RE: Open Access and Efficiencies in Publication

[Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca>]

John Cox wrote:

Heather Morrison really must get her facts right.  If she read 
Reed Elsevier's Annual Report, she would note that its 2005 
revenues of US$9.2 million were derived from a variety of 
businesses, including Harcourt (textbooks), LexisNexis (legal and 
business information), Reed Business Information (magazines) and, 
of course, Elsevier (scholarly/research books and journals). The 
Elsevier unit probably generates around US 2 billion.

Not all of Elsevier's revenue is from publishing of scholarly 
articles, of course; my numbers are presented as a very rough 
illustration of what might be possible only.

That is why I provided the example of 10% of Elsevier's revenue 
(less than half your estimate of US $2 billion, John) paying for 
460,000 Public Library of Science articles.

If your estimate of $2 billion in revenue is correct, John, then 
this amount would pay for about 1.3 million BioMedCentral 
articles.  That is a lot of open access!

A complete calculation of how many article processing fees for 
open access could be paid for through the revenues of existing 
publishers would require a more precise figure for Elsevier, but 
it would also need to include the revenues of all the other 
scholarly publishers. Elsevier was selected for this example 
solely due to the large size of the company.

Any opinion expressed in this message is that of the author 
alone, and does not reflect the opinion or policy of BC 
Electronic Library Network or Simon Fraser University Library.

Heather Morrison
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com