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Re: Funding OA (Long-Term)

Thomas Krichel can answer on his own account, but his point seemed perfectly clear to me. Efficient journals in the 21st century should have much lower overheads than efficient journals in the mid 20th century.

Look at another economic activity -- international phone calls: I dont know where the non-trivial costs of the international telcos are going to come from in the next 20 years because I dont care. The need for many of those costs will disappear because network communications costs are dropping 30% pa (or something of that order). An efficiently organised web journal doesn't need a secretary, a travel allowance for the editor, postal costs, an office, off-prints, and modest or generous honoraria for its editorial board. Those costs are 'nice to have' but they will probably go away/have gone already. Sure some costs remain but $1,500 as an article processing charge is probably too much to pay in the fields of library science, philosophy, or French literature, so look for a way of taking costs out of the system.

Aggregation and automation will decimate many of these cost centres on the production ramp, but it would also be worth thinking about the costs on the librarians side of the distribution slope. Are these costs also liable to diminish as an efficient system of web-based library services develops (Google Book Search etc)? It is at least possible. There is going to be less need for book stacks and less need for book stackers. There will be a move to aggregated services and centralised resourcing.

I share your (Ann's) doubt that it is appropriate for libraries to provide editorial and production subsidies to open access journals in the long-term. Your budget will not stretch to it.

Adam Hodgkin

On 2/7/07, Ann Okerson <aokerson@pantheon.yale.edu> wrote:
Mr. Krichel: Could you kindly explain further your message below, i.e., how it is responsive to the inquiry about long-term open access funding for high quality, peer reviewed journals? My point was that libraries (particularly the larger ones) are more and more being asked to contribute significant sums of money for ongoing support, once OA projects have passed startup funding, and that doesn't seem to me a secure source of revenue. To wit, since access is free, the incentives to keep paying are not high and the financial underpinnings thus become vulnerable.

You replied that publishers need to change their journals platforms to less costly ones and get free Web hosting somewhere. Many small (and larger) publishers have already done exactly that. And, while reasonable, the suggestion doesn't provide much help for the publishers of quality titles, as the rest of their non-trivial costs remain to be covered.

(Maybe we should look to our arctic-American friends for cheap labor, but they seem pretty occupied where they are... see last week's New Yorker cartoon, on the table of contents page. Sorry I'm contributing to the bizarre metaphors: pit bulls, Barbie dolls, and now penguins!)

Ann Okerson/Yale Library

On Tue, 6 Feb 2007, Thomas Krichel wrote:

  Ann Okerson writes


To one of the inquirers, a very good e-journal, we responded by asking
whether it would be possible to charge a subscription fee, thus
spreading out the costs among this fine title's many readers.  But we
heard that spreading out costs among many readers is costly for the
publisher. Instead, perhaps everyone could agree to pay author charges
of $1500 per article?  As this is a journal in the information-library
arena, such a charge represents an unfunded expense at an order of
magnitude price higher than for other journals in our field and is
unrealistic.

Yes. The journal could probably do with shedding expenses. Running an
academic journal should not be that expensive. It should be much less
expensive than, say, running an academic web site since the journal has
fewer pages, all writing is done outside and the pages just cumulate and
don't need updating. What is required is just one tech-savvy academic,
she can run it in her service time.

When will the time come that Columbia will beg Yale to contribute
to maintain Columbia's web site? When did we ever discuss how the
web is funded?

Cheers,

Thomas Krichel
mailto:krichel@openlib.org
http://openlib.org/home/krichel
RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
skype id: thomaskrichel