[GOAL] Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?

[Andrew Odlyzko]

Perhaps a Kazhakstani graduate student can provide simple distribution
of files at a very low cost.  But once you get into providing anything
resembling serious curation, and even more when you get into peer review,
costs do mount up.  For example, arXiv costs about $10 per preprint
submitted (if we divide the annual cost of the arXiv by the number of
new submissions, and so don't worry about the accounting niceties of
splitting the costs between handling new and old papers).  For a few
million papers per year for all of scholarly publishing, this gets
beyond the capability of a Kazhakstani graduate student.


This rough estimate of $10 per preprint for arXiv, and others to be quoted, 
are all from the paper "Open Access, library and publisher competition, and 
the evolution of general commerce," Evaluation Review, vol. 39, no. 1, 
Feb. 2015, pp. 130-163,

    http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0193841X13514751

and (for those who can't get inside the paywall), a preprint is at
 
    http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/libpubcomp.pdf

Going beyond preprint distribution (and the very light level of screening
by volunteer editors, which does exist at arXiv, at no monetary cost),
Elsevier collects about $5,000 in total on average for each article they
publish.  About $2,000 is their profit, and the remaining $3,000 covers 
what they claim are necessary costs.  As many (including your truly) have 
been arguing for a couple of decades, the necessity of those costs (leaving
the profit question aside) is extremely questionable, and we now have lots 
of examples of lower cost journals.  It seems clear (some estimates and 
references in the paper cited above) that we could operate an adequate
scholarly publishing business, with the current level of peer review, 
at $300 per article, or 10% what it costs Elsevier.  The main obstacle 
is inertia.

Andrew





Heather Morrison <Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca> wrote:

> Indeed, great article. Building on this, a reflection: whatever one thinks of the ethics and legality of Elsevier's lawsuit against SciHub founder Alexandra Elbakyan, it appears to me that she has demonstrated that a Kazhakstani graduate student can provide the bulk of the important services contributed by Elsevier (hosting and serving up articles) at no cost to users, and apparently off the side of her desk. If this is correct, this says something about the real necessary marginal cost for providing this service, i.e. almost nothing.
>
> Considering that academics do the real work of academic publishing - writing and peer review - if the traditional value add of publishers in storing and disseminating articles, necessary in the print and early electronic ages, can now be done for next to nothing, surely we can devise a new system that retains or strengthens quality at a fraction of the cost?
>
> best,
>
> --
> Dr. Heather Morrison
> Associate Professor
> École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
> University of Ottawa
> Desmarais 111-02
> 613-562-5800 ext. 7634
> Sustaining the Knowledge Commons: Open Access Scholarship
> http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
> http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
> Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca<mailto:Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca>
>
> On 2017-06-27, at 11:38 AM, "Reckling, Falk" <Falk.Reckling at fwf.ac.at<mailto:Falk.Reckling at fwf.ac.at>>
>  wrote:
>
> Indeed Eric, astonishingbackground story, almost all what you have to know about the publishing industry and very well written,
>
>
>
> Best Falk
>
>
>
> Von: Éric Archambault<mailto:eric.archambault at science-metrix.com>
> Gesendet: Dienstag, 27. Juni 2017 09:26
> An: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)<mailto:goal at eprints.org>
> Betreff: [GOAL] Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?
>
>
>
> Interesting article in the Guardian that spells out the role played by Robert Maxwell in the development of the scholarly journal industry.
>
> Éric
>
>
> Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?
> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
>
>
> Eric Archambault
> 1science.com
> Science-Metrix.com
> +1-514-495-6505 x111
>
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