Electronic Scientific, Technical, and Medical Journal Publishing and Its Implications Proceedings of a Symposium (2004) / Chapter Skim
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3 Costs of Publication
3 Costs of Publication
Pages 6-26
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From page 6... ...
Although these statistics are not directly on the cost of publications of electronic journals, they do set the stage for many of the issues discussed below. According to a recent Morgan Stanley Industry Report,4 the STM journal market has been the fastest growing segment of the media industry for the past 15 years, with 10 percent annual growth over the past 18 years, and a predicted 5 to 6 percent annual growth over the next 5 years.
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From page 7... ...
The elements of these costs vary tremendously among publishers and Internet publishing services. At the high end they can include parsing supplied text into a rigorously controlled version of SGML or XML; making hyperlinks to data and metadata algorithmically; presenting multiple resolutions of images; offering numerous elaborate search and retrieval possibilities; supporting reader feedback and e-mail to _ J authors; supporting alerting and prospective sighting functions; delivering content for indexing to secondary publishers and distributors, as well as to Internet indexing services; and supporting individualized access control mechanisms.
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From page 8... ...
Manuscript submission tracking and refereeing support applications have reduced mailing costs and made it possible for more manuscripts to be processed by existing staff. Increases in the size of the journal in page equivalents, increases in graphics and colors in some instances, and the adoption of advanced Internet features like supplemental information and so forth have increased the costs of Internet publishing services about 50 percent higher per year over other costs.
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From page 9... ...
- - I r ~ ~ The successful operation of true digital archives—protected repositories for the contents of journals- would permit the removal of the printing, binding, and mailing costs. A true digital archive or repository in the view of most librarians is one that is not merely an aggregation of content accessible to qualified readers or users, but one that preserves and protects the content, features, and functions of the original Internet edition of the deposited journals over many decades and even centuries.
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From page 10... ...
Perhaps in the next decade the segment of STM publishing most at risk is the secondary publishers, the abstracters and indexers and the tertiary publishers, those producing the review and prospective articles long after the leading-edge researchers have made use of the most useful articles. None of the alternative publishing experiments underway or about to get underway operates independently of a larger STM journal publishing establishment, and none operates without costs.
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From page 11... ...
How the experiments in business models might provide competitive pressure on traditional business models and pricing is a topic for discussion and examination over time. Experiments should be tried, but in Michael Keller's view, the solution to the serious crisis of escalating journal costs lies in the not-for-profit societies, whose purposes and fundamental economic model are very closely allied with the purposes and not-for-profit economic models of our research universities and labs.
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From page 12... ...
Issues in Conducting a Study of Journal Publishing Costs If the publishing costs are to be is studied well, there has to be an acknowledgment of the diversity of the publishing landscape, even in the scientific, technical, and medical publishing area. If only a few publishers participate, the selection bias could drive the study to the wrong answers.
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From page 13... ...
Robert Bovenschulte, American Chemical Society Electronic publishing has not only revolutionized the publishing industry, it has also tremendously changed the fundamental economics of the STM journal business. Many of these issues overlap both the commercial and the not-for-profit publishers.
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From page 14... ...
It is miles apart and many decimal points away from the first approach. Second, electronic publishing costs remain fuzzy because we are still living in a bimodal publishing world.
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From page 15... ...
The other type of publisher owns most of the actual material they publish. Figure 3-1 compares the current print plus electronic publishing costs for these two types of for-profit publishers.
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From page 16... ...
In the marketing and sales statistics in Figure 3-1, there is about a four point difference between the two types of publishers, but the mostly owned publishers have billions of dollars in revenues, so those four percentage points translate into massive marketing dollars. Figure 3-2 presents the current electronic journal cost components.
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From page 17... ...
Figure 3-3 provides some diagrams of relative print (P) and electronic journal (e)
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From page 18... ...
Or, as Bernard Rous put it, you could play accounting games, and you could actually go with a little p and a big E depending on what you are trying to accomplish on any particular day. Unfortunately, Gordon Tibbitts thinks that a big P and a big E are the most likely outcome.
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From page 19... ...
Robert Bovenschulte noted that the ACS adopted a policy five years ago of trying to encourage its members to stop subscribing to individual print journals, and instead to obtain them online from their institution's subscription. The ACS creates a significant pricing differential between print and Web subscriptions, the electronic ones obviously being much cheaper.
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From page 20... ...
Digital Archiving Issues Floyd Bloom asked Mike Keller if the true digital archive was achieved and allowed us to diminish the reliance on print, what organization would be responsible for trying to come to some agreement as to what the taxonomy and terminology should be for that kind of archiving?
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From page 21... ...
So publishers are calling upon the same people time and time again to provide this difficult but largely unpaid service. Robert Bovenschulte said there is a lot of commonality at the ACS with what Kent Anderson described, except that ACS publishes 31 journals.
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From page 22... ...
So, it is a very dangerous business area, and people do charge more for the online versions because they realize they will net fewer unit sales. Michael Keller added that customers might be chtarner1 more for on , —, _ · · ~ ~ electronic book because it can do more things, such as better searching, moving pictures, or other functions.
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From page 23... ...
Michael Keller said that his solution is very different. Libraries should not necessarily support all scholarly communication efforts that are brought to them.
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From page 24... ...
Is the problem that the secondary services do not add enough value, in which case they have to focus more on information competency to teach the younger researchers how to do those appropriate searches, or do they somehow need to develop better mechanisms for searching and retrieving the precise answer from this huge corpus of literature? Michael Keller responded that he is supportive of secondary and tertiary publishing and has himself contributed to secondary publishing.
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From page 25... ...
The society has been publishing electronically for about 10 years, beginning on a gopher server back in 1993. The reason small societies like the American Physiological Society can manage to publish electronically is because of the compounding effects of information exchange that occurs at the meetings that they have with HighWire Press.
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From page 26... ...
The ACM wanted to maintain a benefit for membership in the organization, as opposed to institutional subscriptions, so the society started differentiating levels of service, depending on whether someone was a member or a patron of an institution that licensed an ACM journal. But differentiating service levels adds real cost and a lot of complexity to the system.
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