$6 USD Per Paper?<\/h2>\n
I came across an interesting presentation from Kyle given at SciPy 2017<\/a> and also documented in a more traditional paper<\/a> where he discussed the design and development of the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS)<\/a>. This particular journal is used to archive software packages and largely exists within the $6 USD per paper cost range, although there’s no reason that a similar technique wouldn’t work for more traditional papers.<\/p>\n Kyle calculates the $6 USD per paper figure, which depends on the journal publishing 100 articles per year, as follows:<\/p>\n Total<\/strong> = $603 USD per year<\/p>\n (or $6.03 USD<\/strong> per paper)<\/p>\n The system looks to largely be dependent on GitHub.<\/p>\n As expected, many attendees at the open source conference where JOSS was discussed expressed positive views of the idea:<\/p>\n Subsequent discussion has however noted that there are some sacrifices needed to get the $6 USD per paper cost.<\/p>\n For instance, this requires heavily on volunteer labour, including from those people developing the software to “run” the journal in the first place. A lot of free work is put in by reviewers and editors, although that’s true of many open source journals. There may also be issues with creating redundancy in the system, which is something that’s important for the long-term archiving of academic papers.<\/p>\n At present, charges aren’t made directly to authors. The journal is relying on funding that has been put into it to cover the running costs. For this to be more sustainable in the longer-term, consideration to funding would need to be made, including all of the legal entity issues that come with handling money and the needs to guarantee service.<\/p>\n There may also be ways to cut the costs still further. Martin Paul Eve suggests that CrossRef membership with 50 DOIs included could be possible for \u20ac75 per year<\/a> (\u00a366 GBP, $90 USD). He also recommends the use of the CLOCKSS archival service at $200 USD per year, which may solve the issue of needing reliable long-term service and archiving. He also suggests the use of Open Journal Systems<\/a>, which could remove some of the technical complexity.<\/p>\n One idea that I’d like to see explored further would be more use of peer-to-peer hosting to archive academic papers. (Legal) torrent style services could be used which would also introduce some further redundancy into the system.<\/p>\n There could well be an interesting student project looking at putting these different approaches together in a way that is both cost-effective and allows for a new open access journal to be set up with the minimum possible technical complexity.<\/p>\n Taking all of these issues into account, it would be challenging for a journal to maintain a $6 USD publication point. But it should be possible to substantially cut the costs of open access publishing<\/strong> from the figures that researchers are charged by many journals today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Is it feasible to run a high quality open access journal with operating costs of just $6 USD (\u00a34.50 GBP) per paper?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[386,385,387,47,7,388],"class_list":["post-653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research","tag-journals","tag-open-access","tag-open-source","tag-papers","tag-research","tag-web-hosting"],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":false,"thumbnail":false,"medium":false,"medium_large":false,"large":false,"1536x1536":false,"2048x2048":false},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"Thomas Lancaster","author_link":"https:\/\/thomaslancaster.co.uk\/blog\/author\/thomas-lancaster\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"Is it feasible to run a high quality open access journal with operating costs of just $6 USD (\u00a34.50 GBP) per paper?","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thomaslancaster.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thomaslancaster.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thomaslancaster.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomaslancaster.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomaslancaster.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=653"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thomaslancaster.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1322,"href":"https:\/\/thomaslancaster.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653\/revisions\/1322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thomaslancaster.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomaslancaster.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomaslancaster.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/thomaslancaster.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/JOSSBusinessModel.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nAlternative Approaches<\/h2>\n