Re: Journal costs

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Andrew Dalby voiced everybody's concern about publication costs.

Basic research, almost by definition, cannot carry its own costs, and
publishing is part of the basic research process. A book on the
reproduction behaviour of Princess A and Actor B can easily find the tens
or hundreds of thousands of buyers that will make the venture break even or
return a profit. One on the corresponding behaviour of, say, scleractinian
corals, will be lucky to find a couple of hundred buyers. The price per
unit will then be very high.

We can deal with the problem by cutting the publication volume, by cutting
costs, and/or by restructuring the publication process.

Cutting volume would only be justified if a lot of what is presently
published is poor or redunant science. That is a scientific judgment, not
an economic one. Not to publish good and valid results because it's judged
too expensive is like cutting construction costs by not putting a roof on
your house. Publication costs are only a small part of the total costs for
research, but without that part the rest would be meaningless.

Cutting costs is always a major concern, to the extent that much of it has
already been done. This is not to say that more cannot be done, only that
people tend to look at this quite frequently, and in many stages of the
publishing process costs cannot sink much lower without compromising
quality. As the technology changes almost daily, new possibilities and
solutions will be found. However (and partly in polemics with Norm), I
don't think that abandoning paper print is a solution in itself. We will
continue to want things on paper for a long time yet, though what will
happen is probably that print-on-demand at a nearby service bureau,
librarary, or even your desktop printer will start dominating over
centralized printing and mail distribution of the full edition. Even more
important, however, printing costs are even today only a minor part of the
total publication costs, and with the proliferation of new media (WWW,
CD-ROM, etc.) demands on the quality and structure of the publication
channels, and hence costs, will increase, not decrease.

As for "cost-cutting" by slackening quality demands, hiding costs, or
shuffling costs over to someone else, this more often than not leads to
increased total costs and so just amounts to various methods of shooting
ourselves in the collective foot.

Restructuring the publication process is easier said than done but seems
necessary. As Andrew exemplifies, the present semicommercial system, in
which more-or-less heavily subsidized (by money, resources or unpaid
labour) publications are sold at a price too low to meet the full
production costs but too high to be affordable by many libraries and
individuals, appears to be breaking down. Library funds are slashed at the
same time as scientists' literature budgets are shrinking and publication
grants are getting scarce. Scientists who put in too much of their time
into editing may find that their careers suffer. Everybody wants scientific
publications, but is anybody prepared to pay for them?

With the evolution of the electronic media we should be able to devise a
more efficient formula. Our prime concern is to make scientific information
accessible, not to shuffle research funds around. With more and more of the
dissemination being done electronically, publishing cost will vary less
with the number of users and be less dependent on a minimum number of users
for its justification. These costs will then be reasonably predictable, and
if they are met where they occur, i.e. at the generating end, the cost the
for users will amount to the cost of accessing the information by computer,
and perhaps of transferring it to some other medium, such as paper.

With such a system, publishing will be an integrated part of scholarly
activities, and work with scientific publishing should have the same
resources and status as teaching and research. To uphold competence and
provide for long-term stability, strong institutional support will
certainly be needed. If this is the system we want, it's high time to work
towards it.


Stefan Bengtson
Editor, Fossils & Strata; production editor, Lethaia
Department of Palaeozoology
Swedish Museum of Natural History
Box 50007
S-104 05 Stockholm
Sweden

tel. +46-8 666 42 20
     +46-18 54 99 06 (home)
fax  +46-8 666 41 84
e-mail Stefan.Bengtson@nrm.se