[BOAI] Comparing Revenues for OA and Subscription Publishing

[David Prosser]

(Cross-posted)

The Economist has published another piece on open access publishing:

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21577035-open-access-scientific-publishing-gaining-ground-free-all

I was struck by one paragraph in particular:

Outsell, a Californian consultancy, estimates that open-access journals generated $172m in 2012. That was just 2.8% of the total revenue journals brought their publishers (some $6 billion a year), but it was up by 34% from 2011 and is expected to reach $336m in 2015. The number of open-access papers is forecast to grow from 194,000 (out of a total of 1.7m publications) to 352,000 in the same period.


By my reckoning this means that in 2012 the revenue breakdown was :

For Open Access = $890 per paper ($172m / 194k papers)
For Sub Access = $3,500 per paper ($6 billion / 1.7m papers) 

If the 194,000 papers published in OA had been published in subscription journals the extra costs could have been around $500 million ((3500-890)x194000).  If you believe that all of these papers would probably have been published whatever the business model you could recast this as the worldwide community having made a saving of $500 million.

If all 1.7m papers published in 2012 had been OA at $890 per paper the $6 billion a year business would shrink to a $1.5 billion a year business.

There are lots of assumptions here (not least that my maths are correct), but it is clear that 

a) the direct costs of publishing in OA journals are current significantly lower than publishing in subscriptions journals

b) the average cost per paper in OA is significantly lower than the roughly £1,450 per article that represented the break-even point for the UK under which the UK would save money if we moved totally to OA

c) the average is much, much lower than the typical price being offered for 'hybrid' OA. 

It would be very easy to construct an argument that the $890 per paper figure is not scaleable to all of journal publishing, but it is interesting that, at least for the moment, the figure is so low.

David





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