The UK Committee did not recommend mandating central (PubMedCentral-style) self-archiving. It recommended mandating distributed institutional self-archiving. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39909.htm
Quoting from Peter Suber's summary: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_07_18_fosblogarchive.html#a109028453862279542 1. The government should provide funds for all UK universities to launch open-access institutional repositories. 2. Authors of articles based on government-funded research should deposit copies in their institutional repositories. Institutional self-archiving is cheaper than central self-archiving, because it distributes the load. It also has the virtue of generalizing the practise of self-archiving across all of a university's disciplines (whereas a central discipline-based OA archive does not). It is also to miss the point of self-archiving to recommend factoring in publishers' costs into the costs of self-archiving! Self-archiving is a supplement to -- not a substitute for -- journal publishing. Stevan Harnad On Thu, 22 Jul 2004, Martin Frank wrote: > Mark brings up a good point, especially in light of David Lipmann's claim > that it would only cost about $700,000 based on the hosting of 50,000 > manuscripts annually. While this might be the number which PubMed Central > conveys to the public, without a true cost accounting I am unconvinced that > this is a real number. I suspect that the $700,000 does not take into > account the general overhead (rent, heat, electricity, janatorial) that most > publishers have to include in their cost analyses. I believe that Martin > Blume alluded to that in his response to David. I also question David's > analysis because of his claim that PubMed Central has an annual budget of > approximately $2.5 million. While this is not a lot of money as compared to > the total NIH budget, it is in my view $2.5 million more than needs to be > spent and could instead be used to support approximately 6 research grants > designed to find cures for cancer, etc. > > If the PubMedCentral budget is indeed $2.5 million as claimed by David > Lipmann, one could use that number as the basis for establishing what an > expanded PubMedCentral might cost if it started receiving articles from > 50,000 authors per year from 4000 or more journals. At least when PMC gets > their downloads from journals now, they come in bunches using the appropriate > DTD, etc. Dealing with 50,000 submissions would probably be much less > efficient than PMC's current efforts with its existing journal customers. > > As I indicated, David claims that his budget for PMC is $2.5 million. PMC > currently hosts about 150 journals. That translates into $16,666 per journal. > Assuming that PMC is likely to receive submissions from the equivalent of > 3000 journals, that translates into a cost of approximately $50,000,000. > > I don't claim to know the right answer for the future cost of PMC, but > extrapolating from their own numbers, it is a lot of money and a lot of lost > research opportunities. > > martin frank > >>> [email protected] 07/21/04 02:00PM >>> > Greetings, > > On Jul 18, 2004, at 1:08 PM, Martin Frank wrote: > > > However, based on knowledge of the costs associated with the hosting > > of journals at HighWire Press, it is estimated that a full fledged > > archive of NIH funded manuscripts at NIH would cost in the > > neighborhood of $75-100 million. > > Wild (uncalled for!) speculation in my opinion (additonal FUD removed). > > According to David Lipman, this is off by at least an order of > magnitude. They > expect about 50-60,000 NIH funded manuscripts per year. Even a generous > $100 > per hosted manuscript* gives only $5-6 million. Lipman also pointed out > that one would not expect to have to immediately deal with this number > of > articles. Considering that NLM can leverage off of the existing PubMed > infrastructure, > I think they are in quite good shape (even creating by hand good XML > metadata > with tagged references can be done for about $5/article). It should be > noted that > if this is really author-deposit of manuscripts (again, Lipman's > impression of the > intent of the legislative language), than this might even be doable on > the same > cost scale of arXiv.org ($1 - $10 per article). I suspect the real cost > will be > somewhere in the middle. > > Regards, > Mark > > Mark Doyle > Assistant Director, Journal Information Systems > The American Physical Society > > * My understanding is that hosting an article on Highwire is about $100 > per article. > > Martin Frank, Ph.D. > Executive Director > American Physiological Society > 9650 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20814-3991 > Tel: 301-634-7118 Fax: 301-634-7242 > Email: [email protected] > APS Home Page: http://www.The-APS.org/ > "...integrating the life sciences from molecule > to organism" >
