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Re: Stop fighting the inevitable - and free funds for open access!

Charles:

Since Sally was pointing out to Hindawi's OA publication fees, I'd like to reply to your points below:

1. They are being published using existing infrastructure at universities and other organizations. The add-on cost is marginal.
Not true. Hindawi is a commercial publisher. We make no use of the infrastructure of any university or any other organization.

2. They have a relatively low volume of articles published per year. The editorial and production effort required is low.
If anything, a high volume of articles per year would decrease the cost per article rather than increase it because of economies of scale. Hindawi published close to 2,000 articles in 2006 and we have been doubling the size of our operation every 2 years in the past few years and expect to keep doing that in the next few years as well.

3. They are solely or primarily textual. There is no need to be concerned with issues like high-resolution color photographs, complex tabular data, charts and graphs, or extensive illustrations.
Not true. Please have a look at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ to see the list of journals we currently publish. We publish many journals in Engineering, Life Sciences, Mathematics, and Physical Sciences. These contain fairly complex mathematical and tabular material for typesetting. I like to think we provide our authors with a high level of publishing services which on the production side include graphics work, copyediting, and professional typesetting.

4. They are using Open Journal Systems or similar open source journal management software. This significantly reduces the complexity and labor needed to support e-journal production.
Not true. We use our own in-house developed "Manuscript Tracking System" and "Online Delivery System" (for journal web hosting). We have a team of about 20 dedicated IT staff developing and maintaining our electronic infrastructure. Not that there is anything wrong of course of using open source software (we do use a number of open source programs throughout the company).

5. There are no marketing costs because the journals are free. Limited promotion is done via mailing lists and other free means.
Not true. You don't have to market to the same customers you would market to in a subscription based world, but no business can run with no marketing of one source or another. OA journals have to be marketed to the authorship (so author submit their best papers to the journals) as well as to the readership (authors publish to get read and with no or little readership you would be out of business in no time).

6. There are no costs associated with imposing access controls or subscription maintenance.
True. But there are costs associated a larger number of transactions for collecting the article processing charges. With subscription based journals, you can depend on subscription agents and even if you have many independent subscribers, they tend to be much easier to communicate with for renewals, etc. With OA publishing, every single article requires its own business transaction for collecting the article processing charges (institutional membership is a way around this, but Hindawi does not have an institutional membership program).

7. There are no paid staff because, given the above, the work can easily be done with volunteer staff and these staff can be anywhere in the world.
Not true. Hindawi has 200+ full-time staff in its full-scale publishing operation. We are of course dependent on the much appreciated volunteering work of our editors and referees. We currently have about 2000 editors (http://www.hindawi.com/editors.html) serving on one or more of our journals editorial boards and several thousand reviewers (http://www.hindawi.com/reviewers.html) who contributed to the success and publications of our journals.

Obviously, this model works well for some types of scholarly journals, but not others.
We are confident of our ability to scale up our OA publishing program in all areas of STM.

Best regards,

Ahmed Hindawi

Charles W. Bailey, Jr. wrote:

Sally:

It may be that the low-end figures you mention are for OA e-journals
that have some or all of these characteristics:

1. They are being published using existing infrastructure at
universities and other organizations.  The add-on cost is marginal.

2. They have a relatively low volume of articles published per year. The
editorial and production effort required is low.

3. They are solely or primarily textual. There is no need to be
concerned with issues like high-resolution color photographs, complex
tabular data, charts and graphs, or extensive illustrations.

4. They are using Open Journal Systems or similar open source journal
management software.  This significantly reduces the complexity and
labor needed to support e-journal production.

5. There are no marketing costs because the journals are free. Limited
promotion is done via mailing lists and other free means.

6. There are no costs associated with imposing access controls or
subscription maintenance.

7. There are no paid staff because, given the above, the work can easily
be done with volunteer staff and these staff can be anywhere in the world.

Obviously, this model works well for some types of scholarly journals,
but not others.

Best Regards,
Charles

Charles W. Bailey, Jr.
E-Mail: cwbailey@digital-scholarship.com
Publications: http://www.digital-scholarship.org/

****

Sally Morris (Morris Associates) wrote:


I think the problem with many of the implausibly low-end estimates of
the costs of journal publishing is that they disregard the real costs
- people, and their associated overheads (salary-related costs, office
space, heat and light, equipment, etc).  However, these costs can be
significantly reduced by offshoring the real value publishers add -
peer-review management, editing and marketing - to low-cost
countries;  in fact, it astonishes me that so few have so far done so.
They may not find a ready-trained work force, but they can train
bright people to do this work.  Have a look, for example, at the OA
charges of Hindawi Publishing, which is based in Egypt.

Sally Morris
Consultant, Morris Associates (Publishing Consultancy)
South House, The Street
Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK
Email:  sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk