What is the (Real) Cost of Open Access?
After the transformation of Communications of ACM, I find myself increasingly interested in the articles that are published in CACM. As expected, one of the common ways to demonstrate my interest is by sharing the URL for the paper, on Twitter, on Facebook, on the blog, or by sharing the link with friends and colleagues. Unfortunately, CACM has a closed-access policy, effectively preventing anyone without a ACM membership or without a university account from actually reading the papers. Same thing for papers published in conferences and journals, but there I can typically find the paper in the home page of the author. For CACM, this is often not the case.
Needless to say, I hate closed access policies. While I can understand the shortsightedness of for-profit publishers, I fail to see why ACM has not adopted at least a "semi" Open Access model, making, say, the current issue of Communications of ACM available to the public. Or by giving public access to papers published 10 or 20 years back in the different journals and conferences.
The stated goal of the association is to promote the field. By restricting access, ACM simply does not work towards this goal!
The main argument that I hear is that publishing has some costs. But I am really trying to understand what are these costs. What is the magnitude of these costs? And who is being paid? Almost like the health-care debate, we are told that something is expensive but we have no idea of who ends up getting the money.
Let's examine the potential cost factors:
Printing: I understand that printing on paper has costs. But covering the the cost of printing seems easy: Amortize it across the print subscribers. (Or even abolish print versions.)
Servers for distribution: What is the cost of electronically distributing papers? The cost of running a server, should not be a concern. At the worst case, NSF should provide funds for that. I find it hard to think that NSF would turn down a request for funding a server that provides open access to scientific journals!
Submission handling: The cost of the submission website? I doubt that it is above $5K per year, per journal. Ask for a nominal submission fee (say $50 per paper) to cover this. The cost for the copy-editors? We can do much better without them, thank you. (Seriously, why do we still have copyeditors?)
Admin cost: The only cost that I can think of is the cost of the admin staff. But how much is it? I honestly have no idea! Is it so high that the ACM member subscriptions cannot cover the cost? I am trying to find the budget of ACM but I cannot find anything public.
Are there other hidden costs?
If anyone has pointers or extra information, please let me know. I am really trying to understand the real costs of high-quality electronic publishing.
Although the CACM does disseminate information, it's also there to encourage people to pay membership dues that let the ACM as a whole hold conferences, publish proceedings, and carry on other activities that lose or break even on money!
ReplyDeleteConferences are a profit center for ACM, as far as I know.
ReplyDeleteOh, you could be right, I don't know specifics.
ReplyDeleteAs someone with a very broad, and often not very deep knowledge of many areas of science, I still want to be able to read (sometimes) very detailed and complete articles.
ReplyDeleteI'm not an academic, but I still have interests ranging from CS, Engineering, Biology, Genetics,Human relations, geopolitics, the law etc. etc. No university access. There is no way that I would subscribe to journals in all of these areas in the hopes that there is an occasional really important article that is not important enough to be well covered (and commented upon) by the millions of blogs, thousand news sources but isn't available because it is to important to not be secret? That wouldn't make sense. I coud pay per use, but in most of these sites you can't tell enough if you are going to scan the paper and find it is useless...then too late to ask for a refund.
Since much of these articles are supported by govt funds or are used to further the economic interests of the writer (tenure, speaking engagements, importances in the field) then making the reader pay seems backwards ... the writer gets the benefit from every reader.
shouldn't it be considered unethical for supported research to be published under restricted terms?
also, i hate registering for a site, buying an article (maybe once a couple years) knowing that there may be only a 1 in 2 or 3 chance on a specific site that the article will be really as important or interesting as it looks. i'm out the money and my time anyway.
Bob, I will not disagree with you about Open Access. Actually, I doubt that anyone would disagree. However, most publishers cite the cost of publishing as the main reason they cannot offer the articles for free to the public.
ReplyDeleteSo, I am looking to find out the real cost of publishing. I somehow suspect that we are feeding a huge bureaucracy, and not any value-adding service. But I am open to see the data and be convinced otherwise.
The journal Computational Linguistics just went fully open access this year. Submissions and editorial are handled by the editor and production/distribution by MIT Press. It's paid for out of membership dues and conference fees paid to the Association for Computational Linguistics.
ReplyDeleteMy recollection is that it's in the US$20K-30K per year range all in. It's published quarterly. That includes partial salary for an editorial assistant, professional copy editing, and production/distribution.
This works out to less than the US$2K/article or so that the pay-to-publish journals charge. Indeed, NIH will pay publishing costs for these journals. NIH requires all NIH-supported work to be published free at PubMed Central. Many proprietary journals open their articles after a year or so.
