Re: Institutional Journal Costs in an Open Access Environment

[Phil Davis <pmd8@cornell.edu>]

Heather Morrison wrote:

> First, a quote from Walters:  "the PLoS Open Access Model would 
> bring dramatic cost reductions for all nine institutions in the 
> sample"... [and] it seems that we are assuming that it would not 
> be fair or universities with intensive research production to 
> pay a higher share of the costs of scholarly communication. Why 
> shouldn't they pay more, though?
One must remember that the $1,500/article used in Bill Walter's 
article did not include PLoS memberships paid for by many 
organizations.  For Cornell University, the library pays 
$10,000/yr to be such a member.  PLoS is also a non-profit 
organization.  One would expect (producer-pays model aside) that 
a publishing system run entirely through non-profit societies and 
associations would be cheaper.  In fact, they are much, much 
cheaper for research organizations like Cornell than a 
producer-pays model.  In our OA White Paper, we calculated that 
author payments for journals produced by non-profit publishers 
would need to be lower than $400/article for our library to start 
saving money.

You must realize that neither Bill Walters nor I have ever used 
words like "fair" or "should' or "ought" in our reports.  This 
moralistic language has been entirely adopted by the OA 
advocates.  Should research institutions (and their libraries) 
pay more than they currently do?  This a decision that needs to 
be taken up by provosts and policy makers.  If library budgets 
are indications of the institution's willingness to adopt an 
author-pays model, one could conclude that their position is 
"no".

--Phil Davis

****************
Institutional Journal Costs in an Open Access Environment
by William H. Walters
http://www.library.millersville.edu/public_html/walters/journal_costs.pdf