[GOAL] Re: Effect of Green OA on Publishers

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 5:06 PM, David Prosser <david.prosser at rluk.ac.uk>wrote:

> Peter
>
> I'm not going to argue the piblishers' case for them, but...
>
> 1. This is cost per submission, while the hybrid OA publication cost is
> per published paper.  A journal that rejects a lot of papers will obviously
> rack-up a lot of multiples of $250.  (This raises the whole issue of
> submission charges - if a journal can't go open access because of the cost
> of rejecting 95% of papers then could it consider a submission charge to
> cover it.  Would people be willing to pay $250 to be considered by Nature
> and Science?)
>

I accept this. I'm not used to having 95% of my papers rejected - I aim for
about 10%. And yes, that may come down to choice of journal.

What I would like to see is a better market in this area. The whole process
is clearly incredibly inefficient. There's an analogy where if you are
bidding for a house you have to pay for a surveyor and every time you fail
it costs you. So the market tries to come up with solutions - e.g. single
surveys per house. The point here is that while there is no price pressure
on authors and while the publication process is distorted by unnecessary
competition between publishers there is no room for improvements in
efficiency.

>
> 2. I think the $250 was a direct cost and so something more should be
> added for overheads.
>

OK - 15%, say


> 3. This is just organisation of peer review.  The study did look at other
> costs, but as there were so many problems with getting comparable costs
> from publishers for online hosting the study was not able to provide a
> total cost-per-article.
>

Getting any useful information about costs in a market like this is very
difficult.


>
> 4. Disappointingly, but not unsurprisingly, I think a lot of publishers
> set hybrid OA charges at a level to try to cover their current revenue per
> papers.  That's why hybrid OA charges tend to be higher than those for
> 'born OA' journals.  It's also why, I suspect, hybrid has never taken off
> (except in a few cases) - it's just too expensive.  If you want OA there
> are cheaper - and often better - alternatives.
>

I have other hypotheses but no evidence.


-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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