On Thu, 13 Dec 2001, Andrew Odlyzko wrote:
> In general, I agree that to operate the way APS does, it costs around
> $800-$1500 per article. However, that does not preclude less expensive
> modes of operation, either with lower quality, or with shifting some
> of the explicit financial costs that APS incurs into hidden subsidies
> from editors and the like.
And there may be even more natural ways for covering the remaining
costs if they are partitioned in a more appropriate way for the new
media (as a SERVICE fee for an outgoing submitted draft instead of an
access fee for an incoming PRODUCT):
"4. Whereas all refereed research should be fully accessible
on-line without cost to all would-be users worldwide, it is
nevertheless not altogether costless to produce. The main change is
that dissemination and archiving cost incomparably less on-line
than on-paper and hence the on-line dissemination/archiving costs
per article effectively shrink to zero.
http://www.arl.org/sparc/pubs/enews/aug01.html#6
This means that the only remaining per-article real costs are
(1) dissemination on-paper, (2) any on-line enhancements by the
publisher (special mark-up, linking), and (3) peer review. Given a
freely accessible, on-line generic version, (1) and (2) accordingly
become optional PRODUCTS, on-paper and on-line, that can be paid
for by those who still want and can afford them instead of the free
on-line generic versions. Hence peer review (3) becomes the only
remaining essential SERVICE; but its true cost (because peers
review for free) is so much lower than what is currently being
spent in access tolls for the text as a user/institution-end
product (an average of $2000 in worldwide collective institutional
subscription, license, and pay-per-view [S/L/P] fees per article
and as much as $5000 for the priciest journals) that it can easily
be covered as an author/institution-end outgoing service charge if
and when the market for the incoming S/L/P products, now optional,
ever shrinks to where it no longer covers it. The true annual
institutional costs of the essential peer review service (per
submitted outgoing manuscript) can be paid for out of only a
portion (10-30%) of the much higher annual institutional windfall
savings on the optional product expenditures. There is hence every
reason to be confident that these lower costs will be met by novel
business models and that the goal of free access to the
peer-reviewed full text is entirely attainable and neither merely
preferable nor unreachably utopian."
>From a draft document in preparation.
Stevan Harnad
NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free
access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the
American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01):
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
or
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
You may join the list at the amsci site.
Discussion can be posted to:
american-scientist-open-access-forum_at_amsci.org
Received on Fri Dec 14 2001 - 12:52:42 GMT