Supplementary Data and Publishers

Neil Beagrie, Julia Chruszcz,

and Peter Williams

Charles Beagrie Ltd

Dryad UK April 2010

Overview• Consultancy for Dryad Sustainability: covered areas of draft

business plan and sustainability for Dryad

• Presenting one of the contributions(publishers) to section on Comparators and Costs

• Outcomes from desk research and 12 interviews with publishers/data publishers + some additional input drawn from Keeping Research Data Safe

• Very brief presentation – article in preparation for Learned Publishing Oct 2010 issue….KRDS2 available from JISC shortly (or me now )

Interviewees• Journal of Clinical Investigation• Journal of the American Medical Association• Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution (Elsevier)• Journal of Heredity (OUP)• Ecological Society of America• Wiley-Blackwell + Ecology Letters• Royal Society• Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology• OECD Publishing• Internet Archaeology and Archaeology Data Service• Pangaea: Publishing Network for Geoscientific & Environmental

Data• Dataverse Network (Social Sciences, Harvard)

Some Findings: growth• Many interviewees stated that supplementary data and

materials are showings rapid growth• 3 gave figures: from 32 articles in 2000, to 251 in 2009 – an

increase of 784%; from 6% in 2005 to 38% in 2009; from 2% a decade ago to 87% in 2009.

Some Findings: workflow• supplementary data have grown organically at the various

journals investigated (author driven);• Both the work and the costs being absorbed into the daily

running of journals;• in 4 cases minimal impact on work duties; in 5 others there was a

significant but often unquantified impact (two of these might be considered data publications with a focus on publishing data papers or datasets); and in 3 cases the information was not available or unknown;

• can be explained in terms of level of effort or importance applied : the greatest levels of effort are associated with copy editing, format migration, addition of metadata, etc, whilst the least effort is required for simply hosting the material; and/or high-levels of automation in the workflow.

Some Findings: costs• These were in most cases unknown or only partially known;• Costs mentioned but usually not quantified include: digital

storage costs, salary costs of journal staff; and long term preservation costs;

• detailed cost information was really only available from Internet Archaeology via Archaeology Data Service which had participated in an activity based costing study (KRDS2);

• Internet Archaeology archiving costs reflect those for a “dataset publisher” so only a comparator for part of Dryad’s content – large datasets.

Some Findings: revenue• only author fees and journal subscription fees were

mentioned as current revenue sources for the supplementary materials in journals;

• 3 journals interviewed have author charges for supplementary materials (see next slide);

• The data archiving and sharing organisations interviewed relied primarily on (uncertain) research grants and temporary or re-current core funding, but one had access to a small endowment and another has a charging policy for some depositors.

Some Findings: author charges• Journal of Clinical Investigation - authors are charged $300 for

supplemental data to appear online with accepted articles; • Ecological Archives - submission of ‘appendices and

supplements’ is free up to 10MB. Above this, there is a fee of $250 for the first 1 GB and $50 for each subsequent GB. The fee for publication of a data paper is $250 for publication of the abstract in the relevant journal plus publication of up to 10 MB in Ecological Archives. An additional $250 is charged for data sets between 10MB and 1GB, and for larger datasets there is an additional $50 per GB fee;

• The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) charges $100 for each Supplemental file.

Summary KRDS Activity ModelPre-Archive Phase

Outreach

Initiation

Creation

Archive Phase

Acquisition

Disposal

Ingest

Archival Storage

Preservation Planning

First Mover Innovation

Data Management

Access

Support Services Administration

Common Services

Estates

KRDS: what did we learn?Whole of Service costing/Seeing the“Big Picture”

Selection of 2009 Allocation of UKDA Activity Costs

Acquisition 5.8%

Ingest 21.5%

A. Storage +Pres. Planning 3.1%

Access 16.9%

KRDS:Implications

• Changing view of digital preservation costs: – “getting stuff in and out” costs much higher than

“keeping it (bit preservation + migration)”;– Staff costs c.70% of total costs;– Importance of economies of scale and

automation.

Further Information“Keeping Research Data Safe” (KRDS1)Final

report and Executive Summary at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/keepingresearchdatasafe.aspx

Keeping Research Data Safe2 (KRDS2) webpage at www.beagrie.com/jisc.php

KRDS2 report available from JISC website early May 2010 or email info@beagrie.com