On 30-Jan-10, at 9:47 PM, David Prosser wrote:

>> SANDY THATCHER: it's the peer review that is the most expensive  
>> part of the  whole process, and arXiv is not in the business of  
>> peer  reviewing.
>
> DAVID PROSSER: Is that true, Sandy?  Can we have a reference please?
>
> Tenopir and King back in 2004 suggested that 'manuscript receipt
> processing, disposition decision-making, identifying reviewers or
> referees and review processing' constituted 26% of the direct
> costs of producing an article (which they estimated at $1700 on
> average).
>
> http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/26.html
>
> Of course, costs may have shifted in the years since then.
> Which is why a reference would be welcome.

What Sandy said is perfectly correct:

(1) The cost of providing peer review (c. $500 per article) is indeed  
the most expensive part of the process of providing a peer-reviewed  
article for free (OA) by depositing it in a central repository like  
Arxiv (or in the author's own Institutional Repository, IR).

(2) And Arxiv does not provide the peer review. (Nor does any other  
repository.)

(3) Low as it is, $7 per article just for deposit and archiving is  
probably an overestimate, because Arxiv needs to do far too much work  
to process and store all the world's institutions' physics deposits  
centrally: It would cost even less per article for an Institutional  
Repository (IR) that archives only its own annual research output (and  
knows all its own researchers, hence need not do the extra generic  
precautionary controls). (Be careful not to jig the estimate by  
factoring in the costs of online infrastructure that the institution  
already has, regardless of whether it has an IR: just the one-time IR  
set-up cost, the extra server and disk-space, etc., plus the cost per  
deposit and annual maintenance of the IR only.)

It would be useful to have IRs' estimates of their annual cost per  
article deposited -- but only from mature mandated IRs that are  
already well on the way to capturing 100% of their annual  
institutional output of refereed journal articles. (Obviously the IR  
price per article will be somewhat higher for IRs that are still only  
capturing only 15% or less of their annual refereed research output,  
as most IRs today still are, because they have not yet mandated  
deposit.)

Another useful comparison would be the cost -- in money and time -- of  
doing the unnecessary IR "quality controls" and preprocessing that  
many IRs think, superstitiously and superfluously, that they need to  
do. (In this case, estimates from all the immature, near-empty IRs are  
relevant too.)

At Southampton ECS, the first mandated IR of all (since 2002 http://bit.ly/ioSFK 
  ), we realized within the first year of the mandate that the  
"quality control" (for the content and metadata of the deposit) was  
based on a completely unnecessary and dysfunctional misanalogy with  
library collections and cataloguing, that all it did was create  
needless work and backlogs for the "quality-controllers" and needless  
resistance and counterproductive resentment from depositing authors  
who, having taken the trouble of depositing their refereed final  
drafts, as mandated, were then denied the immediate satisfaction of  
seeing them go immediately online and start getting downloaded:  
instead, they had to go into a quality-control queue, sometimes for  
days or weeks, as the volume of mandated deposits to "process" grew.  
We quickly jettisoned the gratuitous process and have seen the IR's  
deposits growing happily ever since: http://roar.eprints.org/1422/

Leave any "quality control" for your institutional authors' peer- 
reviewed final drafts in the background. If something is wrong, users  
will let the author know; if users don't squawk (or there are no  
users!), the slip-up probably isn't even worth correcting. Focus on  
solving the real problem, which is not "quality control" but capturing  
the IR's target content: the institution's full annual output of  
refereed research.

And remember that -- whilst journals still exist and subscriptions are  
still paying for *their* quality control -- your IR is not hosting the  
all-important version-of-record, but merely an OA supplement.

A word to the wise...

Stevan

>
> David
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [log in to unmask]
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Sandy Thatcher
> Sent: 29 January 2010 01:24
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: ArXiv Grows Up, Adopts Subscription-like Model
>
> Uh, it's the peer review that is the most expensive part of the
> whole process, and arXiv is not in the business of peer
> reviewing.
>
>> What really struck me about the arXiv business model is the
>> phenomenal cost-effectiveness of arXiv.
>>
>> At under $7 per article (that's the total cost!), arXiv manages
>> all of the technical aspects of disseminating scholarly articles
>> -including storage, sustaining a heavily used system, developing
>> the search interface, and even working with publishers so that
>> arXiv also works as a submission platform for some journals.
>>
>> wow!
>>
>> Heather Morrison, MLIS
>> The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
>> http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com
>