Björn Brembs

This is an easy calculation: for each subscription article, we
[pay](https://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676)
on average US\$5000. A publicly accessible article in one of SciELO's
900 journals
[costs](https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/cjhe/article/view/479) only
US\$90 on average. Subtracting about 35% in [publisher
profits](https://svpow.com/2012/01/13/the-obscene-profits-of-commercial-scholarly-publishers/),
the remaining difference between legacy and SciELO costs amount to
US\$3160 per article. With paywalls being the only major difference
between legacy and SciELO publishing (after all, writing and peer-review
is done for free by researchers for both operations), it is
straightforward to conclude that about US\$3000 are going towards making
each article more difficult to access, than if we published it on our
personal webpage. Now that is what I'd call obscene.

Just to break the costs of legacy publishing down in detail:

|                                                       |      |
|-------------------------------------------------------|-----:|
| Publisher profits                                     | 1750 |
| Paywalls                                              | 3160 |
| Actual costs of typesetting, hosting, archiving, etc. |   90 |
| Sum                                                   | 5000 |


This is an easy calculation: for each subscription article, we pay on average US$5000. A publicly accessible article in one of SciELO’s 900 journals costs only US$90 on average. Subtracting about 35% in publisher profits, the remaining difference between legacy and SciELO costs amount to US$3160 per article.

Are we paying US$3000 per article just for paywalls?

Academic publishers have been
[parasitizing](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n820.html "A fistful of dollars: why corporate publishers have no place in scholarly communication")
the public purse for long enough now. Steffen Böhm, director of the
Essex Sustainability Institute, [said it
best](https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/comment/opinion/open-access-initiatives-to-benefit-the-academy/2004174.article){target="_blank"}:

> By cutting out the parasitic publishing middle men, the academy could
> reclaim control of its knowledge, funding and labour.

In his article, he mentions the successful
[SciELO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SciELO){target="_blank"} project
in South America. In a lot of ways, SciELO
([scielo.org](https://www.scielo.org)) is quite close to what I
[have](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n906.html)
[been](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n856.html)
[arguing](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n835.html)
[for](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n841.html): SciELO means
"Scientific Electronic *Library* Online" and is supported by the
Brazilian and Chilean government. It currently publishes about 900
scientific journals which are all fully openly accessible. The Latin
American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information
([BIREME](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC198880/) --
*Biblioteca* Regional de Medicina)
[spearheaded](https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/cjhe/article/view/479/504)
conception, design and implementation of SciELO, with special assistance
from the US [National *Library* of Medicine](https://www.nlm.nih.gov/).
Ten of SciELO's 15 national collections are funded more or less directly
by governments, five by universities. SciELO publishes and archives
everything in marked-up full-text, meaning that the entire full-text is
machine-readable and hence exquisitely (re-)useful. In essence, with a
decentralized database like SciELO, any and all possible metrics (if one
really wants/needs them) are just a few lines of code away.

The success of SciELO demonstrates that our institutions, our libraries,
big and small, collectively have all it takes to cut out the parasitic
middle men that annually gobble up billions and tax funds that are
dearly missed in our budgets. We have the know-how, the infrastructure,
that funding, the workforce, the technology and even plenty of examples
where such a take-over (actually, take-backs) has worked on a smaller
scale. All we need to do is to get some coordination among major players
going and there will be many birds hit with one stone:

- Immediate, fully open access to all publicly funded research world
  wide -- text, data and software
- The equivalent of approximately 4 billion US dollars saved annually
- An incredible market for innovation, e.g.
  - what are the best ways to present scientific data in the most
    flexible way?
  - can we write programs that construct (and test) hypotheses by
    crawling this vast scientific space?
  - What possible additional uses can be developed from such a resource?
- A single place to find scientific information
- Long-term archive security
- Any functionality of the current journal system still deemed relevant
  is easily copied.

The only thing keeping us from this digital utopia are commercial
publishers and the politicians they buy with our money (either
[directly](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n840.html) or via
[lobbying](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n819.html)). Oh and
then, of course, there is the tiny issue of [journal
rank](https://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3748){target="_blank"}. ![Big
Smile](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/plugins/ultimate-tinymce/addons/emotions/img/popobig/big_smile.png "Big Smile"){decoding="async"
border="0"}

------------------------------------------------------------------------

**UPDATE**: Approximate cost for a paper in SciELO is
\~[90US\$](https://t.co/82a7FkXLb6). Given an annual world-wide
publication output of roughly [two million papers per
year](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n891.html), that would
amount to a total cost of publishing new articles of around 180 million
US\$ for the entire planet. Add to that [approximately
200k](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n896.html) US\$ annually for
infrastructure and related costs, and you are still way below 200m total
annual costs for academic publishing, fully open access. If that were
shared only between the roughly 9000 universities world-wide (i.e.,
without additional contributions from governments directly), the total
average cost per university and year would amount to just over 20,000
US\$. With every German library spending, on average [\>600k on
subscriptions](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n900.html), this
would entail windfall savings for each institution.

Compare that to the current academic publishing market running at an
estimated 12 billion in sales. With about 30% or 4b in publisher
profits, current costs of academic publishing are inflated by more than
7.8b. In other words, switching to a library/institution-based
publishing system akin to that realized in SciELO would provide savings
closer to 11b than to 4b.


Academic publishers have been parasitizing the public purse for long enough now. Steffen Böhm, director of the Essex Sustainability Institute, said it best:  In his article, he mentions the successful SciELO project in South America. In a lot of ways, SciELO (scielo.org) is quite close to what I have been arguing for: SciELO means “Scientific Electronic
<em>
 Library
</em>
Online” and is supported by the Brazilian and Chilean government.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Are we paying US$3000 per article just for paywalls?

Cut out the parasitic middle men!