The costs of open access, as calculated on a napkin.
Lately there has been a resurgence of conversation about the actual costs of running an open access journal. I first started my napkin-scratches on the subject over a year ago, but never published anything on it. But, let’s try it out.
Agreed. $300 is a good estimate for OA publishing including all 'classical' services provided by publishing industry. https://t.co/2IZmmbfMUP
— Alexⓐnder Grossmann (@SciPubLab)
June 28, 2017
One journal calculates that, with an entirely volunteer staff, hosting and DOI and Crossref costs about $3.50 per paper if you’re publishing 200 papers a year (which, in my field, is very high, but that’s a good and healthy goal, so we’ll leave it).
In my experience, working on an OA journal with an entirely volunteer staff and with hosting donated by a university, I think we only have the DOI expenditure. (We get a wonderful honourarium in the form of a free conference registration which normally runs in the $600 range.) So, it varies.
Regardless, I would like to think about an even better use-case: paying professionals for their expertise. While we generally think of peer-review as a “pure” task worked into academics’ salaries so that money can’t corrupt the process, the truth is that there are lots of fields using peer-review labour from practitioners and students and others without that “compensation” available to them. Still, I think peer-review could stay volunteer, and so could the editorial board. Where I want money to be spent is on professional copyediting and professional design.
In fact I feel quite strongly about this.
oh no, now I must fight @petersuber to the death pic.twitter.com/mnr54aW1Vc
— Ʌǀǀɑnɑ (@allanaaaaaaa)
June 26, 2017
So, here’s my math, knowing what I know about OA:
Editorial board - volunteer or small honouraria
Peer reviewers - volunteer
Social media - free & volunteer or small honouraria
Hosting costs - $150-200 a year
Printing - not applicable!
Where could the costs be? I would say, *worst case scenario*:
Paying a layout and graphic designer - Two weeks full-time pay per issue -- so, assuming quarterly publication, two months of work. $60,000FTE (generous!) / 6 = $10,000 a year
Similarly, paying a qualified fact-checker and copyeditor = $10,000 a year.
That’s worst-case scenario -- if you paid well and the work was hard. (Most journals I know do not require the services of a talented graphic designer. Often they’re creating PDFs using Microsoft Word.)
So let’s be really precious and round up to $25,000 a year to include hosting, honouraria, DOIs, Crossref membership.
That seems to be about what was awarded to these journals (many of which are OA):
http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/results-resultats/recipients-recipiendaires/2015/journals-revues-eng.aspx
Now, let’s assume we can cut those costs down by centralizing: say, a library houses a number of journals and pays one in-house copyeditor and one in-house designer a full-time wage to work on as many journals as they can (obviously this involves some schedule-staggering). Assuming two weeks per journal per quarter, that’s maybe seven journals per editorial duo. Seven journals for $120,000/yr for staff expenditures, plus let’s again round up a bit to cover the other expenditures - $5,000/yr * 7 = $155,000. So, just over $20,000/yr/journal.
(If a quarterly journal publishes 20 articles per issue, then it works out to $280 per article. Very close to other estimates. I'm starting to feel pretty good about this napkin.)
This how many millions of dollars one #Canadian university must pay to subscribe to top 5 article databases. #academicpublishing #libraries pic.twitter.com/zMdfzX61xo
— Matt Huculak (@jmhuculak)
June 6, 2017
Assuming an average serials budget in the, oh, I dunno, $2 million range? (There are 98 universities in Canada and many of them are smaller than UAlberta.) There would be ~$200 million in public funds available, which could pay for about 10,000 high-quality, sustainable Open Access journals in Canada alone. (So, over a quarter of all the existing journals in the world. The DOAJ currently lists 9,000 OA journals.) Not including colleges. (And not charging $300 APCs to recoup costs, which, for some journals some of the time, I'm not against, mostly, I think.)
For the life of me I can't figure out how many academic journals are actually published by Canadian organizations, but I have this strange feeling it might be less than 10,000 ....