Research

We present a simple simulator to compute the article processing charge (APC) that a journal should set to cancel science.ai cost.

For over a century, submission style guides have been the principal interface between authors and journals. However, as journals have evolved from paper to the digital age, style guides have remained largely unchanged. Style guides today provide recommendations to ensure uniform visual style required for print, but not machine-readability required for the web. The result is a time-intensive process for authors to fill in forms at submission to capture structured data already present in the manuscript, and an expensive and error-prone production process for publishers to manually extract structured data from ambiguous text before publishing on the web. We developed a new style guide for scholarly submissions, DOCX Standard Scientific Style (DS3). DS3 targets documents written in Microsoft Word (DOCX) and enables the capture of enough structured data to be automatically convertible to data-rich, accessible, semantic HTML (Scholarly HTML). DS3 was designed on a set of core principles: add structure, eliminate ambiguity, embed addressable rich content, and ensure accessibility; all while minimizing cognitive burden, presenting clear minimum requirements, and providing the convenience to choose between multiple input methods. Recommendations in DS3 are illustrated with an interactive visualization demonstrating the structured data (JSON-LD) each allows to collect. In the same way that librarians standardized collections metadata with Dublin Core, we call for a “Dublin-Core”-equivalent standard for scholarly submissions. Such a standard could serve to improve the authors’ experience, increase discoverability and accessibility of published science on the web, and reduce production costs. We propose DS3 as a candidate for such a standard.

We assessed the marginal cost of scholarly communication from the perspective of an agent looking to start an independent, peer-reviewed scholarly journal. We found that various vendors can accommodate all of the services required for scholarly communication for a price ranging between $69 and $318 per article. In contrast, if an agent had access to software solutions replacing the services provided by vendors, the marginal cost of scholarly communication would be reduced to the cloud infrastructure cost alone and drop to between $1.36 and $1.61 per article. Incidentally, DOI registration alone accounts for between 82% and 98% of this cost. While vendor cost typically decreases with higher volume, new offerings in cloud computing exhibit the opposite trend, challenging the notion that large volume publishers benefit from economies of scales as compared to smaller publishers. Given the current lack of software solutions fulfilling the functions of scholarly communication, we conclude that the development of high quality “plug-and-play” open source software solutions would have a significant impact in reducing the marginal cost of scholarly communication, making it more open to experimentation and innovation.