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

[Mary Summerfield <msummerfield@yahoo.com>]

The more selective a journal the greater the labor taken to 
manage peer review.  Many of Chicago's journals were highly 
selective; this is a partial explanation of the high costs of the 
editorial activity.

It would seem that the same can be said of a scholarly book 
program.  The more selective the editors the more effort will be 
expended turning down proposals and working with reviewers and on 
developmental editing.

Mary Summerfield
SPIE (and formerly with University of Chicago Press)

________________________________
From: Nawin Gupta <nawin.gupta@comcast.net>
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Sent: Monday, December 1, 2008 4:51:26 PM
Subject: RE: Should university presses adopt an OA model for all of their scholarly books?

Here is an approximation of costs for purposes of this
discussion:

Managing Editor - ranging from half-time to full-time with an
editorial assistant - $30,000 to $100,000

Editorial Office - $5,000 to $25,000

Editorial Processing, from acceptance to ready for publishing in
print and online, including copy-editing and peer review system -
~ $100/page; ranging from $40,000 (for a quarterly journal with
100 editorial pages per issue) to $200,000 for around 2,000
editorial pages

Online publishing and the 3 P's associated with printed journal
would be additional to the above, as would be sales/marketing.

One could argue that these costs are on the high end, but I have
a feeling that the average for the university presses lies
somewhere between $15,000 and the example above.

Nawin Gupta

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Sandy Thatcher
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2008 9:00 AM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Should university presses adopt an OA model for all of their
scholarly books?

One wonders why.... I was assuming a quarterly journal with about
96 pages per issue. There are of course journals that publish
more frequently and have many more pages annually than 4 x 96, as
well as some with complicated typesetting, but I wanted to keep
my estimate simple, representing what I consider to be the
"typical" journal in these fields. I'd love to see the breakdown
of costs that add up to more than $100,000 per journal. Can you
supply them, from memory or otherwise?

P.S. Our Press publishes 11 journals in the humanities and social
sciences for a total cost of around $185,000 annually, and my
figure of $15,000 is rounded off from that experience.
Copyediting for most of them is paid for by the editorial office,
not the Press, so if that expense were added to the mix for all
of our journals, the total would probably round off to $20,000.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press