Elsevier's profits alone could fund all academic publications as open access

http://svpow.wordpress.com/2011/10/22/economics-of-open-source-publishing/

by MikeTaylor • 15 years ago

114 26 15 years ago

svpow.wordpress.com

jules2• 15 years ago

> And remember that PLoS is now making a profit at that rate — no longer living off the grants that helped to get it started. At a rate of $1350 per article, it’s not just surviving but flourishing, so we know that that’s a reasonable commercial rate to charge for handling an open-access academic article with no limits on length or on number of high-resolution colour figures [...] So, yes, open access is cheaper. Stupidly cheaper. Absurdly, ridiculously, appallingly cheaper.

Open-access is still absurdly expensive. $1350 to publish an article in an online journal, seriously? Unlimited length and colour figures in an online journal? No shit. The cost should be exactly $0, since all the actual work like reviewing articles is done by volunteers. I'm sure that many universities and companies would be glad to provide free hosting for papers.

ThomPete2• 15 years ago

So how would one go about making it free?

mechanical_fish• 15 years ago

This is a nice devious response. ;)

Let me take a stab at the answer: You can publish unedited, dubiously archived, difficult-to-cite, poorly advertised articles without anonymous peer review for the cost of hosting, right now.

masklinn6• 15 years ago

> Unlimited length and colour figures in an online journal? No shit.

You'd be surprised.

> The cost should be exactly $0, since all the actual work like reviewing articles is done by volunteers.

Peer reviewers are not the only ones working on PLOS, it has a pretty big editorial board[0] of 1300~1400 members and a pretty extensive editorial process. I do not claim to know if (let alone that) it is worth $1350/article, but they do apparently waive publication fees for authors who can't provide them, so the idea is that granted authors pay for insufficiently funded authors.

There are costs to a scientific journal, which have to be covered one way or an other. In an open-access journal, they clearly can't be covered by the one who accesses the information, so they have to be covered either by the one who publishes it (the author) or a third party (via grants).

> I'm sure that many universities and companies would be glad to provide free hosting for papers.

I'm not sure that's got any relevance.

[0] http://www.plosone.org/static/edboard.action#sectioneditors

jules2• 15 years ago

As far as I know PLOS editors are unpaid just like reviewers. People keep saying that there are costs to a scientific journal, but don't say what those costs are exactly. Sure, the costs are nonzero like hosting, but what costs more than say $1 per article?

shabble• 15 years ago

Hosting costs, software dev, and maybe non-volunteer admin costs are factors off the top of my head.

Maybe it's excessive, and would either reduce over time, or the organisation would find some way to grow into the budget (now, which is more likely?), but the important part would be organising it as a non-profit.

Putting the cost onto the submitter to pay for free access to everyone thereafter is a nice model - academics need those publications to justify their grants, and can allocate money towards it. The problem is, "in perpetuity"[1] is a long time, so you're gonna end up front-loading the cost a bit.

[1] Or maybe just a standard copyright term. Someone still needs to host it though, and preferably keep as much metadata as possible attached.

MikeTaylor5• 15 years ago

[I am the author of the original article.]

As other commenters have pointed out, PLoS do have costs. What's easy to overlook here is not just the editorial work and infrastructure costs associated with the articles that are published, but also the costs of assessing the articles that are _not_ published -- that don't make it through review.

I'm not necessarily defending the specific price-point they've set, but I do think it's important that they (and other academic publishers) are free to set a price that works economically: then they can compete with each other on price and features, and, presto, we have an actual _market_. Whereas what we have now in academic publishing is largely a cartel.

The great thing about PLoS is that they have shown, and are showing year on year, that you don't in fact need charity to be a successful open-access publisher. All the whining in the world from Elsevier and Springer about how they need to charge absurd access fees -- all that whining is shown to be nonsense by the example of PLoS.

Finally, it's important to note that PLoS offer no-questions-asked full waivers of the publication fee, so that researchers without institutional funding are not discriminated against. They're a non-profit: their basic goal is not to "increase shareholder value" but to help disseminate science.

masklinn6• 15 years ago

By the way, since PLoS is a non-profit, do they publish their cost structure anywhere? Is it possible to say where the money from a publication goes, for instance?

zerostar07• 15 years ago

$0 would mean PLoS would be like reddit. It's good to have a price point, although i do think it's high.

I would argue the cost of having walled-garden publications is much higher than anyone thinks, considering that currently we can't build any data mining tool to facilitate research. It's such a bad situation that, if i was a creationist, that's the argument i would use against science. Incidentally, i was just trying to download an article. The journal said my chrome browser wasn't supported , then when i tried Firefox, it insisted that i needed to update my version of java (??) to use their freaking downloader to download the paper. Result: paper ignored. [Edit: here it is http://www.scopus.com/record/display.url?eid=2-s2.0-00339652... ]

axusgrad• 15 years ago

Things would be more expensive without a profit motive driving efficiency, but maybe a change be a net gain. Pointing at the profit someone makes and saying "we could be keeping all that money!" is oversimplifying.

MikeTaylor5• 15 years ago

An, axusgrad, that isn't it AT ALL. The point is "Look at all the profit WE are giving these people. If we spent it differently we could make massive savings AND give the world free access to our research."

yuhong• 15 years ago

So could Elsevier and Springer be taken private?

anamax• 15 years ago

Sure - buy "enough" stock and make a tender offer for the rest.

Elsevier's profits alone could fund all academic publications as open access

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