Re: Need for systematic scientometric analyses of open-access data

From: Thomas Krichel <krichel_at_OPENLIB.ORG>
Date: Sat, 21 Dec 2002 13:27:24 -0600

  Stevan Harnad writes

> Now the immediate occasion for this discussion thread was the recent $9
> million grant to the Public Library of Science for the founding of new
> open-access journals (i.e., BOAI-2):
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2517.html
>
> This is excellent news for open access

  Maybe.

  But is it good news for scholarly communication? Probably not.

  They want $1500 per submission. We discussed that with the RePEc
  community. A library would have to cancel one of the expensive
  journal in our discipline for a year to fund one submission. Using
  data from Ted Bergstrom, Bob Parks made a rough calculation
  that if a library took all the journals in Ted's list, which
  has many journals in economics and certainly the most expensive
  ones, it could fund 42 submissions with the money that it
  would save from cancelling all the submission, assuming that
  it would buy all of the, no library does that. Now note
  that these are submissions, not accepted papers. If they
  have a high rejection rate, you burn all you money for
  your serial budget onto trying to get into one of the
  two journals. Noone except the very well-funded will be able
  to publish there.

  Can anyone tell me how an organization can cash in $9 Million,
  over 5 years, and not be able to operate two, presumably
  online, journals with this money without charging a submission
  fee, for at least the time that the subsidy runs for?

  Cheers,

  Thomas Krichel mailto:krichel_at_openlib.org
                                              http://openlib.org/home/krichel
                                          RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Received on Sat Dec 21 2002 - 19:27:24 GMT

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