Journal publishing costs

[FrederickFriend <ucylfjf@ucl.ac.uk>]

New research on scholarly communication costs is always worth 
reading, and I draw attention to a new report from the Public 
Knowledge Project on a survey of journals using PKP's OJS 
platform. The survey report is on the PKP web-site in the form of 
a pre-publication article entitled "A survey of the scholarly 
journals using Open Journal Systems" by Brian Edgar and John 
Willinsky

http://pkp.sfu.ca/files/OJS%20Journal%20Survey.pdf.

The following extract from the article indicates the importance 
of the findings from this survey: "These journals are also in a 
position to contribute to future discussions about scholarly 
communication in light of their budgets, which appear to 
challenge what is often held up as the necessary and real cost of 
scholarly publishing, whether to prove the impossibility of open 
access publishing or to set a publication charge fee for authors 
to pay for open access. The challenge posed by this set of 
journals becomes starkly apparent, whether one compares the first 
copy costs from this journal sample of $188.39 per article, at 
roughly a tenth of the industry standard over the last decade 
(RIN 2008, p. 35), or the annual budget for the majority of these 
journals, which stands at less than what are held to be the 
"fixed" costs ($3,800) of a single article (Ware & Mabe, 2009, p.
52)."

The findings in the report will be particularly helpful for small 
societies wondering how to move their journals to e-only and 
their business model to viable open access. Often societies feel 
either that the cost of moving to e-only is prohibitive or that 
they have no other option but to join a major commercial 
publisher. Open Journal Systems can provide a viable and 
academic-friendly way forward, showing that publishing costs need 
not be as high as they are sometimes portrayed. The 
pre-publication article points to the significance of the 
"scholar-publisher" model as "an effective response to the 
current hold that large commercial and society publishers have on 
research library budgets by pursuing a model of cooperative 
participation in the global circulation of peer-reviewed 
literature".

Fred Friend
JISC Scholarly Communication Consultant
Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL