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I read the report. The Association of University Presses finds that University Presses are providing great value and that their average cost per book is 20,000$. Of these, 15,000$ are covered by subsidies and the rest via prints sales etc.
They report 50% of book costs are overhead and acquisition. Work directly related to the creation of a book (editorial, design, production) is about 1/3. The remainder is marketing.
May I suggest that 10k overhead for a book is too much? What on earth are you doing?
For comparison, the average cost per book at Language Science Press is 4,000€, and that includes some books with more than 1500 pages. Our overhead is probably below 10% (basically rent). Our download figures are approaching 100k for the most popular titles.
What is the acquisition budget spent on? Conference trips of acquisition editors, where University Presses A, B, and C try to outcompete each other? Maybe we can just get rid of carbon-heavy conference jet-set acquisition editors and reduce our costs by a third? Why should the scientific community pay for all those trips? What is the added value here?
I found the Ithaka report out of step with reality. This report follows suit. My working assumption is now that University Presses are some kind of self-serving publishing dinosaurs, trapped in old habits of doing things.
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We have recently discovered that pdfs produced with LaTeX have a certain treatment that does not interface well with common screenreaders for visually impaired people. Fixing this is actually a major project and will get pretty gory. We will not have the funds available at LangSci to do this on our own, but we might apply for some funding. If you are interested in LaTeX-based documents and accessibility, we will be happy to get in touch
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Hi Emma,
see here:
https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/22
https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/25
https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/144
Former versions are available for reference. We provide back and forward links between the versions. Superseded book have a different cover image. We strive to have backlinks in the DOIs as well. We are currently working on facilities to toggle the display of forthcoming versions in the catalog so that users will only see them if they are really interested
Best
Sebastian
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I seem to have trouble with that Zotero group. In any case, here are two references which could be incorporated there:
Nordhoff, Sebastian. (2018). Cookbook for Open Access books. Berlin: Language Science Press. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1286925
Nordhoff, Sebastian. (2018). Language Science Press business model. Berlin: Language Science Press. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1286972
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FWIW, our bookdownload figures are available from here as csv: https://github.com/langsci/opendata/blob/master/bookdownloads/langscidownloads.csv
We made some analyses, but they are not really conclusive:
Downloads over time: https://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/langsci-press/2015/08/12/access-stats-for-open-access-books/
Difference between OMP hosting and OAPEN hosting: https://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/langsci-press/2017/03/09/access-statistics-from-oapen-and-omp/
Relative downloads for the first 24 months after publication: https://twitter.com/LangSciPress/status/1238128202524037126
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I had a look at @scholtom’s report. Very nice work. The section on “subscribe-to-open” lists Language Science Press. I am not sure this is 100% correct. LangSci never had closed content, so we could not possibly do a transition, and we can also not threaten to revert back to that. I can see how we ended up there, but the model is slightly different.
We have published our annotated business model here: https://zenodo.org/record/1286972
Our annual reports including revenue and expenditures can be found here: https://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/langsci-press/category/statistics/
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