The Price of Posting — PubMed Central Spends Most of Its Budget Handling Author Manuscripts | The Scholarly Kitchen

"PubMed Central (PMC) costs US taxpayers about $4.45 million per year to run, according to documents recently obtained by an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Surprisingly, most of the money is spent converting author manuscripts into online publications. Over the past decade, speculation has been the best anyone could attempt, owing to a consistent lack of responses to budget information requests made to PMC staff and leadership. These new FOIA-obtained communications represent the first time we’ve seen actual figures about PMC’s expenditures. Judging from emails and spreadsheets recently obtained, PMC may have been preparing to reveal its expenditure level, but might also have been looking to low-ball the figure by 10-12%. Not surprisingly, the bulk of the PMC budget is devoted to outside contractors — this has long been believed to be the case. Of the $4.45 million budget, it appears PMC spends between $3.5 million and $4 million on outside contractors — these figures are a little hard to nail down. As stated earlier, most of the money spent by PMC ($2.7 million of the entire $4.45 million budget) is spent converting author manuscripts into XML and providing QA for these. Put another way, the deposit of author manuscripts as a source of open access (OA) content costs US taxpayers an additional $2.7 million per year. It is clear from the enormous effort and expense PMC puts into conversion and editing that author-deposited manuscripts are not adequate on their own. These author manuscripts (53,818 deposited in 2012, based on parameter searching on the PMC site) accounted for less than 20% of the materials posted to PMC that year (272,409 articles found via search), yet consumed 60% of the expenses. And with a recent push for more compliance, this amount seems poised to double ... In an email dated February 16, 2012, between Ed Sequeira and Kent Smith, these expenses were being pored over, potentially as part of preparations to finally announce PMC’s expenses. In a document labeled “FY 2012 ANNUAL COSTS FOR PUBLIC ACCESS,” the expenses were broken out to some extent. Instead of trying to reproduce the table, I’ve scanned the sheet in, and you can view it here. Essentially, it shows that personnel costs (some Federal employees but mostly contractors) consume $1.2 million of the budget. Manuscript tagging and QA consumes $2.25 mllion, with about $500,000 additional expense coming from overheads. In total, manuscript tagging and QA is given a bottom line figure of just over $2.7 million of the $4.45 million budget ..."