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

[Jan Velterop <jan@biomedcentral.com>]

Whatever the solution, I should think that relying on publishers -- any
publishers -- for long-term preservation is the wrong thing to do. At
BioMed Central we hope to provide open access to what we publish 'in
perpetuity', but just in case perpetuity proves rather too long, we
deposit all our material in a (growing) range of archives, in different
countries, to avoid reliance on single (and quite possibly even
proprietary) solutions and enable the open development of structural
solutions to the question of preservation.

As for cost-evaluation, see
http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews7-4.html#feature2, spotted on
Peter Suber's Open Access News blog:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

Jan Velterop

> -----Original Message-----
> From: James A. Robinson [mailto:jim.robinson@stanford.edu]
> Sent: 17 August 2003 21:46
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Subject: Re: Open Access pricing and the perceived ability of research
> grants to cover publication costs 
> 
> 
> It would seem obvious from basic economics that a present sum of money
> could be used to provide an endowment for preservation. I am aware of at
> least one learned society which is doing just that.  The questions of how
> much need to be spent, and how to predict future costs are 
> nonetheless real.
> 
> You write that one should set aside some of current income to provide for
> future growth. That's normal for a business. What I'm asking is: what if
> 15 percent of input-paid generated revenue of 60 articles per month is not
> enough to cover future growth needs?  I'd assume you have a few choices:
> 
>         You can put in more advertising in your print publications,
>         assuming advertising is willing to pay for the space.
> 
>         You can set aside a larger percent of current income for future
>         growth. What kind of margin are people thinking about when
>         measuring current operational costs vs future operational costs?
> 
>         You get a grant or some other "free money" from another source.
>         This may have strings attached, which always something to be
>         wary of.
> 
>         If you are known to be good quality but are seen as expensive
>         to submit to, you lower your price in the hope that more papers
>         will be submitted. That doesn't seem very easy to accomplish,
>         unless they are already operating with a nice cushion.
> 
>         You can cut costs in some other area of the business. Or you
>         can simply not grow as your customer base would like to see
>         (stop the reference linking project, quit scanning the back
>         archive of content from the 1870's that you've always wanted to
>         bring online).
> 
> None of these are great choices. We've seen some groups who very much like
> the idea of a larger grant and others who are essentially subsidized by
> their more traditional parent organizations.  I haven't seen anything
> which I can read and say "Wow, now *that* is a business plan which will
> handle their future needs properly."  Not that I'd  necessarily know it if
> it came and bit me somewhere.
> 
> It should also be obvious that under the current model, though publishers
> could increase prices to cover such expenses, there is no assurance either
> that they would do so, or that the price would be paid. It 
> might be safer to allocate the money in advance. .
> 
> I think it's safe to say that some publishers have shown that it is very
> possible to increase the price to outrageous and irresponsible levels in
> order to fuel their expansion and development.  My point is really that
> many points of income (readers) vs. few points of income (submitted
> papers) may make it hard to fuel the cost of maintaining a set of
> resources which nevers gets smaller, only larger and more complex to
> handle.
> 
> Jim Robinson