Re: A word on calculating costs

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btopenworld.com>]

I have kept out of this correspondence so far because I am no longer in a
position to discuss details of costs, though I was involved in past ICSU
workshops. However I read from time to time in this and other postings
sentiments like this one from Adam:

>"We shouldn't be bench-marking the present production method, which is 
>seriously inefficient"

I will be very interested to hear his explanation for this statement
especially since as far as I know he has not been involved in journal
publishing since some time in the mid 1980s when I succeeded him as head
of journals at Oxford University Press. In my experience since then
publishers have made significant savings on production costs since then.
Unfortunately other costs such as remuneration and expenses for journal
editors have increased and new costs such as most of the electronic ones
have been added. Every publisher that I know in both for-profit and
not-for-profit sectors work to minimise costs - obviously.

I prefer to believe that when actual publishers produce costs they are
likely to be more correct than those from outside publishing. I would have
serious doubts of schemes produced by a publisher to show how librarians
should save money unless it was backed up by real librarians.

I have seen in another posting a request from a BMC spokesperson for
audited costs. I would love to see BMC audited costs.

Anthony

----- Original Message -----
From: "adam hodgkin" <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 11:12 PM
Subject: Re: A word on calculating costs

> 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