Re: Should university presses adopt an OA model for all of their scholarly books?

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Sandy,

While I agree with the thrust of your post, it should be pointed 
out that the figures you use are BEFORE subtracting what various 
universities pay now.  Universities (through their libraries) 
probably purchase 85% of university press journals, and libraries 
probably purchase somewhere around 15-25% of university press 
books.  So you can subtract these percentages from your figures.

But of course a lot more would change if the "system" went OA.

Joe Esposito


----- Original Message -----
From: "Sandy Thatcher" <sgt3@psu.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Monday, November 24, 2008 7:47 PM
Subject: Re: Should university presses adopt an OA model for all of their
scholarly books?

> My own recent back-of-the-envelope calculations showed that it 
> would cost universities a total of $14 million annually to 
> publish all university press journals and $200 million to 
> publish all university press books annually as open access. 
> This is based on the assumption that the average annual cost of 
> publishing a journal in humanities and social sciences in 
> university presses is $15,000 and that presses account for 
> roughly 700 journals overall, and that the average cost of 
> publishing a monograph is $20,000 and that the annual output of 
> presses collectively is 10,000 titles. These figures, of 
> course, exclude all costs associated with printing, binding, 
> and shipping physical copies, including warehousing. (Those 
> costs constitute roughly 30% of the overall cost of publishing 
> a monograph.) If POD is provided, there would of course be some 
> income stream generated to offset those costs, but also some 
> extra costs coming from the manufacturing and distribution of 
> the POD copies. But when you think that even without generating 
> any income, all the output of university presses, both journals 
> and books, could be made OA for a total annual cost of about 
> $214 million, that seems like a possibly wise 
> investment--especially when you consider that this amount 
> probably is less than the total of annual salaries for Division 
> 1 football coaches! And if this cost were shared equally among 
> all 3,000 American colleges, it would amount to less than 
> $72,000 per university annually, a piddling amount. If the 
> Carnegie classification were used as a basis for charging 
> universities proportionate fees according to FTE student or 
> faculty count, most colleges would pay far less than this.
>
> So, do I hear a motion for funding university press operations 
> so that all of our output could be made available OA--and we 
> can stop arguing about copyright?
>
> P.S. Maybe have Google contribute its $125 million to this goal 
> instead of paying legal fees and startup costs of the Book 
> Rights Registry for the settlement?
>
> Sandy Thatcher
> Penn State University Press