Stevan, On Friday, January 10, 2003, at 07:26 PM, Stevan Harnad wrote:
Replies to Jan Velterop, Sol Picciotto, and Mark Doyle
Agreed. But be prepared to split the peer-review function from the archiving function. Co-bundling is no longer necessary online, and the economics may be quite different once the two are disentangled.
Eventually these will probably split. But there is a real interest of a scholarly society to ensure the long-term availability of the work we peer-review and also to be able to certify that the object in question is what we peer-reviewed. However, at the moment there are no up and running, long-term alternatives for archiving, so we still have to carry out current "best practice" archiving and we still have to pay for it.
There is no question that some cost per paper will be involved for institutional archiving too. I think we're talking about $500 per paper for peer review and about $10 per paper for archiving. How much do you think markup will add to that
Right now it is close to another $500 per article for us. But we do a considerable amount of markup and much of the cost has to do with marking up the complex math that is in our journals. We are pushing our vendors to reform their production methods. One has already done so and we have seen about a 15% savings. We expect to improve upon this as well. But for now, the cost is not negligible.
-- and don't you think it will be off-loadable onto the author, the way document-preparation (word-processing) has been?
Yes, but this keeps seeming to be 5 years away.... Maybe the new version of Microsoft Office (with XDocs) will be a break through...
For the time being, all those costs (and more) are paid by the access-tolls. If and when institutions get back the sums they spend annually on toll-access -- about $2000 per incoming article, paid collectively by those institutions that can afford toll access to that particular journal -- each will have more than enough savings out of which to pay the ~$510 dollars per outgoing article for peer review and archiving, don't you think?
Yes, provided they are willing to change the model. So far there has been resistance to actually getting this done. And this presumes leaving the "best practice" archiving out of the equation, something we are reluctant to do.
The transitional problem is not merely one of collective action: the transition is between an incoming toll-access model for buying in a product (other institutions' research output) and an outgoing service model (peer-review for their own research output): not the same product or consumer at both ends. This transition cannot be managed on either a university-consortium, nor a single-publisher basis.
You may be right. Nonetheless, it is incumbent on us to try (if only to set an example and to make it clear that the scenario you outline below is the only way forward).
My own guess is that it can only be forced into existence by author/institution self-archiving, generating the sequence: (1) open access, (2) shrinking demand for and revenue from the toll-access version, (3) growing institutional windfall toll-savings, (4) publisher cost-cutting and downsizing to the essentials (this is where we'll find out what things really cost), and then (5) a transition once the windfall institutional savings are in place to pay for it the new way.
Possibly, but I think this is going to take quite a while to come about. Also the transition can proceed differently in various geographic regions. For instance, we have several country wide site licenses for accessing APS journals. If a site license matches the amount that would be required for the submission side charges from that region, than the transition has been effectively accomplished. But right now the site licenses don't quite balance. In the U.S. it would be much harder to take a site-license approach for the entire country, so we have to try and work with a consortium of universities. Cheers, Mark Mark Doyle Manager, Product Development The American Physical Society [email protected]
