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

["Lisa Dittrich" <lrdittrich@aamc.org>]

For reasons I can't fathom, everyone seems to assume that 
journals are all housed at universities.  As a Washingtonian, I 
know many many are housed at associations.  In the case of our 
journal, there is a staff of six plus the editor, all of whom 
require salaries (and salaries that cover the cost of living in 
the expensive DC area) as well as health insurance.  Unlike some 
journals, we do not subsidize our association--the reverse is 
true.  And most of our authors do not receive grant funding; we 
have never even charged page charges, no less publication fees.

I frankly get a little irritated when those who don't publish 
journals comment as if they were experts.  (And I'm not singling 
out you, Charles).  I know something about how subscriptions work 
for libraries, but I wouldn't presume to be an expert.  The world 
of journal publishing is very varied, with all kinds of models in 
place.  And the costs of publishing are not modest, even in the 
most bare bones environment. This is why many open access 
journals must rely heavily on subsidies PLUS author fees to 
operate.

Lisa Dittrich
Managing Editor
Academic Medicine
2450 N Street, NW
Washington, DC 20037
lrdittrich@aamc.org
www.academicmedicine.org

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Charles W.
Bailey, Jr.
Sent: Monday, February 19, 2007 7:00 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
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.
E-Mail: cwbailey@digital-scholarship.com