Re: Nature's vs. Science's Embargo Policy

From: Mark Doyle <doyle_at_APS.ORG>
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2003 14:01:42 -0500

Greetings,

On Friday, January 10, 2003, at 01:00 PM, David Goodman wrote:

> For one thing, probably $500 is nearer the real cost than $1500;

Well, you have to cover rejections as well as accepted articles. $1500
is about what it costs APS per published article ( this covers
ALL costs associated with our journal publications, including rejections
which cost more on average to peer review than accepted articles and
it assumes all income would come from submission side charges for
accepted articles only).

I do find the BioMedCentral figure of $500 interesting though. Is that
partly subsidized by advertising or other revenues? Jan, do you have
a per-published article cost that you can share? Does that $500 apply
to all submissions or only accepted ones?

> for another, reducing the cost to $500 might possibly offer some
> savings to
> institutions as a whole and $1500 certainly would not.

You have to be a bit careful here. I have done the analysis for some
large universities for APS and one component you have to include
is page charges that authors currently pay. Phys. Rev. Lett. has
mandatory page charges and the other APS journals have voluntary
ones (with something like 40% compliance from US institutions). AAS
journals I think have substantial page charges as well.

So it isn't just library subscription budgets that need to be factored
in,
but also money that comes directly out of authors' research grants
that could be freed up in a new system.

Anyway, for a large US research institution, for APS publications, I
find the money is about the same in both the new and old systems,
but that it is no longer split between the researcher and the library.
APS revenue per published article is equal to our cost per published
article since we are non-profit. Applying this model to a for-profit
publisher
would (it seems to me) lead to a net savings for the institution.

Currently authors don't get back anything tangible for their page
charges.
I would like to see these linked to getting full rights to APS
formatted PDF's
and archival XML for inclusion in their institutional and personal
archives.

Cheers,
Mark

Mark Doyle
Manager, Product Development
The American Physical Society
Received on Fri Jan 10 2003 - 19:01:42 GMT