Re: Sub-sidy/scription for ArXiv

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

On 28-Jan-10, at 8:27 PM, Nat Gustafson-Sundell wrote:

> I can't conceive of peer review per se costing billions when 
> peer review itself is 'free' and can be managed with little 
> overhead and relatively few salaries

Managing peer review costs about $500 per article today 
http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html 
and about 2.5 million peer-reviewed journal articles are 
published per year (though I think we can get the price quite a 
bit lower than that) 
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Temp/peerev.pdf

By the way, that's still only a fraction of the total cost per 
article today, but that includes obsolescent products and 
services like the paper and online edition with which peer review 
is currently co- bundled...

> One monstrous megajournal does indeed sound scary... the big 
> commercial publishers publish separate titles that have 
> separate identities within the same fields.

There's a trade-off between economies of scale (and journal-fleet 
publishing) and the need for journal autonomy, variety, and 
competition.

> a distributed network of local IRs actually pushes up the 
> price-tag of the whole system

It is not at all clear that that's true, especially since the 
institutions' online infrastructure is already used for so many 
other things anyway.

> indexers and harvesters... may also, if commercial, exploit 
> their dominance at some point).

Once most or all of OA's target content has been made (Green) OA, 
I'll bet on the universities' yearly crop of bright grad students 
to beat any commercial indexer/harvester any day of the week. 
(And notice that the biggest and best of the commercial 
harvesters today, Google, does not charge the user...)

> The other issue, where we clearly see different futures, is 
> that the cost of subs for current content might actually be 
> pressured up in the cases where publishers lose the revenue 
> they've made for providing ongoing access to back-content.

My bet is that institutional cancellation pressure (from user 
preference for the self-archive Green OA versions) will induce 
cost- cutting not price-raising. But either way, it no longer 
matters, once we have universal OA (which will make journal 
subscriptions no longer the inelastic necessity they are now).

> universities.. will... need to increase their IR support 
> budgets (since, presumably, the IRs begin to be used and this 
> has some effect on the expense of supporting the IR).

No, once you set up the free IR software on a server, cost does 
not go up significantly, either with more depositing authors or 
with more users (though most of those will not be local either). 
Total annual institutional peer-reviewed journal article output 
is not that big, though it might need some more disk space and a 
server that can handle a reasonable amount of download pressure.

> I see no reason at all to believe publishers will re-size fees 
> under the scenario you provide, precisely because it is not 
> just about content - it is about the other services in the 
> value chain (specifically quality control and career effect due 
> to title reputation, upon which those publishers that do 
> profiteer can continue to profiteer).

That's all conferred by the journal's peer-review standards, 
whose costs, as noted above, are only a fraction of the cost per 
article that subscription revenue pays for.

> I think your point has much more force if all content is 
> mandated to become immediately available, but now I think we're 
> really talking about Spanish castles in the air ...

Stay tuned...

> if immediate deposit mandates did become a reality and the 
> scenario played out as you picture it, my guess is that we'd 
> end up needing to build the peer review service providers you 
> mention

A journal is just a title -- i.e., an authorship, readership, 
refereeship, editorial board and track-record. Titles migrate. 
Either they will stay with their original publishers (downsized) 
after universally mandated Green OA or they will migrate to other 
publishers. But in any case, no need to re-build or re-invent 
peer review.

> More universal availability of back content will certainly give 
> universities more wiggle room to build the future (since more 
> options on a going-forward basis become more practical).

I like the idea of calling embargoed access "back-content"!

And you're quite right that universal immediate-deposit mandates, 
even with delayed OA, will leave wiggle room: and that wiggling 
will soon work its way the universal immediate OA that is 
optimal, inevitable (and already long overdue) for research, 
researchers, their institutions and funders, and the tax-paying 
public that funds the funders and institutions.

Stevan Harnad