R: cost of peer review and electronic distribution of scholarly jo=

["Enrico M. Balli" <enrico@medialab.sissa.it>]

Dear Stevan,

I totally share your statement on Richard Poynder's query, and
would like to give my contribution to the discussion. Sissa
Medialab is not exactly a publisher, but we have some journals
jointly published with IOP: JHEP, JCAP, JSTAT and JINST. We
provide the peer review for all our journals, and we believe that
the quality of our peer is very high. During the year 2007 these
journals published 1851 papers. The total revenue of our company
in the same fiscal year was 1.242.108 euros, without any loss. As
you can imagine our rejection rate is higher than zero, and the
number of reviewed papers is higher than the number of published
papers. I'm not disclosing any industrial secret here: we are a
limited company and our balance sheet is public, and our journals
are online and everybody can check these figures. The same
applies to any other commercial publisher, BTW...

I hope this helps.

Enrico M. Balli

-----Messaggio originale-----
Da: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] Per conto di Stevan Harnad
Inviato: venerd=EC 23 maggio 2008 17.02
A: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Oggetto: Re: cost of peer review and electronic distribution of scholarly
journals



In particular, all the current costs of providing both the print
edition and the PDF edition, as well as all current costs of
access-provision and archiving will vanish (for the publisher),
because they have been off-loaded onto the the distributed
network of Green OA IRs, each hosting their own peer-reviewed,
published postprints. The only service the peer-reviewed journal
publisher will need to provide is peer review itself.

That is why Richard Poynder's recent query (about the true cost
of peer review alone) is a relevant one.

As I have said many times before, based on my own experience of
editing a peer-reviewed journal for a quarter century, as well as
the estimates that can be made from the costs of Gold OA journals
*that provide only peer review and nothing else today*, the costs
per paper of peer review alone will be so much lower than the
costs per paper of conventional journal publishing today, or even
the costs per paper of most Gold OA publishing today, that the
problem of the possibility of imbalance between net
user-institution costs and net author-institution costs will
vanish, just as the the subscription model vanished.


Stevan Harnad