[Open-access] [open-science] Elsevier: some facts, by Tim Gowers

Wed Apr 30 08:23:47 UTC 2014

On Wednesday, April 30, 2014, 9:47:46 AM, you wrote:

> Just one comment: You should probably also add in some
> thousands (?) of major hospitals as subscribers to a
> number of Elsevier journals in your  calculations.

I must admit, I have some difficulty following this obsession with Elsevier. As if the other publishers were any different?

From one major investigation, we know quite well what we are paying:

http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676

"Data from the consulting firm Outsell in Burlingame, California, suggest that the science-publishing industry generated $9.4 billion in revenue in 2011 and published around 1.8 million English-language articles — an average revenue per article of roughly $5,000."

Is there anything else we need beyond these figures? What am I missing?

Legacy publishers: US$5000
SciELO: US$90
Arxiv: US$7

Multiplied by the number of papers published, this is what we would be paying, if we used one of these exclusively:

Legacy: 10b
SciELO: 0.18b
Arxiv: 0.014b

Do we need any figures beyond that? Rather than focusing on one publisher, we ought to perhaps, if anything, focus on the individual countries, so we can say to each citizen: "you are wasting this much of your taxes on legacy publishing". 

I must be missing something that people spend so much time on Elsevier, when we already seem to have all the numbers we need. What am I missing?

Bjoern

-- 
Björn Brembs
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http://brembs.net
Neurogenetics
Universität Regensburg
Germany