RE: Costs of open access publishing - the Wellcome Trust

[Jan Velterop <velterop@biomedcentral.com>]

It may be interesting in this context to have a look at Alastair
Dryburgh's newsletter (http://www.alastairdryburgh.co.uk/nlrc.html) from
which the following excerpt:

_________________________________________

Any Colour you want so long as it's Black

Imagine, back in 1910, a group of automobile manufacturers getting
together to talk about the cost of building automobiles. (Back then,
you'll remember, the automobile was a luxury item for the very rich, built
in very small numbers).

They conclude that costs are pretty much as low as they can be. You could
save something by replacing that nice walnut trim with metal, and
dispensing with roof and windows, but who would want to buy an automobile
like that ?

Then someone mentions someone they've heard of who thinks he can
completely redesign the product and the production process and produce
automobiles at a fraction of the cost. "Oh that lunatic Henry Ford," comes
the reply. "It won't work, and anyway who'd want one of those Model Ts ?"

Of course you know how that story ended, but why bring it up now ? Because
someone has just made the same mistake again in the journals world. The
Wellcome Trust report on Costs and Business Models in Scientific Research
Publishing estimates the cost per article of open access publishing at
$1,950 as against a cost in the traditional model of $2,750. But this
reduction is just the result of eliminating print. The report doesn't
begin to consider what else one could do about costs.

This is an important omission. When open access really started to hit the
headlines, back at the time of the Budapest conference, there was a lot of
talk about how journal publishers made things too complicated, and it was
possible to devise a radically simplified process which made possible a
reasonable journal at a publication fee of $500 per article. This may
still be true - BioMed Central still appear to believe it.

What would happen if Henry Ford took a look at online publishing as
currently organised ? He might find that:

Many of the processes are still the old print ones with online tacked on -
highly inefficient;  There is a huge cost of complexity and pointless
diversity (25 different workflows for 26 products);  Many people don't
even know what their costs are, never mind how they compare to benchmarks
or best practice.

In short, things are ripe for a Fordist revolution. This won't happen, of
course, as Mr Ford is dead, but is he turning in his grave or laughing ?
________________________________________

Jan Velterop