Re: Institutional Journal Costs in an Open Access Environment

[Phil Davis <pmd8@cornell.edu>]

Jan Velterop wrote:

"Assuming that the total amount of money involved in the 
aggregate remains the same, redistribution of costs has the 
important academic and societal benefit of enabling full open 
access. Given that the funders (mostly governments) inject this 
money into the system anyway, this could be a winners-only game, 
the funders, academia, and society as a whole being the winners."

Phil Davis responds:

Jan's response assumes that all grant money coming into a 
university stays in research.  There is nothing farther from the 
truth.  At Cornell University, a leading research institution and 
a net producer of research, the overhead rate for incoming grants 
is 58%.  This means that only 42% of incoming grant money is 
directly allocated to the researcher.  The other money goes into 
a big pot of money that covers everything from heating and 
lighting, to mowing the law.  The library (part of the overhead 
of an institution) gets about 1-2% of university operating costs. 
Having 58% of federally-funded research costs going to 
institutional costs that don't directly cover research means that 
we don't just have reallocation issues to deal with, we have a 
major shortfall that would need to be picked up by research 
institutions to support publishing.

Secondly, Jan's argument assumes that researchers are happily 
willing to part with some of their research windfall to devote to 
publishing costs.  Given that page-charges are mostly an historic 
relic, kept alive in a few fields like biology, this seems 
unlikely.  In spite of large grants in the Physical Sciences, 
physicists appear to be quite intolerant of having to pay to 
publish. Just over ten years ago the journal Physical Review D 
(High Energy Physics) reinstated page charges for authors. In the 
words of the Editor-in-Chief of the American Physical Society:

"What happened was that people started boycotting our journal and 
started publishing in Nuclear Physics [a journal published by 
Elsevier], which did not have page charges but which cost about 
10 times as much on a per page basis to the institution. If page 
charges and article charges have to be paid out of the authors' 
grants, as happens in the U.S., then the authors are faced with a 
dilemma. Either they pay the page charges or they send a post-doc 
or a graduate student to a meeting. The cost would be about the 
same.  It is not going to be easy to convert to [the author-pays] 
mode of operation."

[1] R. Ramachandran, "We Have to Be Able to Recover Our Costs. 
Interview with Prof. Martin Blume, Editor-in-Chief, American 
Physical Society." Frontline 21.2 (17-30 Jan. 2004): 
http://flonnet.com/fl2102/stories/20040130001308200.htm

****************
Institutional Journal Costs in an Open Access Environment
by William H. Walters
http://www.library.millersville.edu/public_html/walters/journal_costs.pdf