Budgeting for Abundance Journal

[Joseph Jackson]

I had an instructive conversation with Jeremiah who founded the
journal of virtual world's research. http://jvwresearch.org/

I think this is an achievable model for what we'd like to do. He is
at U Texas Austin but has self-
funded the journal with minimal involvement from UT. Offhand I think
$10K is sufficient to start this up and run the first year. As you
see from the transcript we explored forming/joining a consortium to
publish open access social science journals--a new brand analogous to
PLOS in this other sphere. Not everything Jeremiah is doing has to be
replicated for our effort but it is a nice blueprint.

1. the most important thing about a journal is prestige (as you
already know) this means that the bulk of your up front expenses needs
to be in developing a hard-hitting online presence.

All of the editors are volunteers, although few do anything of note
they are building up the prestige, which is essential to back up the
website
then we have two other elements: each issue is themed (as you may
have noticed) and a pair or trio of scholars propose the theme, draft
the CFP, review the submissions, arrange peer review, prepare for copy
editing. These editors work for the prestige of having their name as
guest editor. Then the $$

1. web design, upkeep, upgrades, etc
$1-3k upfront, $100-200 per issue for making everything look nice
although the back-end - using open journal systems (OJS) is being
provided and supported by the Texas Digital Library Consortium at no
cost. If one or more of your editors is affiliated with UT-Austin,
that could be arranged. The value of OJS is $5k + per year
2. editorial coordinator - $300-400 per issue this person keeps you
(the editor) from going insane by coordinating all the tedium between
guest editors, copy editors, layout design, web designer, etc.

3. copy editors - $300-600 per issue: this is essential.. part of
your prestige is built upon the quality of the articles and despite
many scholars having Ph.D.s and important universities after their
names, they are not necessarily good writers

4. legal, trademark, crossref fees, copyright fees, etc these vary.
I have been digging on this for a while. Part of branding is
protecting your brand. Trademarking is cheap - $400-ish. Crossref
puts you in the DOI database and I've not yet figured out the exact
cost but we are a member and trying to learn how to use it, but at
least - $400 per year

Copyright, i'm still working on... from what I understand even though
you use the CC license, the journal should still file a copy with the
library of congress, which can be done online and is $15 per article
(or something similar)

5. publicity
This is a challenge.. we are working on the idea of using the
services of PR Newswire, with a 501(c)3 the costs are $600-900 per
press release... but this gets 400 words to 5000-15000 new outlets
again trying to surpass the prestige barrier

So, how do we pay for it? First, we are in the process of setting up
the 501(c) 3 - Virtual Worlds Research Foundation which incurs its own
costs.

Nonetheless, so far i've paid for it out of my own pocket but given
the low cost of production and upkeep of the journal once it has
picked up momentum we are focusing on institutional sponsorships and
personal donations. We've already had one research group commit to at
least 1k per year and several others that are mulling it over
and since my editors do little, i'm going to lean on them to kick in a
little. The second revenue stream takes longer because you are
building brand and a collection of intellectual content. The CC
license still means its yours, despite other people can use it without
the horrible restrictions that groups like IEEE put on their material.

I think we can follow a similar path which means, you can turn the
material into books, edited, authored, etc and the brand becomes
increasingly worthwhile and can be leveraged into branding conferences
which can be an extremely profitable business, so, over the long run
it can work out quite well... in the short term, the costs are low, so
the sacrifices all around (with the exception of everyone's time) is
minimal.

In the science field it is normal to pay-to-publish, in social science
it isn't (and is taboo). I'm not sure where your field falls in the
spectrum.
SS journals are usually supported by associations, institutions, etc.
hmm... this is giving me a nasty idea. we've been mulling that over:
of instead of a vwr foundation open an open academic foundation (or
some similar name not already used) focused on providing the
infrastructure and model for doing precisely this. You are the 3rd
journal in as many weeks that i have touched base with that is
meandering through the same path. That is how it needs to be, there
needs to be some base of funding
That is why an open academic publishing foundation would be good;
could attract a block of funding from different companies and
foundations to fund the launch and maintenance of journals open-
access: no cost to publish, no cost to subscribe, no registration
required to view.

