Re: The cost of peer review and electronic distribution of scholarly journals

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Sat, 24 May 2008 12:18:24 -0400

From: "Enrico M. Balli" <enrico -- medialab. sissa. it>
Date: May 24, 2008 10:56:55 AM EDT (CA)
To: <liblicense-l -- lists. yale. edu>

Dear Stevan,

I totally share your statement on Richard Poynder's query, and would
like to give my contribution to the discussion. Sissa
Medialab is not exactly a publisher, but we have some
journals jointly published with IOP: JHEP, JCAP, JSTAT and JINST. We
provide the peer review for all our journals, and we believe that the
quality of our peer is very high. During the year 2007 these
journals published 1851 papers. The total revenue of our company in
the same fiscal year was 1.242.108 euros, without any loss. As
you can imagine our rejection rate is higher than zero, and
the number of reviewed papers is higher than the number of published
papers. I'm not disclosing any industrial secret here: we are a
limited company and our balance sheet is public, and our journals
are online and everybody can check these figures. The same applies to
any other commercial publisher, BTW...

I hope this helps.

Enrico M. Balli

-----Messaggio originale-----

      SH: In particular, all the current costs of providing
      both the print
      edition and the PDF edition, as well as all current costs
      of
      access-provision and archiving will vanish (for the
      publisher),
      because they have been off-loaded onto the the
      distributed
      network of Green OA IRs, each hosting their own
      peer-reviewed,
      published postprints. The only service the peer-reviewed
      journal
      publisher will need to provide is peer review itself.

      That is why Richard Poynder's recent query (about the
      true cost
      of peer review alone) is a relevant one.

      As I have said many times before, based on my own
      experience of
      editing a peer-reviewed journal for a quarter century, as
      well as
      the estimates that can be made from the costs of Gold OA
      journals
      *that provide only peer review and nothing else today*,
      the costs
      per paper of peer review alone will be so much lower than
      the
      costs per paper of conventional journal publishing today,
      or even
      the costs per paper of most Gold OA publishing today,
      that the
      problem of the possibility of imbalance between net
      user-institution costs and net author-institution costs
      will
      vanish, just as the the subscription model vanished.



Stevan Harnad
Received on Sat May 24 2008 - 17:23:11 BST