RE: Costs of open access publishing - the Wellcome Trust

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

I am not sure of the future, but one of the few aspects I am sure of is
that your prediction is wrong. Following your model, I would think that
the equilibrium you mention would be at about the cost of the least
expensive non-profit journal, which seems to be $1500.  Why you take
Elsevier as a benchmark is beyond my comprehension, and even if you do,
the standard should be the least expensive Elsevier journal, not the
average.
 
If this price proves to be too high, there is a ready and reliable
alternative: repositories. The cost under any of the variants is much less
than $500--the number its advocates give is typically $0, which is
presumably hyperbola, so it might be between $5 and $50--which in their
models would be paid as a distributed cost by the many systems that will
be maintaining repositories.
 
Editing will add to the cost, but why the readers should pay for the
authors' felt need to have quality certified by referees, or for the
proof-reading that the authors should have done, is also something I do
not understand. This the authors' responsibility. Should the reader also
pay for the cost of the research?
 
Dr. David Goodman
dgoodman@liu.edu

-----Original Message----- 
From: Rick Anderson [mailto:rickand@unr.edu] 
Sent: Fri 5/21/2004 6:42 PM 
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu 
Subject: RE: Costs of open access publishing - the Wellcome Trust 
	
> The early proponents of open access were most vociferous in
> their view that existing publishers made things much more
> complicated than they needed to be, and that editorial
> processes could be radically simplified so that open access
> publishing became viable at a publication fee of $500 per
> article. This point has been emphasised less recently as some
> OA publishers, most notably PLoS, have introduced higher
> article charges with an emphasis on quality.

I'm reminded of LaRouchefoucauld's observation: "There is nothing more
horrible than the murder of a beautiful theory by a brutal gang of
facts."  The fact that OA providers are starting to talk more and more
like commercial publishers ("Sorry it's so expensive, but quality always
is") should tell us something about the actual costs of scholarly
publication in the real world, as opposed to the theoretical costs of
scholarly publication in an imaginary utopia. 

Here's what I think is the real-world situation right now:  Yes, some
journal publishers have been charging prices that are unjustifiably
high.  No, open access models cannot be provided nearly as cheaply as OA
proponents have suggested.  Therefore, here's my prediction for the
future: As OA models continue to evolve, we can expect to see the price
of OA continue to climb until it reaches equilibrium.  That point will
probably be somewhere below the cost of the average Elsevier journal.
It will not, however, be nearly as low as OA advocates think (even now).

Rick Anderson
rickand@unr.edu
##