Should we support MDPI in setting up the OA journal 'Vision'

Frontiers blog post on finances

My take:

• Publishing operations: 34% – for what? There is very little copy-editing, you have to use their template anyways, so the only thing they really do is typesetting. I guess the money actually goes to spamming everybody about Research Topics and Markram himself.

• IT and innovation: 32% – ok, they're indeed innovative and that's a good thing, but I could also live with a less innovative journal if it were cheaper.

• Growth / New Journals: 11% – they already have too many journals. This is just trying to thin-slice the market with super specialized journals of little value.

• Discounts & waivers: 10% – make it cheaper and you won't have to subsidize anyone.

Ok, lets run with Jonas's suggestions and see where that gets us:

Presumably servers, typesetting, support, and basic admin (see the Frontiers post) are always going to be necessary. So how much might we estimate email publicity (and consequently pageviews and citations?) costs? Lets be generous and say 20% of the publishing budget.
For innovation, ok, so you'd want to let other companies or organisations innovate and instead just run a "vanilla" journal, so presuming the IT for the web platform etc is needed then you could maybe lop 30% off that part of the budget to remove innovation.
For growth / new journals you'd set that component to zero.
For discounts & waivers - I don't think that could go realistically. There are too many scientists that don't have funds to publish and so you'd want to keep them or you stop such people from publishing - this is a traditional complaint about JoV.

So I reckon in total that maybe cuts about 20-25% off the APC.

Does this suggest that APC cannot be driven very low?

Anyone want to cite estimates of what it would have cost them to publish in PeerJ over the past 3-4 years (their APC) as evidence that publishing need not cost authors very much?

OK, I can do cost comparison:

I have 3 papers in JoV:
2012 (14 pages): 4 authors
2014 (17 pages): 3 authors, all from 2012
2015 (in press, but I estimate 15 pages): 4 authors, 2 from 2012

PeerJ: Suppose we all got membership for 1 article per year. That would amount to 6 different authors * $99 = $594, or $297/article

JoV: $105/page * 46 pages = $4830, or $1610/article (even more with the new rate of $125/page).

Thanks Jonas, that's really useful.

That will be helpful in discussions with MDPI but its also generally informative for us. A typical APC for PeerJ, the self-styled cheapest publisher, is about $300 or £200. Its also the modal/minimum cost from MDPI. So I guess its not realistic to think any commercial publisher is going to go below that - or if they do you'd want to question their viability.

Anyone got an APC that is significantly different from the one Jonas calculated, or anyone want to add a different take?

As for Frontiers expenses, I don't think your analysis is fair. Or, rather, let's run it against arXiv: a trivial though ugly and inconvenient platform, no cost to publish, donations are necessary to maintain it, and real researchers use it.

Their 2014 expenses were $881,285 and they had around 97,517 submissions, which amounts to $9/article.

Of course, they don't have a peer-review system in place and I don't know how much extra it would cost to maintain it, but hello, we're talking $9/article.

And to go further eLife is free to authors, and if you trade a bit of personal data you can get webspace for free if you want to self-publish unreviewed articles. But I'd argue if we are going to evaluate open access journals we have to be fair. We can't really compare their costs to webspace where you can log unreviewed articles or to subsidised journals.

Sure, but these numbers give you an estimate how much it actually costs to maintain a server and a submission platform. I can hardly see how $9 can become $300 even with a peer-review system in place. Of course, once you start adding other features (copy-editing, typesetting and so on), costs start to grow, and it's up to us to find the right balance. But I just wanted to show that the basic realistic solution is very cheap. ArXiv is far more than self-publishing!

Moreover, notice how Frontiers is charging about €1000 per article and you estimated that even with the cost shaving I suggested, it would go down to only about €800, and yet PeerJ somehow can survive with $300. This is just to show that these figures Frontiers or others publish are not sufficient to estimate how much things actually cost.

I don't disagree re Frontiers. I just want to get an idea of what a realistic minimum APC for a sustainable commercial company works out as. And it looks like its about $300/£200. Of course we may be a little naïve here as we don't know how PeerJ and MDPI work their finances. The former could essentially be a pyramid scheme and the latter may use $300/£200 as a loss-leader to get people on board before then having to jack the prices to a sustainable rate. But as I say the key point is that we don't seem to have any evidence that an APC can go below $300/£200 - that is a useful benchmark.

Thanks for the illuminating discussion. BTW arXiv does have some form of minimal peer review to keep out crackpots.

Open Journal Systems (OJS) is free and most major univ libraries have the technical competence to set it up, plus already have the bandwidth to accommodate it, so close to zero server cost if maintained by a library. Apparently it does nearly everything a ScholarOne or ElsevierEditorialSystem does.

For costs, I think that leaves: 1) assistance by professional staff to keep things running smoothly, 2) help with shepherding manuscripts along, 3) typesetting.

About #3 (typesetting), If you want to go from a typical author-submitted Word or PDF file to a beautiful product, it's going to cost! But I don't have a good sense of how much. I'll ask some people.

While PeerJ resembles aspects of a pyramid scheme structurally, I heard from a reliable source that despite their low fees they are already meeting ongoing costs! That's with what I suspect is technologically the best publishing platform out there; reduces costs. It is opensource, but I was told is not set up currently to accommodate the workflow that would be more typical of a journal (not sure where the differences lie).

Ok, so in terms of questions we now can add:

How would you distinguish yourself from JoV (already established), iPerception (established brand and lower cost) and PeerJ (not established in vision but effective pricing inline with MDPI's minimal/modal APC)?

If we are starting a new open-access journal, why should we go with MDPI rather than do it ourselves (use OJS, pull in 1+ uni per continent to host, draw on expertise in design in one of our institutions, and then raise a loan or investment to bootstrap the costs of admin)?

And, I'll add another question unrelated to the discussion above but of concern to the open-access types in my own school, and maybe of more apparent relevance given the FTC discussion on CVNET:

Will you offer a facility for registered reports?

Regarding the estimate of 'what should a genuine publication cost be', the idea that something like 200/300 pounds is in the right range is also suggested by Ubiquity Press who have a basic APC of £300 http://www.ubiquitypress.com/site/publish/

Simon, Alex and I just talked to the managing editor responsible for Vision. He was very open and helpful. I'll post a longer summary next week, but just a few key points.

If the journal would be indexed in web of science or pubmed they would anticipate the APC rising to 800CHF. Obviously this is more than we might have hoped, but still a lot less than JoV. But it was not really clear otherwise how it would differentiate itself from JoV, other than offering some 'competition'.

Editorial decisions would be down to the chief editor, and they were open to many innovations, and had facilities for open peer review and hosting data and code.

The company is technically for-profit, but actually all of the profit is reinvested. The 'for-profit' status is just a technical necessity that makes it easier for them to work internationally given Swiss law. The owner/founder is a scientist, who wants to improve publishing. But there is nothing in their corporate structure to protect this model, but they are discussing becoming a non-profit to guarantee this.