From: Heather Morrison <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2013 16:35:31 -0800

Note that Sage OPEN does provide professional copyediting services,
according to the Sage OPEN FAQ:
http://sgo.sagepub.com/site/misc/FAQs.xhtml

This requires a little tweaking of my estimates below. With 5 articles
published per day, I think that between a full-time Managing Editor
and junior assistant copyediting could easily be managed in-house.
Which suggests that this model might be further tweaked to allow for
the same level of profit with an even lower APF if the author wanted
to take on their own copyediting. This is an approach work looking at.
Authors from the developing world, for example, might be able to lower
their costs on this score by taking advantage of the AuthorAID program
http://www.authoraid.info/

best,

Heather Morrison

On 2013-01-25, at 2:32 PM, Heather Morrison wrote:

> Some reflections on the Sage OPEN $99 per article news
>
> Sridar Gutam on the GOAL list has pointed out that even this APF, for a scholar from India, is far too high a price. Even in the West, I hear that there are rumblings on HSS listservs that scholars are up in arms about what looks like an attempt to shift the costs to them, personally. This could be a downside of a cost this low.
>
> Some reflections on whether for-profit at $99 is realistic - see Gary Daught's blog post for details on the numbers I'm referring to:
> https://oaopenaccess.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/article-processing-charges-reduced-to-99-on-sage-open-humanities-and-social-sciences-mega-journal/#comment-1872
>
> Let’s think a little bit about the work involved and how this might relate to costs. 1,400 article submissions over the course of a year, assuming 200 business days per year, amounts to 7 article submissions per day. 160 published articles means .8 articles completed per day.
>
> How long would it take a managing editor to process 7 article submissions per day? Some would be immediately rejected as out of scope or so clearly of poor quality that they aren’t worth sending out for peer review. With an automated submissions process, there is some work involved up to the decision point, then often the rejection can be completed with an automated e-mail reply.
>
> Less than one published article per day, even with a high rejection rate, should not be a huge task for a PLoS ONE-like publish-if-it’s-good-research and DIY copyediting approach.
>
> At $395 / article = $64,000 / year, this should be a fair amount of money for staffing and overhead – it’s not even clear to me that this kind of volume would be a full-time position.
>
> If Sage OPEN were to increase its acceptance rate – perhaps by adding staff capable of dealing with a wider range of subjects, disciplines, languages – then it could benefit from cost efficiencies. If the acceptance rate were 1,000, at $99 / article, that’s just under $100,000 per year. Publishing 5 articles per day, when the publisher’s staff is not actually doing any of the editing, peer review, copyediting, etc., seems quite doable. Hire a Managing Editor with some academic background (perhaps a Master’s Degree?) at $50,000 per year, a junior assistant at $20,000 per year to deal with invoicing, factor in 25% overhead = total costs of $87,500, for a profit of $12,500 or an operating profit margin at 12.5%. Not bad - most of us wouldn't mind at all if our pension funds were paying out at 12.5% per year.
>
> I’m not saying this is what this costs, but it does look like the idea of attractive profits at $99 processing costs per article is something we should be having a close look at.
>
> As a final note – I find this interesting because of the PRICE. However, because Sage OPEN uses CC-BY which I consider to be frequently inadvisable in the social sciences and humanities due to concerns about research ethics, third party rights, and reasonable concerns about accuracy and author reputation when derivatives are allowed, I would NOT advise anyone to publish in Sage OPEN. If Sage opens their minds about licensing alternatives I’d be much more interested.
>
> best,
>
> Heather G. Morrison