Cost of Scholarly Publishing

Mr Peter Booth Wiley, Chairman of the Board, John Wiley & Sons, talked on "Open-access and scholarly publishing in the 21st century" in Canberra recently. This sparked some discussion amongst academics as to the cost of publishing papers and how "open access" (where readers are not charged) could be funded.

CSIRO Publishing charge authors $3,000 per paper, to cover the cost of open access. Alternatively CSIRO charge individual Australian subscribers AU$195.00 per year to access non-open articles.

The Conference in Research and Practice in Information Technology (CRPIT) series charges conference organizers about $50 per paper for electronic publishing (printing on paper is an optional extra). All the papers are available open access and also are included in the ACM Digital Library.

I notice that IEEE are charging readers US$31.00 for a paper I wrote for a conference earlier in the year (a preprint is available free). IEEE is not generally open access, but even so I had to pay the conference organizer a $150 fee to have my paper published.

IEEE also have Google Ads on the public version of the page. I tried Google and Amazon.com ads on the ACS Digital Library some years ago. However the ads tended to detract from the dignity of the papers and so I had to take them off. But the ads on my recent IEEE paper look reasonable:

Going Back To Uni?
Enquire Online Or Speak To Our Student Advisors On 1300 240 976!
www.open.edu.au

Honda Australia
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www.honda.com.au/cars

Keep Your Brain Young
Sharpen Your Memory With Brain Games Made By Neuroscientists
www.lumosity.com

Australia's Coral Sea
Vital areas still to be protected. Find out more!
www.ProtectOurCoralSea.org.au

Buy Ink & Toner Australia
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www.InkStation.com.au/Ink-Toner

I can understand the relevance of the ads for university, cars, memory games and ink to IEEE publications. But "Protect Our Coral Sea" seems less relevant. The last time I was involved in protecting the Coral Sea, it was in the Joint Operations Center aboard the flagship of the US 7th Fleet. ;-)