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

Wed Apr 30 08:34:09 UTC 2014

To some extent I agree with you there Bjoern.

It would be good to also highlight the wastefulness & lack of value for
subscriptions paid to NPG, Wiley, Springer, T+F, SAGE etc...

Recent replies to this thread have turned up some interesting ideas however
that could be applied regionally/by country

e.g. has anyone in the UK FOI'd the UK patent office or NHS Trusts
(hospitals) to see how much they pay for journal subscriptions?
Is that information available anywhere, already?

> 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"

Agreed (but whilst remembering that each and nearly every other country
**also** pays, redundantly).
The more data, country-level or otherwise the better!

On 30 April 2014 09:23, Bjoern Brembs <b.brembs at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> ---------------------------------------------
> http://brembs.net
> Neurogenetics
> Universität Regensburg
> Germany
>
>

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Ross Mounce
Fossils, Phylogeny and Macroevolution Research Group
University of Bath, 4 South Building, Lab 1.07
http://about.me/rossmounce
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