Re: A word on calculating costs

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

If the cost per article drops by 50 percent, and the number of articles
increases by 1,000 percent, what does this do to the total cost of
scholarly communications?  The current user-pays model has the effect of
suppressing production, which, provided that most editors are reasonably
competent (as I for one believe they are), is a very, very good thing.

Joe Esposito

On Tue, 11 Jan 2005 20:38:04 +0000, adam hodgkin <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think that Jo must be right -- the 'true' cost of an OA model is very
> hard to predict when so many factors have to be considered. He is right
> the situation is very dynamic!
> 
> However, it is not necessary to predict the actual exact cost of
> anything. The point surely is that there are many reasons to expect the
> cost (per article-published or per researcher-reading) of the
> increasingly OA system to be significantly (yes at least an Order of
> Magnitude) lower. We dont have to get a 'correct' answer to know that
> the ground has a decent slope. Weather forcasting is very complex, but
> we now have sufficient evidence to be sure (?) about the reality of
> Global warming.
> 
> I didnt mention the Google 10$ per book figure because I thought that OA
> journal technology would be done in the way Google will scan library
> books. Of course not. The surprising thing about the Google approach is
> that they are NOT apparently doing most phases of the process
> dramatically/technologically different from the way Gale or ProQuest
> have done large scale digitisation projects in the past and they STILL
> expect to get this massive cost reduction.
> 
> re Anthony Watkinsons points. Are we interested in seeing BMC's audited
> costs? Possibly, but even without sight of this audit I do know that the
> way they are building their Refereeing and Production systems is
> intended to be scaleable in the sense in which a web-based publishing
> system should be scaleable. Vitek Tracz in a recent interview said that
> they expected their throughput to double each year. Will BMC's cost base
> move at anything like the same rate? My guess is that they are tooling
> up to handle four times the papers very efficiently (ie with not many
> more people than now). Perhaps Anthony can tell us if any of the big
> conventional publishers are yet on top of this?
> 
> Adam