Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - What’s the Real Value of a Scholarly Publication? Part I « petermr's blog

“I’ve been invited to a very timely meeting in Oxford next week to discuss the future of Scholarship. “Open Science and the Future of Publishing”... Let me tackle COST and PRICE first. The COST to the public purse of scholarly publishing is of the order of 10 billion USD. There are also contributions from industrial subscriptions, and from student fees, and 1% from pay-per-view, but the bulk is from taxpayers. In return for this the public get virtually no value or rights... This is set by the PRICE of electronic journals. This bears no relation to the COST of production. The cost of production can be very low. It’s USD 7 for ArXiV (not peer-reviewed) and about 100 USD for Acta Cryst E (a very high-quality peer-reviewed data journal). In an efficient organisation it’s inconceivable that the COST of production of a journal article is more than 200 USD... Publishers like Nature estimate costs-per-paper at 20,000 USD. That is not related to the cost of production but something else. Perhaps the high rejection rate? The basis of these “costs” is kept highly secret. The PRICE of pay-per-view articles (about 35 USD for one day’s rent) is the only part with real elasticity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticity_%28economics%29...”