Re: PLOS article metrics

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

I believe that the point about "low-cost" services was a 
reference to the internal cost structure of an organization, not 
the price customers (in these examples, authors in an author-pays 
model) pay.  These two definitions of cost are related, of 
course, in that low internal cost requires only a reduced scale 
or lower prices to customers to generate a surplus.  But is PLOS 
a low-cost operation in the sense of its internal costs?  I 
wouldn't think so.  Visit the offices in San Francisco (not 
India, not Egypt), or dig through the public filings as to 
compensation and other expenditures, and make your own judgment.

Having said that, I think David's comment is particularly astute 
and underscores the fact that PLOS is a truly outstanding 
organization that is well on its way to self-sufficiency. 
Whatever its internal costs, it appears that PLOS is soon to 
generate enough revenue to more than cover them.  This is no 
small achievement.  And for people who think that making money 
with a start-up enterprise is easy, I say, Try it sometime.

What David doesn't touch on (it is outside the scope of his post) 
is that the vehicle by which PLOS is attaining a surplus is PLOS 
One, a truly revolutionary service based on the radical 
proposition that peer review need not be fully rigorous to be 
good enough.  By reducing the editorial cost of peer review (that 
is, from the standard of the founding PLOS journals) and thus 
accepting more papers, though at a reduced fee, PLOS, through its 
PLOS One service is challenging many assumptions in scholarly 
communications.

It could be argued that the editorial review of PLOS One is only 
"lighter" because of the high standards of the founding PLOS 
journals.  I don't know. Nor do I know if even the lighter 
standards of PLOS One are on a par with toll-access journals in 
the field.  It would take someone deeply immersed in the field to 
answer those questions.

It should be noted that PLOS One is taking the grounds of 
competition into an area that toll-access publications cannot go. 
A toll-access publication needs to make a case with prospective 
readers, and that case is that the material is very good, not 
good enough.  PLOS One is carving out the good-enough space for 
itself.

To my mind, PLOS One is, after arXiv, the most important and 
innovative service in scholarly communications today.  But its 
importance and innovation is not connected to the fact that the 
publications are open access but to the deep questions it is 
implicitly making about the value of peer review.

Joe Esposito



On 9/25/09 1:51 PM, "David Prosser" <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk> wrote:

> The handy table from BMC shows just how varied publication fees 
> are:
>
> http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/apccomparison/
>
> Some for profit publishers charge very low fees (e.g. Hindawi) 
> and some society publishes charge much higher fees (e.g., ACS). 
> Although I think I would be hard- pressed to support the 
> contention that the PLoS fees are high compared to many 
> commercial publishers - even the highest PLoS fee is less than 
> Elsevier, Springer, Taylor and Francis, Wiley and Sage (and 
> note that PLoS does not have additional colour figure charges).
>
> PLoS covers about 80% of annual operating costs through 
> operating revenue (mainly publishing fees) and expects that to 
> rise to 100% next year - 
> http://www.plos.org/downloads/progress_report.pdf p8. A number 
> of open access publishers are already profitable, including 
> Hindawi, MedKnow, and, I believe, BMC (although it is less 
> clear now that it is part of Springer).
>
> I would note in passing that traditionally it is claimed that 
> it takes 7 years for a subscription journal to reach 
> profitability. Even the oldest PLoS journal is only 6 years old 
> (next month) so any surprise we feel at its current financial 
> position should be that it is doing so well!
>
> David Prosser
> Director, SPARC Europe
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> [mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Steven Hall
> Sent: 25 September 2009 01:04
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Subject: RE: PLOS article metrics
>
> Leaving aside the extraordinary and Stalinesque suggestion of 
> 'eliminating' the for-profit sector from scholarly publishing, 
> can Heather please tell us on what basis PLoS is more efficient 
> than for-profit publishers?  Its publication fees - $2,900 for 
> PLoS Biology and Medicine, $2,250 for three other journals and 
> $1,350 for PLoS One - are as high as and in many cases greater 
> than those of for-profit publishers, but is it yet able to 
> balance income and costs on an annual basis without substantial 
> grant funding?
>
> How far is it from breaking even on a cumulative basis?  This 
> is not to denigrate PLoS, which has stated publicly that there 
> is a substantial cost to high-quality scholarly publishing, but 
> it is to question whether it can be held up as a more efficient 
> model than those of commercial publishers (a claim it would 
> probably not make for itself).  There may well be a debate to 
> be had on the economics of journals publishing, but it needs to 
> be based on fact and not, as so often is the case, on 
> supposition or abstract theory.
>
> Steven Hall