Re: Open Access pricing and the perceived ability of research grants to cover publication costs

["James A. Robinson" <jim.robinson@stanford.edu>]

This may be a very naive question, but what analysis has gone into the
problem of converting to a paid-input model when it comes to ongoing
business costs of granting access to articles?

With the current model it's possible to make adjustments to the costs of
subscriptions which pay for infrastructure changes. Changes which allow a
publisher to maintain the archive of their published materials. Is this
model in any way affected by going from one cost model to another?

Right now, with the journals I've got experience with, there is this model
where the subscriptions pay for access to current articles, and also cover
the cost of "free access for all" w/re to the archive of older material. A
small change in the subscription costs can bring in a lot of extra
revenue, as it essentially spreads the cost over all those who want to
read the material.  Can the same apply for input-paid where an author
needs to justify X dollars to be published in Journal Y?

I'm wondering if a single payment for input of articles can scale to
maintain operational costs of older material?  There are a few scenerios I
can think of along these lines:

    a) Yes, it does cover ongoing costs to maintain the archive.
       I haven't done the math, but I guess I'd say I have doubts
       that this would be the case.

    b) No, it does not cover costs which means the amount paid to
       submit an article will rise as operational costs rise.  At
       some point you either reach a level where input-paid covers
       operational costs without driving away submissions or you
       keep raising costs and see your submissions drop off.

    c) A 3rd party could take over archiving the material. They need
       money to operate and that would need to come from something like
       a gov't or private grant, given the legal license PLoS and others
       are planning to stick on articles they publish.  This could be
       a University which uses general funds or a gov't grant, it could
       be a business which bids for gov't contracts.  I don't like the
       thought of this model, but I know some would.

I'm asking this question from the viewpoint of someone who gets to see
some of the issues that are faced up when an archive of material never
reaches a maximum size. Where the input never stops, and you can never
draw a line in the sand to say "at this size, we get rid of old content."

There are a few resources off the top of my head which I can throw out as
examples of some of this: reliable disk storage in the range of
terrabytes, network access allowing for bandwidth to handle incoming
requests from people wanting articles, software development to handle
searching and retrieving the documents, development of software which lets
users get a better grasp on an ever growing volume of material (different
views of material, hyperlinking, etc.), the salary of developers/operators
who need to maintain fairly complex systems and potentially the slow
increase in then number of these people needed.

Some of those costs will never stabilize.  People make a lot of noise
about how disk space keeps going down, but many times they are looking at
the cost of an IDE drive at their local computer store. When it comes to
reliable RAID arrays which are terrabytes in size, the costs aren't as
low.  They do come down over the years, but nowhere near as fast as the
cheap disks for a personal computer.  Bandwidth is expensive, and will
continue to be expensive.  Same with software development for searching
and organizing tools.

I know there are entire other ranges of operational costs which a
publisher deals with, those are just the ones I've got experience with.
Have people already looked at these issues and said it's not a problem?

Jim Robinson/Stanford