Greetings, On Tuesday, March 26, 2002, at 03:07 PM, Peter Suber wrote:
The International Consortium for the Advancement of Academic Publishing (ICAAP) has announced its prices for designing, managing, preparing and hosting electronic journals. After the initial setup fee, the price is $400/year, and $30/article for markup (Canadian dollars). Compare these prices, for example, to services charging $500/article. ICAAP believes its prices are low enough to create an alternative to expensive commercial presses and to allow editors to make their journals free or affordable for readers. ICAAP also announces that it now offers similar services for print journals. http://www.icaap.org/icaapcosts.html (Full disclosure: I'm on the ICAAP board, but ICAAP is a non-profit organization and I have no financial interest in it.)
Is there a copy of the ICAAP DTD? I would say the markup I saw in their posted example http://www.sociology.org/content/vol005.002/cummings.ixml is a far cry from what a normal XML-savvy publisher does these days. References are not tagged, there is no math markup in the example (will they do full-fledged MathML?), names are marked up assuming western standards, etc. What is the assumed input format (Word?)? While this might be workable for a sociology journal, I don't see this $30/article price working for a highly technical journal. Do their prices extend to being able to handle 10,000's of article per year? When you scale up in number or in complexity the material you end up with needing more and better skilled labor. So a blanket comparison of $30/article vs. $500/article without further context is fairly vacuous. That said, I do applaud the effort to create a true archival format first that is then used to create further deliverables. This is a critical element that is often missing in discussions about freeing the literature. Major publishers take this aspect very seriously and a wholesale replacement of the current system to one based on self- or institutional- or subject-based archiving without tackling the underlying technical issues related to long term archiving would be a major mistake. The most viable and cost-effective solution for solving this problem is to develop authoring tools that allow authors to directly create a truly archival XML file. The later in the process you add markup, the more costly it is, especially with complex markup for math or chemistry. It would be nice if some of the money flowing into BOAI was directed towards this.
[S.H.: What about the cost of implementing peer review?]
The archiving cost is just as, if not more, important than the peer review cost and the fact that is it usually missing from your discussions is a major weakness. I don't think the $30/article number is generalizable to all fields of scholarly communication. Cheers, Mark
