Annual Reports — What Do They Actually Tell Us? | The Scholarly Kitchen
lkfitz's bookmarks 2016-09-07
Summary:
"The math on publishing costs in the eLife annual report is questionable, with some capital expenditures held out as non-publishing expenses despite their clear relevance to a long-term technology publishing plan. In fact, this bit of financial contortion removes 22% of their expenditures, which suppresses their per-article charge calculations by a similar amount. For example, the calculations without the capital expenditure for 2015 come out to about US$4,700 per article. But, with the capital expenditure factored back into the overall expenses, the per-article publishing cost rises to US$5,500.
Factoring in the work space, overheads, and capital expenditures, and the eLife cost-per-article goes from US$4,700 to roughly US$6,380. And we’re still not sure that we’ve seen all their expenses."