Science in the Open » Blog Archive » The Marginal Costs of Article Publishing – Critiquing the Standard Analytics Study

"Standard Analytics have released a very useful paper looking at platform costs for scholarly publishing. In the paper (which coincidentally demonstrates part of the platform system they are developing) they make some strong claims about the base cost of publishing scholarly articles. In this post I will critique those claims and attempt to derive a cost that fully represents the base marginal cost of article publishing, while pointing out that such average estimates are probably not very useful. The central point is that the paper shows not marginal costs but (a proportion of) the per particle technical platform costs. It is however the case that their central point, that modular, low cost and flexible platforms that create efficiencies of scale, offer the opportunity for radically cheaper scholarly publishing systems ..."