Re: A word on calculating costs

["Peter Banks" <pbanks@diabetes.org>]

I really don't think that the cost of scanning books has much relevance to
the process of peer reviewing papers.

But Adam raises an important point. We cannot conduct peer review in the
way we do now with greatly diminished sources of funding. Unlike Adam, I
do not see the potential for orders-of-magnitude increases in efficiency.
This may be because I have the perspective of a large clinical medicine
journal. Such journals thrive because of "rock star" editors at major
universities (much as PLoS Medicine thrives because of its high-profile
editors). I can say from personal experience that a University of
Pennsylvania or a Harvard is not about to let a faculty member spend the
10-20 hours a week it takes to edit a major jouirnal without significant,
significant compensation. It is simply incorrect that "most of the
essential, high quality and difficult work is done by unpaid authors and
referees." In clinical medicine, those editors and associate editors do
most of the work, and they ARE paid.

I am concerned that many of the assumptions Adam, and other OA advocates,
use are based on small, specialty journals. I would like more insight into
running large clinical journals. Perhaps PLoS Medicine will be the
trailblazer that shows how OA can work for such titles--but the early
evidence doesn't seem to suggest a financially sustainable model (unless
the Moore Foundation plans to expand its generosity to other publshers!).

As for the question of whether socially useful purposes are served by
juornal marketing, it is an interesting question. I wish that readers were
automatically drawn to high-quality journals, but that has not been my
experience. If weight of evidence equalled marketing effectiveness, then
we wouldn't need to continuously "sell" the public to stop smoking and
lose weight through social marketing, and drug companies wouldn't spend
billions trying to get physicians to use drugs to treat to metabolic
targets.

Peter Banks
Publisher
American Diabetes Association
1701 North Beauregard Street
Alexandria, VA 22311
703/299-2033
FAX 703/683-2890
Email: pbanks@diabetes.org

>>> adam.hodgkin@gmail.com 1/5/2005 6:12:38 PM >>>

Google makes an announcement saying that it plans to digitize 15M books at
an average cost of $10 a book. This looks like at least an order of
magnitude improvement in efficiency compared to previous efforts. But I
guess I am not alone in thinking that Google are not bragging and will get
pretty close to that figure by concentrating on doing the job very
efficiently. Just doing what needs to be done.

Google reckons that the cost of digitising an out of print book should be
about $10 and we have serious discussion about the 'real' cost of article
processing being two orders of magnitude more than this? These are
articles which are produced in electronic form by authors who are prepared
to make any reasonable corrections and do not need to be scanned. Pull the
other one....

Publishers (and quite a few OA proponents) would have us believe that it
costs $500 or $2500, or even $3000 on average to process a single article
(when everyone recognises that most of the essential, high quality and
difficult work is done by unpaid authors and referees). This is simply
backward looking cost-preservation. Once efficient modes of publication
and quality control are bedded-in its going to cost orders of magnitude
less to process research publications. We shouldnt be bench-marking the
present production method, which is seriously inefficient (Phil Davis's
research is very interesting and damning of the heritage). The real
question is how can system-wide efficiency be realised when science is
published by 21st century methods.

For example: do we really need a 'market-led' method of quality control
(refereeing through Society and privately funded journals) or would it be
preferable to use an automated system of peer review, entirely within the
control of academic researchers? And another question about the marketing
costs -- Is any really useful purpose served by 'marketing' specialist
scientific and academic journals? The only worthwhile form of marketing of
learned journals is the effective and costless form or marketing which
stems from their reputation in the audience served. The system might be
more efficient if there was less profit to be had from marketing
individual journals.

-- 
Adam Hodgkin