Wednesday, April 20, 2016

On the Marginal Cost of Scholarly Communication

On the Marginal Cost of Scholarly Communication. Tiffany Bogich, et al. Science.ai by Standard Analytics. 18 April, 2016.
     An article that looks at the marginal cost of scholarly communication from the perspective of an agent looking to start an independent, peer-reviewed scholarly journal. It found that vendors can accommodate all of the services required for scholarly communication for between $69 and $318 per article, and with alternate software solutions replacing the vendor services, the marginal cost of scholarly communication would drop to between $1.36 and $1.61 per article, almost all of which is the cost of  DOI registration. The development of high quality “plug-and-play” open source software solutions would have a significant impact in reducing the marginal cost of scholarly communication, making it more open to experimentation and innovation.  For the cost of long term journal preservation, the article looked at CLOCKSS and Portico.

No comments: