Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

In Open Access News 
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
Peter Suber quotes Walt Crawford from the October issue of Cites & Insights

>   WALT CRAWFORD: "If all current journal literature was replaced by
>   open access 'author-fee' literature at $X per article, would that
>   be an overall savings? I rarely see [this] question discussed. I
>   suspect that the answer to [this] question is that if X is 500,
>   there might be an overall saving --and if X is 1500, the total cost
>   of scholarly article access would be higher. Given that $500 and
>   $1,500 are the price points for today's most prominent experiments
>   in up-front financing, that's significant."
>   http://cites.boisestate.edu/civ3i12.pdf

The question has been much discussed, starting from the 1998 launch of the
American Scientist Forum on what has since come to be called Open Access:
 
   "Savings from Converting to On-Line-Only: 30%- or 70%+ ?"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0002.html
    Other threads include:
    "The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0303.html

To cut to the quick: It all depends on what you reckon to be the essential
costs. Assuming you drop all paper-related costs, do you need to produce a
text (e.g., a PDF) at all, or can that be off-loaded onto the author (as
95% of the text-generation already is)? Do you need to provide archiving,
or can you off-load it onto the author's institution? That leaves only the
cost of implementing peer review. $500 was the highest estimate anyone
ever made for that. (That is about 1/3 of the average cost per paper
currently being covered out of the total toll-revenue that is being paid
by those institutions that can and do pay the tolls.)

But this is all too hypothetical. What will reveal (indeed shape) what the
essentials and their costs turn out to be, empirically and practically,
will be the outcome of the competition between the authors' self-archived
open-access versions and the publisher's toll-access versions of the same
articles. Here are the two main possible outcomes:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.2

    (1) No change. Researchers at those institutions that can afford
    to pay the tolls continue to use the toll-access version, as now,
    and researchers at institutions that cannot afford the tolls,
    use the open-access version. The cost per paper remains the same,
    and continues to be paid the old way, via access tolls.

    (2) Cancellation pressure forces cost-cutting and downsizing by
    toll-access journals: What will be cut? Paper version, archiving
    (offloaded onto Institutional Archives) and text-generation (offloaded
    onto author's word-processing). What is left? The cost of implementing
    peer review (and possibly some copy-editing, though with an online
    open-access corpus, even reference-checking can be automated and
    offloaded onto the author's software). That essential cost will be
    covered via open-access publishing (author/institution peer-reviewe
    and certification charge, possibly paid out of the institutional
    toll-savings).

My own prediction: (2), and at a cost of >>$500.

No need to commit to this in advance though -- unless you found a
pre-emptive open-access journal: then you have to make a pre-emptive
choice as to the essentials and their costs. But for everyone else, just
self-archive and then let nature take its course.

Stevan Harnad