Re: Revision to Physical Review B data

[Mark Doyle <doyle@aps.org>]

On Apr 19, 2005, at 9:12 PM, Heather Morrison wrote:

> BioMedCentral charges just over $500, last I heard, and Optics Express
> under $500 (for short articles).  These are both real publishers in the
> relatively expensive-to-produce STM arena; I'm not sure what the costs
> per article are in other areas such as humanities, but I'm sure there
> are very efficient operations due to the fact they simply have to make
> do with less revenue.
My understanding is that they make do with a loss (not just less revenue).
BMC has other journals that are more expensive (as noted by Diane Carroll)
and last I heard, $500 was mostly a theoretical target price that would be
achievable only in the long run. Optics Express is subsidized by OSA out
of its other revenues as far as I know (same for IOP's New Journal of
Physics). Not good examples. Even PLoS Biology doesn't make ends meet
solely based on the author charges they collect - they use other outside
funding (e.g., the Moore Foundation) to fill the gap.

> PRB is a high-end, highly prolific STM journal.  David is right in
> pointing out that there are publishers with much greater profit margins;
> PRB does not represent the worst-case scenario.
>
> However, PRB does not represent the best-case scenario, either.  As
> noted in an earlier posting, assuming David's numbers in Online on the
> Journal of Insect Science are correct, then a group of 500 libraries
> could support this journal as open access for $84 annually each; far
> less than making even one author payment, no matter how reasonable, and
> far less than one average subscription for a biology title.
Does the avg. biology journal only publish 50 articles per year? It really
doesn't make sense to me to read too much into a journal that only
publishes 50 papers per year (a journal that is largely subsidized by
being embedded in the wider university setting). We publish PRST-AB, make
it available for free (with a fully functional interface including
reference linking) because it is sponsored by 10 accelerator labs
(http://prst-ab.aps.org/help/sponsors.html). But even so, it gets a great
deal of subsidy just by being embedded in the larger APS journal
operation.

Regards,
Mark

Mark Doyle
Assistant Director,  Journal Information Systems
The American Physical Society
doyle@aps.org