Ensuring that the results of the research projects they fund are disseminated as widely as possible is surely a legitimate thing for the NIH to do and for the US Government to require the NIH to do. The current system does not maximise the dissemination of those results so resulting in reduced impact for the authors, reduced efficiency for readers, and reduced return on the research investment made by the NIH.
I'm not at all convinced by the 'spending money on dissemination impedes the discovery of a cure for cancer' argument. Spending money on making sure that data are easily available has accelerated the pace of scientific discovery (most famously in genome research) and there is no reason to think that this will not be the same for papers. Anyway, if the argument did hold, could NIH not extend it and suggest that if it was not paying out millions of dollars each year in submission charges, page charges, and colour figure charges it could support more research grants? David David C Prosser PhD Director SPARC Europe E-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 (0) 1865 284 451 Mobile: +44 (0) 7974 673 888 http://www.sparceurope.org -----Original Message----- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Martin Frank Sent: 22 July 2004 22:20 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Mandating OA around the corner? Mark brings up a good point, especially in light of David Lipmann's claim that it would only cost about $700,000 based on the hosting of 50,000 manuscripts annually. While this might be the number which PubMed Central conveys to the public, without a true cost accounting I am unconvinced that this is a real number. I suspect that the $700,000 does not take into account the general overhead (rent, heat, electricity, janatorial) that most publishers have to include in their cost analyses. I believe that Martin Blume alluded to that in his response to David. I also question David's analysis because of his claim that PubMed Central has an annual budget of approximately $2.5 million. While this is not a lot of money as compared to the total NIH budget, it is in my view $2.5 million more than needs to be spent and could instead be used to support approximately 6 research grants designed to find cures for cancer, etc. If the PubMedCentral budget is indeed $2.5 million as claimed by David Lipmann, one could use that number as the basis for establishing what an expanded PubMedCentral might cost if it started receiving articles from 50,000 authors per year from 4000 or more journals. At least when PMC gets their downloads from journals now, they come in bunches using the appropriate DTD, etc. Dealing with 50,000 submissions would probably be much less efficient than PMC's current efforts with its existing journal customers. As I indicated, David claims that his budget for PMC is $2.5 million. PMC currently hosts about 150 journals. That translates into $16,666 per journal. Assuming that PMC is likely to receive submissions from the equivalent of 3000 journals, that translates into a cost of approximately $50,000,000. I don't claim to know the right answer for the future cost of PMC, but extrapolating from their own numbers, it is a lot of money and a lot of lost research opportunities. martin frank >>> [email protected] 07/21/04 02:00PM >>> Greetings, On Jul 18, 2004, at 1:08 PM, Martin Frank wrote: > However, based on knowledge of the costs associated with the hosting > of journals at HighWire Press, it is estimated that a full fledged > archive of NIH funded manuscripts at NIH would cost in the > neighborhood of $75-100 million. Wild (uncalled for!) speculation in my opinion (additonal FUD removed). According to David Lipman, this is off by at least an order of magnitude. They expect about 50-60,000 NIH funded manuscripts per year. Even a generous $100 per hosted manuscript* gives only $5-6 million. Lipman also pointed out that one would not expect to have to immediately deal with this number of articles. Considering that NLM can leverage off of the existing PubMed infrastructure, I think they are in quite good shape (even creating by hand good XML metadata with tagged references can be done for about $5/article). It should be noted that if this is really author-deposit of manuscripts (again, Lipman's impression of the intent of the legislative language), than this might even be doable on the same cost scale of arXiv.org ($1 - $10 per article). I suspect the real cost will be somewhere in the middle. Regards, Mark Mark Doyle Assistant Director, Journal Information Systems The American Physical Society * My understanding is that hosting an article on Highwire is about $100 per article. Martin Frank, Ph.D. Executive Director American Physiological Society 9650 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20814-3991 Tel: 301-634-7118 Fax: 301-634-7242 Email: [email protected] APS Home Page: http://www.The-APS.org/ "...integrating the life sciences from molecule to organism"
