Annual Costs Per Deposit of Hosting Refereed Research Output Centrally Versus Institutionally

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

On 30-Jan-10, at 9:47 PM, David Prosser wrote:

>> SANDY THATCHER: it's the peer review that is the most expensive
>> part of the  whole process, and arXiv is not in the business of
>> peer  reviewing.
>
> DAVID PROSSER: Is that true, Sandy?  Can we have a reference please?
>
> Tenopir and King back in 2004 suggested that 'manuscript receipt
> processing, disposition decision-making, identifying reviewers or
> referees and review processing' constituted 26% of the direct
> costs of producing an article (which they estimated at $1700 on
> average).
>
> http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/26.html
>
> Of course, costs may have shifted in the years since then.
> Which is why a reference would be welcome.

What Sandy said is perfectly correct:

(1) The cost of providing peer review (c. $500 per article) is 
indeed the most expensive part of the process of providing a 
peer-reviewed article for free (OA) by depositing it in a central 
repository like Arxiv (or in the author's own Institutional 
Repository, IR).

(2) And Arxiv does not provide the peer review. (Nor does any 
other repository.)

(3) Low as it is, $7 per article just for deposit and archiving 
is probably an overestimate, because Arxiv needs to do far too 
much work to process and store all the world's institutions' 
physics deposits centrally: It would cost even less per article 
for an Institutional Repository (IR) that archives only its own 
annual research output (and knows all its own researchers, hence 
need not do the extra generic precautionary controls). (Be 
careful not to jig the estimate by factoring in the costs of 
online infrastructure that the institution already has, 
regardless of whether it has an IR: just the one-time IR set-up 
cost, the extra server and disk-space, etc., plus the cost per 
deposit and annual maintenance of the IR only.)

It would be useful to have IRs' estimates of their annual cost 
per article deposited -- but only from mature mandated IRs that 
are already well on the way to capturing 100% of their annual 
institutional output of refereed journal articles. (Obviously the 
IR price per article will be somewhat higher for IRs that are 
still only capturing only 15% or less of their annual refereed 
research output, as most IRs today still are, because they have 
not yet mandated deposit.)

Another useful comparison would be the cost -- in money and time 
-- of doing the unnecessary IR "quality controls" and 
preprocessing that many IRs think, superstitiously and 
superfluously, that they need to do. (In this case, estimates 
from all the immature, near-empty IRs are relevant too.)

At Southampton ECS, the first mandated IR of all (since 2002 
http://bit.ly/ioSFK), we realized within the first year of the 
mandate that the "quality control" (for the content and metadata 
of the deposit) was based on a completely unnecessary and 
dysfunctional misanalogy with library collections and 
cataloguing, that all it did was create needless work and 
backlogs for the "quality-controllers" and needless resistance 
and counterproductive resentment from depositing authors who, 
having taken the trouble of depositing their refereed final 
drafts, as mandated, were then denied the immediate satisfaction 
of seeing them go immediately online and start getting 
downloaded: instead, they had to go into a quality-control queue, 
sometimes for days or weeks, as the volume of mandated deposits 
to "process" grew. We quickly jettisoned the gratuitous process 
and have seen the IR's deposits growing happily ever since: 
http://roar.eprints.org/1422/

Leave any "quality control" for your institutional authors' peer- 
reviewed final drafts in the background. If something is wrong, 
users will let the author know; if users don't squawk (or there 
are no users!), the slip-up probably isn't even worth correcting. 
Focus on solving the real problem, which is not "quality control" 
but capturing the IR's target content: the institution's full 
annual output of refereed research.

And remember that -- whilst journals still exist and 
subscriptions are still paying for *their* quality control -- 
your IR is not hosting the all-important version-of-record, but 
merely an OA supplement.

A word to the wise...

Stevan

> David
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> [mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Sandy Thatcher
> Sent: 29 January 2010 01:24
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Subject: Re: ArXiv Grows Up, Adopts Subscription-like Model
>
> Uh, it's the peer review that is the most expensive part of the
> whole process, and arXiv is not in the business of peer
> reviewing.
>
>> What really struck me about the arXiv business model is the
>> phenomenal cost-effectiveness of arXiv.
>>
>> At under $7 per article (that's the total cost!), arXiv manages
>> all of the technical aspects of disseminating scholarly articles
>> -including storage, sustaining a heavily used system, developing
>> the search interface, and even working with publishers so that
>> arXiv also works as a submission platform for some journals.
>>
>> wow!
>>
>> Heather Morrison, MLIS
>> The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
>> http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com