

Open Access to Scientific Publications:The good, the bad, and the ugly - yarapavan
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/2/69353-open-access-to-scientific-publications/fulltext

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ivan_ah
I think publishers provide the valuable services like proofreading, aid the
peer-review process and content filtering. They SUCK at distribution though
and should not be in the distribution business.

Now who is good at distribution? arXiv is. Their costs are less than 7$ per
publication, they are seriously lean and efficient.

<quote> How much does arXiv cost to operate? The annual budget for arXiv is
$400,000. With over 60,000 new submissions per year one may think of this as
an effective cost of <$7 per submission. Alternatively, with over 30,000,000
full-text downloads per year this is an effective cost of <1.4 cents per
download. We believe that arXiv is an extremely cost-effective service.
</quote> <http://arxiv.org/help/support/faq>

Now the question is how to keep the useful aspects of publishing and not have
to pay for them. An army secretaries, a bunch of typesetting gurus and some
method for peer-review... tall order i know.

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Asmodeus
So you're suggesting the separation of the editorial and peer-review services
from the publishing service?

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ajb
From the article: "But the proponents of Open Access quickly realized that
online publishing is not free, nor cheap. Management, equipment, and access
costs add up quickly. [...] [PLOS] charges between $1,350 and $2,900 per
paper, depending on the journal. In fact, many in the profession estimate that
to be sustainable, the author-pay model will need to charge up to
$5,000–$8,000 per publication"

WTF? $8000 per article would pay for each article to have its own EC2 instance
for >10 years, including bandwidth costs. Something not right there...

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chadgeidel
This came up in my feed yesterday, but it was blocked (I'm not an ACM
subscriber). I thought that was rather ironic.

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nemoniac
What a travesty of an article. Beaudouin-Lafon is nothing more than a shill
for ACM and the entire scientific publishing industry.

