RE: Homer Simpson at the NIH

["David Prosser" <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk>]

Both Ian Russell and Rick Anderson have picked-up on the issue of
value-for-money and cost-per-article.  Yes, cost-per-download has certainly
fallen over the past few years.  But do we have any evidence that open
access will increase the total system costs, as Joe is suggesting?

I'm not going to elevate this to the level of evidence that we 
can generalise from, but let me share a factoid.  Elsevier in 
recent literature have suggested that the average 
cost-per-download for the articles they publish is about 2 Euros 
(certainly a vast improvement on the 12 Euros per download they 
claim they charged at the start of the big deals).  In a recent 
presentation in Washington Byran Vickery of BioMedCentral said 
that the analogous figure for BMC articles is about 0.35 Euros. 
(Obviously, it is subscription price divided by downloads for 
Elsevier and article processing charge divided by downloads for 
BMC.)

Those figures begin to suggest that in this case open access is 
less expensive to the community than big deal subscription 
access.

David C Prosser PhD
Director
SPARC Europe
E-mail:  david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk
http://www.sparceurope.org

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Ian Russell
Sent: 03 August 2007 18:00
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Homer Simpson at the NIH

David Prosser wrote:

> JE: 'The overall costs of scholarly communications will rise.'
>
> Maybe, but don't the overall costs of scholarly communication 
> rise anyway each year - that's certainly the feeling most 
> librarians have! Alternatively, and less flippantly, it's 
> entirely possible that if we can create a new, functioning 
> market then at least we may get better value for money.

David,

In the current environment increases in overall costs in journal 
publishing are primarily driven by the increase in the number of 
articles being produced and published.  Love them or hate them, 
'big deals' and consortia purchasing have actually been driving 
the average cost per journal down and (at least for the 
publishers that I have worked for) price per page and price per 
article has been falling for many years; this in the context of 
often large expenditure on IT.

My personal opinion is that the increase in international
standard research articles from China and India in the next 5-10
years will have a greater impact on the economics of journal
publishing than OA, but that's another topic.

I think assessing the 'value for money' of alternative business 
models is sensible; for example I still can't see the 'value' in 
building an expensive and duplicative system of online 
repositories when academics can, by-and-large, get the material 
they want more or less immediately and many publishers are 
operating their own online journals with free access after a 
reasonable embargo period anyway...

There are less expensive and faster ways of dealing with the 
issue of access to the literature by the public too (though my 
feeling is that demand would be exceptionally low).  I am 
surprised that free access from public libraries has not been 
explored more fully for example...

Ian Russell
ALPSP