From: "Guédon Jean-Claude" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2017 07:24:35 +0000

Inertia is the symptom, not the cause of the present situation.
Someone loking at a map of trench warfare lines in WWI would have seen
relatively little movement on large segments of the front for very
long times. Such an observer could be forgiven for mistaking this lack
of movement with lack of efforts. The same is true in the efforts to
achieve well-crafted Open Access: the relative lack of movement hides
tremendous energy being spent for or against this or that version of
open access. Mistaking this for inertia amounts to depriving oneself
of the analytical resources provided by a more dynamic and political
view of the situation. Inertia is not a first cause; it needs to be
analyzed in terms of more elementary forces.

Jean-Claude Guidon
________________________________

From: Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2017 11:24:21 -0400

On Jun 28, 2017, at 9:57 AM, Andrew Odlyzko
<[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:

we could operate an adequate scholarly publishing business, with the
current level of peer review, at $300 per article, or 10% what it
costs Elsevier.  The main obstacle is inertia.

"I think that the true figure for peer-review implementation alone
across all refereed journals probably averages closer to $200 per article,
or even lower. Hence, quality-control costs account for only 10% of the
collective tolls actually being paid per article.”
Nature 410, 1024-1025 (26 April 2001) | doi:10.1038/35074210
https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6832/full/4101024a0.html

Inertia indeed, on the part of the publishing industry, predictably,
but on the part of the research community, deplorably…

Stevan Harnad

On Wed, Jun 28, 2017 at 9:57 AM, Andrew Odlyzko
<[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Perhaps a Kazhakstani graduate student can provide simple distribution
of files at a very low cost.  But once you get into providing anything
resembling serious curation, and even more when you get into peer review,
costs do mount up.  For example, arXiv costs about $10 per preprint
submitted (if we divide the annual cost of the arXiv by the number of
new submissions, and so don't worry about the accounting niceties of
splitting the costs between handling new and old papers).  For a few
million papers per year for all of scholarly publishing, this gets
beyond the capability of a Kazhakstani graduate student.


This rough estimate of $10 per preprint for arXiv, and others to be quoted,
are all from the paper "Open Access, library and publisher competition, and
the evolution of general commerce," Evaluation Review, vol. 39, no. 1,
Feb. 2015, pp. 130-163,

    http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0193841X13514751

and (for those who can't get inside the paywall), a preprint is at

    http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/libpubcomp.pdf

Going beyond preprint distribution (and the very light level of screening
by volunteer editors, which does exist at arXiv, at no monetary cost),
Elsevier collects about $5,000 in total on average for each article they
publish.  About $2,000 is their profit, and the remaining $3,000 covers
what they claim are necessary costs.  As many (including your truly) have
been arguing for a couple of decades, the necessity of those costs (leaving
the profit question aside) is extremely questionable, and we now have lots
of examples of lower cost journals.  It seems clear (some estimates and
references in the paper cited above) that we could operate an adequate
scholarly publishing business, with the current level of peer review,
at $300 per article, or 10% what it costs Elsevier.  The main obstacle
is inertia.

Andrew