Digital Science | Shaking Up Science

" ... In my own experience of selling software to libraries, I’ve found that institutions might spend well over 500 person days of effort on their selection process. The salary cost of those days probably adds up to over a quarter of a million pounds, often more than the purchase price of the software. Suppliers meanwhile, constantly assess labour costs, asking themselves if the 30-90 days of work that a bid might involve outweighs the profit from the sale. Meanwhile ‘real’ costs, like travel and equipment, are almost negligible by comparison.. This profound difference in attitude drives a conflict between academia and publishing. The perception that a large portion of the workflow of commercial publishers ‘doesn’t have any costs’ creates suspicion and resentment among some academics and librarians. The ‘no costs’ fallacy is based on the idea that for a commercial publisher, manuscripts are free, peer review is free, editorial boards are free, and electronic dissemination is free. In reality, there are very considerable labour costs in managing all of these ‘free’ resources and in providing additional editorial & marketing services to take the article from the researcher to the reader. Furthermore, the technology infrastructure to support editing, discovery and dissemination has to be developed and maintained (by the publisher or a third party) and this is also a significant cost. I am not suggesting that all is well in the commercial relationships between business and academia. Journal pricing has been a particular problem. The common assumption has been that these journal prices were rising rapidly through profiteering by those publishers who controlled key titles and could price monopolistically. Doubtless there is some truth in that; the large profit margins of some commercial publishers suggest that they don’t have sustainability concerns. For many society publishers, however, falling membership and conference revenues force them to rely more heavily on subscription revenue or risk insolvency. There has also been a disproportionate rise in skilled labour costs things are getting cheaper but tasks are getting more expensive. The explosion in the number of authors and articles has also been a significant factor driving the aggregate cost of scholarly communication. Publishers seem to have been profoundly unsuccessful in explaining these very real (and continually rising) costs to both academics and librarians, precisely because of the lack of a shared understanding of the costs of the time that businesses put into the publishing process. Publishers could have done more work over the past 20 years or so to engage with academics and librarians over the economics of scholarly publishing ..."