Technopolis Group has recently conducted as a study for the French Observatory of Scientific Editing, Estimation des coûts éditoriaux des ouvrages de recherche, which aims to explore and to assess the economic model behind publishing academic books. This project has been led by the French Ministry of Culture and the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research (MESR), with the advice of a monitoring committee made up of key players in the book sector. The main goal is to gain a deeper understanding of the various cost items and their structure, depending on the type of work and the profile of the publisher.
Publishing is fundamental to science, as it underpins the dissemination of knowledge. Facilitating the diffusion of scientific insights is critical for driving scientific progress. Scientific publishing encompasses several steps: assessing the relevancy of the contribution through scientific peer-review, the publishing process, and the release of the publication itself (books, electronic journals, etc.). The number of resources needed within this process varies greatly depending on the type of format (e.g. books vs articles), the publishers’ practices and business models, and the characteristics of the manuscripts. Few details are known about the costs of scientific editing and to what extent it might hamper scientific knowledge diffusion.
The ability to measure publishing costs varies widely. While some core expenses like editorial work, printing, and operations are easier to quantify, others—such as peer review and digital edition—are less visible and harder to track. This uneven visibility influences how consistent and comparable cost estimates can be across different publishers.
A major source of variation lies in editorial practices. Public and private publishers show having different practices regarding costs structures: private publishers in our sample tend to adopt more layered and outsourced editing processes than public ones. The differences in costs magnitudes across the public and private publishers seems partially explained by the level of complexity. Private publishers in our sample tend to edit more complex books than public ones. This result echoes the role of disciplines: scientific and technical publications are generally more demanding and costly than those in the humanities or social sciences.
Funding patterns mirror these cost structures differences. The level and type of funding available across disciplines and publisher types both influence and reflect how books are produced. In essence, cost variation in publishing isn’t just about numbers—it’s about how editorial choices, organisational models, researchers’ publishing strategies, and funding realities interact.
Read the main results of the study and the presentation carried out by Florence Blandinieres. The results provided below within the dashboard to illustrate the different costs structured emerging from the studies. The estimates are based on aggregated values. The actual distributions are available within the report.
