RE: Costs of open access publishing - the Wellcome Trust

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

David, you give me too much credit for rigorous thought.

> 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.  

What model?  I've proposed no model.  I'm simply predicting that when we
finally arrive at a workable OA system, the price of a typical OA journal
will be somewhere between the lowest numbers proposed by OA advocates and
the price of an average Elsevier journal.  This prediction is hardly built
on anything as rigorous as an economic model -- it's based on two simple
observations, neither of which I think should be very controversial even
in this forum: 1) That Elsevier's journal prices are, on average, quite a
bit higher than they really need to be (can I not get an amen?); and 2)
that there is no way to publish a journal without charging higher prices
than most OA advocates anticipate.  I base the latter of those two
observations on the fact that most OA advocates have never actually
published a journal and will, therefore, generally tend to be
overoptimistic about sustainable pricing.  I think PLoS' price hike tends
to support that proposition.

> 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. 

I don't take Elsevier as a benchmark.  I take Elsevier as one of the
clearer examples of aggressively opportunistic pricing in the scholarly
journal market.

> 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, 

A cost of $0 is not just presumably hyperbole, it is demonstrably silly.
There is no way to produce and distribute information at zero cost.
Repositories are certainly an option for OA, but they are by no means a
cost-free option.

----
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
(775) 784-6500 x273
rickand@unr.edu