Comparing university costs for subscripion & OA

[David Goodman <dgoodman@princeton.edu>]

Ann, i did not say that the library funding would be sufficient 
for all of the publications.

Fundamentally, I suggest the additional use of a portion of the 
money in grants for the purpose of publishing the results, as now 
permitting by essentially all granting agencies. Faculty normally 
feel that the amount permitted (or prudent, considering their 
research needs)  is not enough for publication of all of their 
results OA, and it probably is not. But it might come half-way, 
with the rest from the library. I think the combination balances 
the interest of all universities: those with the most papers to 
publish have the most grant funds with which to do it. To use 
your figures, if the library pays $900 and the research sponsor 
pays $900, the amount is clearly sufficient.

Ann, where does the money come from to publish the journals now? 
It comes from the subscriptions. To the extent that the 
subscriptions from very largest and wealthiest universities do 
not cover all the cost, the money must now be coming from those 
who can less well afford to pay. The money should come from where 
the money is: the research grants and institutional funds of the 
wealthy universities who do the research-- and, at least in 
principle, are doing it for the benefit of all scholars and the 
general public.

You are quite correct that this was discussed in outline before; 
the argument stopped when you asked me offline not to post on the 
subject.

David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
dgoodman@princeton.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>
Date: Sunday, March 18, 2007 8:43 pm
Subject: Re: Open Choice is a Trojan Horse for Open Access Mandates
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu

> David:  Why do I feel we are covering old ground and old
> inaccuracies below??
>
> Sometime in 2004 there was discussion both on this list and in
> other venues, noting that the publishing output of large research
> universities is considerably higher than your numbers below, and
> thus -- if a per article fee of any size (over $900) is to be
> charged for STM, these universities will need to find
> considerably more funds than they are currently spending on
> subscriptions, where the cost is shared by many readers.
>
> I don't intend here to disagree about what is the best cost/price
> model for publishing research, but rather to repeat some data
> from my December 2003 seminar presentation on this topic, based
> on approximate (conservative) publications numbers from Yale --
> which is not by any means the largest STM article producer among
> ARLs:
>
> Number of STM articles published (most indexed by ISI
> with an estimate for the rest):                        3,600
> (this excludes humanities journals)
> *I estimate the above number is about 10% on the low side and
> that the real number was closer to 4,000)
>
> STM journals budget that fiscal year                	$3.6M
>
> On this basis, our per-article STM purchase
> cost was:                                        	$900-1,000
>
> Assuming those same STM 3,600 - 4,000 articles
> @ your $2,500                                         $9M-10M
>
> @ $1,250 (which is LESS than PLoS now charges
> and also less than the top BMC journals)        	$5M
>
> It's almost impossible to calculate the humanities numbers as
> the citation sources for them are much more scattered and meager,
> and the citations patterns are very different to STM. Social
> Sciences fall somewhere between the two and are not estimated
> above.
>
> Ann Okerson/Yale Library
>
>
> On Sun, 18 Mar 2007, David Goodman wrote:
>
> The grant money supporting research in science and many fields 
> of the> social sciences has for many years already produced n 
> many campuses> exactly this effect Sandy fears--and in many 
> matters in addition to library funding.
>
> But in this particular case the newly freed money will come 
> from the expensive subscriptions in the science fields, 
> supplemented by the publication fees paid by their grants. If a 
> no longer needed biochemistry journal cost $20,0000 a year, the 
> biochemists will not unnaturally expect some of the money to be 
> spend in publishing their articles.
>
> But this shift if properly administered can have great 
> potential benefits in the humanities: the publication of 
> humanities monographs is already often supported by funding 
> from the author's institution or special grants for the 
> purpose. Any reasonable university administrator will see the 
> virtues of using some of the newly available money from the 
> cancellation of science subscriptions to support publication 
> fees in all fields of study. As Sandy remarks, the humanities 
> faculty will make it clear that they expect such consideration.
>
> (This is one of the reasons libraries may not be suitable to 
> mange publication funding: they typically do not have the power 
> in campus politics to stand up to the interests of individual 
> academic groups. The chief academic officer is in a much 
> stronger position. )
>
> The median ARL library spent $5.8 million in serials in 2005*. 
> Assuming> that $0.8 million is the cost of the many small 
> serials to which Open Access paid on behalf of the author 
> funding is not applicable. The $5.0 million is enough to fund 
> 1,000 journal articles at $2,500 each, and and 100 books at 
> $25,000--quite apart from funds from granting agencies, using 
> the current costs. If journal articles can be produced at half 
> the cost (as for many non-profit publishers), and if 
> publication subventions needed by books publishers are half the 
> full price of production, then it will fund 2,000 articles and 
> 200 books. The median faculty size for an ARL institution is 
> 1,353. This is at least 2 articles per science faculty a year, 
> and 1 book for humanities faculty every other year. Many 
> science faculty produce more, but they usually have grant funds 
> available in addition.
>
> *(The actual amount is about $0.6 million higher, for some 
> institutions> report electronic serials separately.)
>
> The general principle of funding publication at the author side 
> is applicable to all fields. The opportunity that this gives 
> for open access is similarly pertinent to all fields. The need 
> is also similar--it is just as hard for those working in small 
> colleges to acquire expensive monographs as articles from 
> expensive journals. Just as many first-rate journals have 
> subscriptions in the low 100s, many first-rate academic books 
> sell a similar number of copies.
>
> The best thing that could possibly happen to Penn State Press is the
> adoption of universal open access.
>
> David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
> dgoodman@princeton.edu