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

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

That may be one difference between commercial publishers and 
university presses, as publishers of journals: the latter usually 
do NOT pay the costs of the editorial office or the salaries of 
managing editor and editorial assistant, nor do they pay for peer 
review other than the costs associated with maintaining a 
software system that the journal editors can use to conduct the 
peer-review process. So, to the extent that universities continue 
to be willing to subsidize those costs, they do not fall due on 
the presses' balance sheets. Nawin's figures are useful, though, 
in revealing what the true total costs may be for journal 
publishing, no matter how those costs may be paid for any given 
journal.

Sandy Thatcher


>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