Open Access to Scientific Publications:The good, the bad, and the ugly

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.

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...

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

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