain?

Peter R Davenport