Re: Mandating OA around the corner?

From: Mark Doyle <doyle_at_APS.ORG>
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 14:00:19 -0400

Greetings,

On Jul 18, 2004, at 1:08 PM, Martin Frank wrote:

> However, based on knowledge of the costs associated with the hosting
> of journals at HighWire Press, it is estimated that a full fledged
> archive of NIH funded manuscripts at NIH would cost in the
> neighborhood of $75-100 million.

Wild (uncalled for!) speculation in my opinion (additonal FUD removed).

According to David Lipman, this is off by at least an order of
magnitude. They
expect about 50-60,000 NIH funded manuscripts per year. Even a generous
$100
per hosted manuscript* gives only $5-6 million. Lipman also pointed out
that one would not expect to have to immediately deal with this number
of
articles. Considering that NLM can leverage off of the existing PubMed
infrastructure,
I think they are in quite good shape (even creating by hand good XML
metadata
with tagged references can be done for about $5/article). It should be
noted that
if this is really author-deposit of manuscripts (again, Lipman's
impression of the
intent of the legislative language), than this might even be doable on
the same
cost scale of arXiv.org ($1 - $10 per article). I suspect the real cost
will be
somewhere in the middle.

Regards,
Mark

Mark Doyle
Assistant Director, Journal Information Systems
The American Physical Society

* My understanding is that hosting an article on Highwire is about $100
per article.
Received on Wed Jul 21 2004 - 19:00:19 BST