[marc fawzi]

Bryan,

An abundance in abundance initiatives is exactly how it should be :-)

Joseph,

Let's say we have 100 active members. Each willing to donate $20 a quarter, or $80 (upfront) for the year, as well as do some work on the website. That's $8,000. But it's chicken or egg as far as gathering 100 subscribers willing to donate $80 each, or $20 a quarter.

What would be a reasonable way to fund it, given the current economic conditions?

Can the work be crowd sourced?

Can it be hosted on say Google App Engine, which I think has a free quota that is sufficient for the first few months (and after that the cost is probably less than Amazon EC2)

Just wondering...

Marc

[Joseph Jackson]

Good suggestion. I can possibly seed part of this and find a couple
other donors, then try to crowd fund the rest. We can also come in
under the 10K $ estimate; some of the things the jvwr is doing are
unnecessary expenses (publicity promotion we can do through various
free channels) The copy editing is tedious however and even with
volunteers we'll need to compensate some essential personnel for
producing the issue. If each issue can be done for 1000$ that brings
it down considerably. Maybe 5K for the first year to get started and
do 4 issues.

On Feb 4, 4:42 pm, marc fawzi <marc.fa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Bryan,
>
> An abundance in abundance initiatives is exactly how it should be :-)
>
> Joseph,
>
> Let's say we have 100 active members. Each willing to donate $20 a quarter,
> or $80 (upfront) for the year, as well as do some work on the website.
> That's $8,000. But it's chicken or egg as far as gathering 100 subscribers
> willing to donate $80 each, or $20 a quarter.
>
> What would be a reasonable way to fund it, given the current economic
> conditions?
>
> Can the work be crowd sourced?
>
> Can it be hosted on say Google App Engine, which I think has a free quota
> that is sufficient for the first few months (and after that the cost is
> probably less than Amazon EC2)
>
> Just wondering...
>
> Marc
>

> On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Joseph Jackson <joseph.jack...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>
>
> > I had an instructive conversation with Jeremiah who founded the

> > journal of virtual world's research.http://jvwresearch.org/

[Charles Collis]

Part of an email I sent to Joseph before I realised discussions were
going on here (some relevant to financing):
---------------

...I'm interested to know what your thoughts are from your perspective
on the wiki side of things, and how it fits with your ideas on the
journal project. For instance, which part of the process you see it
serving: holding information on key concepts, collaboratively working
on journal drafts, organising things, being a community space, or
something else?

Obviously AdCiv.org has its own identity which I'm not sure I'd want
to tear down, but I'm very happy for it to have a key role in
supporting the journal, and large portions of the site can be
dedicated towards this aspect.

I'm wondering (as I'm sure you may be too) whether there are there
other more contemporary methods in which a journal could be run to
avoid significant costs of more traditional methods - perhaps this is
an opportunity to be a ground-breaking model for a journal (as well as
covering a ground-breaking topic)?! Could the traditional peer-review
process take advantage of more modern tools, methods and filters and
be brought more up to date? It might be too easy just to ape existing
journals as part of trying to gain credibility. Ultimately credibility
will be down to quality of content of course.

It would be interesting to have a largely self-sustaining, self-
assembling framework as much as possible partly to reduce costs and
partly because it would be interesting to operate outside the
prevailing economic model that a post-scarcity society will mostly, if
not entirely, usurp!

I am aware of course that your aspirations are for it to be a quality
and respected publication in time, and perhaps what I mention above
are not mutually incompatible with this. It may not be immediately
obvious how to do it in a radically new way and still do it very well,
but it's worth thinking hard about I reckon.

On Feb 4, 8:45 pm, Joseph Jackson <joseph.jack...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I had an instructive conversation with Jeremiah who founded the

> journal of virtual world's research.http://jvwresearch.org/

[marc fawzi]

<<
It would be interesting to have a largely self-sustaining, self-
assembling framework as much as possible partly to reduce costs and
partly because it would be interesting to operate outside the
prevailing economic model that a post-scarcity society will mostly, if
not entirely, usurp!
>>

I'd be very excited about such approach.

;-)