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

[Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca>]

Nawin Gupta wrote:

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

***

Questions:

1.	Can you clarify that these are two ways of expressing
    editing costs (Editorial Staff + Office), OR Editorial
    processing costs?  Or am I misreading this?

2.	$100 per page for copyediting and peer review seems very
    steep. Is as example of a journal where these functions are
    provided by paid editorial staff?

Comment:

The cost estimates for university press publishing provided by 
Gupta and Thatcher are very different.  This is quite common in 
scholarly publishing, and makes much more sense than one would 
think at first. Almost anything in scholarly publishing can be 
done either on a purely volunteer / in-kind support basis, or by 
paying for services, or something in between (e.g., an editorial 
salary only partially reflecting the work involved).  Because 
this is part of the work of the scholar, there can be a vast 
difference in cost which does not necessarily correlate with 
quality.  Some of the society journals are produced at very low 
costs compared with the commercial sector, for example, yet are 
very highly regarded for their quality, often moreso than 
commercial journals.

Any opinion expressed in this e-mail is that of the author alone, 
and does not represent the opinion or policy of BC Electronic 
Library Network or Simon Fraser University Library.

Heather Morrison, MLIS
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com