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Re: PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access: excerpts from article in Nature Magazine

Charles:

I must say that this is not a good accounting practice. It results in the "creeping overhead" problem. Organizations that do this (working only with marginal costs and without allocating fixed overhead), whether in the for-profit or not-for-profit world, find it difficult to extricate themselves from certain projects and also inexorably get cash flow headaches. Nor does this kind of set-up address the need to accumulate capital for future investments.

This matter of future investments is not small. It appears that many people involved with scholarly communications are advocates of "once and for all" information technology: the technology we have today will do just fine forever. This won't happen. Needs change and grow. A surplus or profit is essential to have money to invest when the time comes. With IT (operating under the jurisdiction of Moore's Law), that time comes every 18 months.

This is not a statement against OA projects. Rather, the point is that even OA projects have to do more than cover their costs. If not, they will become creaky and eventually disappear. Think of such things as underinvested civic infrastructure to see where this can go.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "Charles W. Bailey, Jr." <cwbailey@digital-scholarship.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Monday, February 19, 2007 4:00 PM
Subject: Re: PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access: excerpts from article in
Nature Magazine

Sally:

People and infrastructure costs are indeed important.

My assumption is that the SFU Library (and/or its parent institution) is subsidizing most of these costs (people, in this case, meaning technical support staff) and charging modest fees to recoup some incremental costs that are not covered by in-place, baseline human/technical/facility infrastructure. (Heather can clarify if this is not so.)

The external "publishers" paying these modest fees then only have to worry about the costs of editorial and journal production support (the latter may be as simple as creating PDFs from Word files and putting them and metadata into OJS). Editorial support may be done entirely by volunteers, whose salaries are being paid as part of their real jobs by various universities and other organizations worldwide.

http://software.lib.sfu.ca/docs/software.prices.pdf

So, from the external "publishers" point of view, the only real costs are as outlined above, and, from the SFU Library point of view, the costs are not viewed as if there was no infrastructure already in place: to a large degree, it was there already for other purposes, and it is the incremental cost on top of this base that is required perform the new journal-hosting function that is viewed as their "real" cost.

Best Regards, Charles

Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

Digital Scholarship
http://www.digital-scholarship.org/
E-Mail: cwbailey@digital-scholarship.com


Sally Morris (Morris Associates) wrote:

I think all of those involved in publishing recognize that the
major element of cost is people;  infrastructure is also an
important element - e.g. buildings, heat and light, computers
and their systems (quite complex if they are hosting
e-journals). If these costs were ignored, I'd be prepared to
guess that many publishers, both commercial and otherwise,
could come up with a similar figure. We have to be careful not
to compare apples with oranges!

Sally Morris
Consultant, Morris Associates (Publishing Consultancy)
South House, The Street
Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK
Email:  sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Heather Morrison
Sent: 01 February 2007 00:24
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access: excerpts from article
in
Nature Magazine

Peter Banks wrote:

"as Heather Morrison claims, that a journal can be run on about
$500..."

This is the approximate annual cost for journal hosting and
software support services by SFU Library, for a publisher with
more than 10 journals.  The price list can be downloaded from:
http://software.lib.sfu.ca/support.html

Look under OJS.  The cost for more than 10 journals is $600 per
journal (Canadian), which is about $500 U.S.

Please note that OJS (Open Journal Systems) itself is open
source, and absolutely free for anyone, anywhere to download. The
price for hosting and support is available for those who choose
this option.

There is more to running a journal than hosting and software
support, of course.

Nevertheless, I hope that sharing this information helps to
illustrate that it is possible to publish scholarly journals
without expending an enormous sum of money.

Disclosure:  I work for SFU Library (for a different
organization, which derives no benefit from the success of OJS).

Heather G. Morrison
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com