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

["Charles W. Bailey, Jr." <cwbailey@digital-scholarship.com>]

Lisa and Joe:

Thanks for your replies.

I agree that there are a variety of models for how e-journals are 
published and funded.  My comments were about a specific case, 
not about e-journal publishing in general.

I think that it is clear that e-journal publishing costs money. 
The question is how much money, and that question relates to 
whether 100% of the infrastructure costs have to be borne by the 
publisher and the scope and complexity of the publishing effort.

For example, it is more difficult and expensive to publish Brain 
Research than Biodiversity Informatics (an OA journal produced 
using Open Journal Systems by the Biodiversity Research Center of 
the University of Kansas). The latter published 7 papers in 1995. 
It does not appear to charge author fees.

If Biodiversity Informatics' publishing activity was like Brain 
Research's, its publication model would need to change: it would 
require much more significant infrastructure.

The point is this: small-scale, nontraditional publishers have 
been publishing e-journals since the late 1980s. A look at the 
Directory of Open Access Journals reveals that many such 
e-journals are being published today. I suspect that a fair 
number of them are doing so using subsidized infrastructure, 
taking advantage of existing physical facilities, computing and 
networking infrastructure, and organizational services.

They are using volunteer editorial labor, whose "real job" 
salaries are being paid by the host organization or other 
organizations. Use of open-source e-journal publishing systems 
may greatly simplify journal production requirements and minimize 
needed technical support staff.

As long as these e-journals' publishing activities are modest and 
they are freely available (eliminating support costs associated 
with licensing and access controls as well as minimizing 
marketing costs) any incremental costs above baseline are likely 
to be fairly small and easily absorbed.

They are not likely to be run like businesses. They are not 
likely to be concerned with cost accounting issues, and, if they 
are, it may be difficult to parse out costs, except for easily 
tallied items such as hours spent on journal activities and 
dedicated servers (if any). The real question is: If the added 
costs are fairly small, are they worth tabulating?  In a 
university setting, faculty are likely to be the prime movers of 
such journals, and faculty don't account for their time in 
detail, whether they are editing a small OA e-journal or a larger 
conventional journal.

These e-journals' technical infrastructure upgrade costs are 
likely to be largely addressed by the normal upgrade cycles of 
their parent organizations. They may have no desire or motivation 
to publish additional e-journals.

So, they are not like Biomed Central, Elsevier, IEEE, Oxford 
University Press, or PLoS (to pick names at random). Nonetheless, 
they are e-journal publishers.

My aim of late has not been to either praise or damn this type of 
e-journal publishing, but rather to clarify that it is is at 
play.  This is why some assertions about very low OA e-journal 
costs can seem nonsensical when viewed from the perspective of 
larger-scale publishers, be they OA or fee-based publishers: 
simple, low-volume, small-scale e-journals are being compared to 
larger, higher-volume, more complex ones.

Best Regards,
Charles

Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

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