RE: A word on calculating costs

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

Peter, as expected, is quite correct that large clinical journals need
consideration taking account of their specific chacteristics (as is true
for all areas and types of publications. I have seen administrators of all
sorts believe that journals were interchangeable, and one was the same as
another, but both publishers and librarians know this is untrue.)
 
A very distinctive characteristic of large clinical journals is that they
are likely to carry a substantial display advertising-- this is not true
of any other stm peer-edited journals (with only a very few exceptions
like Nature & Science--and even they are not pure peer-reviewed primary
journals but carry very substantial editorial content, as does PLoS).  
This imposes special responsibilities on the editors of these journals,
because they have responsibility for seeing that the scientific content is
not affected by the advertising. This has resulted in elaborate
specifications for ethical conduct by authors, reviewers, and editors,
that are less necessary elsewhere. Ensuring this is no doubt a large and
necessary part of the editorial work responsibilities to which Peter
refers.
 
These very advertisements bring in considerable income for the journal.
This source of funding is not available elsewhere in the sciences to
similar titles.
 
Another distinctive characteristic of clinical journals is that the best
of them are likely to have a substantial number of individual subscribers,
and Peter is of course correct that it is necessary to market to them.  
Very few expensive primary journals have individual subscriptions (except
sometimes for society members-- which typically barely pay their own way).  
What I believe most journal editors mean by marketing, is marketing to
authors.
 
Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu

________________________________

From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Peter Banks
Sent: Thu 1/6/2005 11:42 PM
To: adam.hodgkin@gmail.com; liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: A word on calculating costs

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 journal 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 publishers!).

As for the question of whether socially useful purposes are served by
journal 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 equaled 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