Cost models for running an online open journal | Journal of Open Source Software Blog
peter.suber's bookmarks 2021-07-11
Summary:
"The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) is a free, open-access online journal, with no article processing charge (APC). We are committed to operating as a free service to our community, and we do so thanks to the volunteer labor of editors and reviewers, and by taking advantage of existing infrastructure. In this post, we examine the true costs of running a journal such as JOSS, and make the case that even when considering all services we don’t currently pay for, the true cost per paper would not exceed $100. Current APCs at many “gold” open-access journals exceed that by one or more orders of magnitude, (see, for example, PNAS, Nature, IEEE, etc.)...
Real costs we *have* to pay
- Annual Crossref membership: $275/year
- JOSS paper DOIs: $1/accepted paper
- JOSS website hosting: $19/month
- JOSS domain name registration: $10/year
At 300 papers/year, this is $813, or $2.71/paper. This is what we actually pay today, covered by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation...."