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 aloneacross all refereed journals probably averages closer to $200 per article,or even lower. Hence, quality-control costs account for only 10% of thecollective tolls actually being paid per article.”
Nature 410, 1024-1025 (26 April 2001) | doi:10.1038/35074210
Inertia indeed, on the part of the publishing industry, predictably, but on the part of the research community, deplorably…
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