How much does it cost to run a small scholarly publisher? | Martin Paul Eve | Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing

"I run a small academic publisher, the Open Library of Humanities. Well, I say small but, at 18 journals, we are bigger than quite a few small university presses. But, by most accounts, we are small.

I want to write here about how much this costs, so that those starting new presses can think about it. The figures here are ballpark, not precise.

Let us make some assumptions:

• Running/coordinating/funding 18 journals requires work. That work is technical (platform) and social (editorial and business). In fact, it requires some full-time staff, I promise.
• Let us assume that these staff should be paid. This is not unreasonable.
• Let us assume that one member of staff is required to oversee editorial; an editorial manager. The role here is liaise with production teams, answer queries from editors, assign articles to editors, copyedit/proof on any central journals (OLHJ in our case), ensure that COPE procedures are followed. How many articles do you think someone in this role can handle, given that articles loop back at various points in the workflow?
• Let us assume that one member of staff is required to oversee the business side; a business manager. The role here is to market the platform to ensure revenue, to ensure compliance with charity laws, to invoice institutions, to manage renewals, to write grant bids when possible, to give outreach talks. This role is how the platform can generate money so it can pay staff, regardless of the business model.
• Let us assume that one member of staff is a technical manager, responsible for maintaining a technological platform. This includes implementing journal-specific fixes, general system administration, and much more.
• Let us assume, for the sake of simplicity, a flat salary of £50,000 for each of the above roles, including on-costs. For the sake of simplicity.

In actuality, we outsource our technical management (and an additional editorial manager) to Ubiquity Press at a decent rate paid for in per-article costs. For the sake of this post, I’m going to pretend we don’t, so I can show what the costs look like."