Like other journals, the scientific side is handled by a volunteer editor, a volunteer editorial board, and volunteer reviewrers.
I've stopped reviewing for or submitting to anything that's not open access.
Thanks for the data Bob.
ReplyDeleteThe $2K/article is comparable to the cost of a conference publication, but I am willing to accept that there is a cultural element there, preventing the switch to pay-to-publish.
BUT, given that ACM is also supported by membership subscriptions, and in addition gets the subscription fees from all the research libraries, I am still wondering why ACM is still not Open Access, at least partially.
Mathematicians and Economists (who are believed to do well with numbers) are the ones with most difficulties of understanding business numbers. Yes, pubishing has a cost as all other business as well. Ever thought of turning a crappy LaTeX (well, still far better that crappy MS Word) into a well-structured XML document? Takes 2 hours in average. Oh yes, the guy that does this needs a salary for those two hours. Ever thought of asking a company or hiring an IT staff to develop software for you (rates start at 100 USD/hour for an experienced developer)? Count several dozens of hours per month. Ever thought of the real cost of a professional server environment (I am not talking about that crappy server setup under your office table)? Backup? If your data amounts 1 TB you will quickly have to switch to harddisk arrays and network attached storage solution. Oh yes, that costs several thousands bucks and needs to be replaced after four years. Telephone lines? E-mail? Computers for the staff members? Some furniture for the office? (Yes, the editors and publishers also want to have a desk and a chair and a decent computer with a screen)... Tax? Further education and training of your staff? Time and money lost on hiring lazy guys and girls that needs to be kicked out of the company again?...
ReplyDeleteCompany car to visit the Professors that serve as Editor-in-Chiefs? Marketing material? Payign for travels to meet scholars at conferences and exibitions?
ReplyDeleteDigitizing printed material from several decades and putting them into databases and making them available online?
ReplyDeleteAnonymous: I am talking about publication from associations, not from for-profit publishers.
ReplyDeleteCopyediting is actually a value-subtracting process at this point. When do they use the "well structured XML document" and I have never seen it?
Software, there is plenty of open source software (see DSpace).
1Tb of data? $100 from Best Buy. Can store the full digital library. Replicate 10 times for backup and protection. We are talking about numbers well below $10K for storage and backup.
Email, furniture, etc are being paid by the volunteers that actually serve as editors and are paid by universities.
There is no tax for non-profits.
Digitization is an one-time process. Sunk cost. Done once, serves for ever.
[ Please remove my previous comment, due to formatting garbage ]
ReplyDeleteSome random notes / thoughts:
- IEEE charges $9 per paper its members for papers that they normally do not have access to.
- I am in a similar situation like bob_d. This has transformed me into a digital beggar. I find myself always trying to find a friend (or a friend of a friend) to help out whenever I hit a closed door. And I know that you do not talk about for-profit publishers, but come on Springer, you charge $34 for http://www.springerlink.com/content/mn2u24251n05n45j/ written in 1957?
- Where I work we publish a magazine that reaches more than 110K people weekly. People divide the cost in: creating the issue, printing it and sending it. Guess what cost is fixed, what varies and where we saved from after giving the option of email distribution.
- Tim O'Reilly says that printing is less than 20% of the cost of a book (ref). But then again he speaks about books and not magazines so TMMV.
This may be of interest. Actual costs of publishing are virtually impossible to pin down, because most publishers are for-profit (even nominally non-profits, such as scholarly societies, often use publishing profits to subsidise other activities). Thus no one will open up their books and tell you what things actually cost, lest you find out that they are price gouging.
ReplyDeleteI've tried to estimate toll-access revenue per article, though the estimate doesn't include such things as charging for reprints. Given that the major publishing houses regularly report operating profits of between 30 and 40%, even in these straitened times, one could make simplistic estimates of operating costs from total number of papers.
That would still need considerable adjustment when talking about society publishers though, for reasons described upthread (volunteer labor, etc).
My sense is that publishers justify their costs by producing over-produced content. The value of the article is not in the quality of typesetting, but in the quality of the ideas, as long as the typesetting meets a minimum level of quality. This level is more than achieved for conferences, and thus should be achievable for journals as well. It should be possible for the ACM to offer its digital library at no additional cost if it stops competing with print publishers. I've written more about this in my post Academic papers want to be free.
ReplyDeleteUnder Open Access philosophy, Redalyc aims to contribute to the editorial scientific activity produced in and about Ibero-America making available for public consultation the content of 550 scientific journals of different knowledge areas: http://redalyc.uaemex.mx
ReplyDelete