I'm engaged in writing up a story that has resulted from my postdoc. As it happens, I will leave this postdoc as soon as the paper is out, and it is the only paper that will result from this postdoc. Thus, we can reasonably attribute 100% of my costs over the last two years to the production of one paper. How much is this paper worth?
1) My salary of ~($40K + benefits) x 2 years = $100,000.
2) My PI's salary, relevant fraction. Let's estimate he earns $100K, and I use 5% of his time, $5,000 x 2 years = $10,000
3) Mice. Each litter I use has a list price of $50. Let's say I've used 50 litters. $50 x 50 = $2,500.
4) Equipment, amortized. My set-up probably cost around $150K, but most of that equipment will be usable for a decade or three. This is the hardest to estimate, but I'll say 10% of the equipment cost = $15,000.
5) Chemicals. Most of the chemicals I use are cheap, but some aren't. $5,000.
6) Miscellany. Sending me to conferences, my share of our tech's and lab manager's salaries, my share of some infrequently used equipment, etc. Hard to say but I'll guess $15,000. Probably an underestimate since there are likely things I'm not thinking of.
Total: $147,500*
It better be one hell of a paper.
* Plus indirect costs!
15 years ago
14 comments:
That's not very expensive.
Hmm... I've never thought about this before, but in my field, the bare minimum grant is $100k/year, usually for 3 years. This type of project would usually end in about papers, 3 if there was a graduate student working on it as well. So, $150k/paper would probably be on the low end.
Yeah, I'd be interested in hearing some analyses from the grant $ / # papers viewpoint. I have quite possibly underestimated, say on the equipment or support staff salaries? What do people estimate is the cost per paper in their labs, as grants/papers?
Hmmm... as a behavioral ecology grad student, I have done a lot of field work. If I calculated how much money was spent on a 3-week trip to a caribbean island that resulted in 2 papers ... including airfare, food, lab fees, 3-week salary for me and another grad student and rum ... it comes to about $1,744.36 per paper. Oh, how scientific fields differ!!
you're forgetting F & A, it's 69% at my institution
when I was working in New Zealand, the ceo of the company I worked for said that the average $/paper in NZ was $100,000 and this was very low by international standards (Japan was the highest at $1M I think). So $150,000 seems reasonable.
But I think by field the costs would vary a lot - my major expenses this year have been gas and fabric which is substantially less than a large Hadron-whatsit
Where are you going after the paper is out?
I'm just completing my 6th year on the tenure track, so I added up the funding I've used to date (setups + grants) + 70% of my salary and benefits (I do teach too) + 50% of salary/benefits paid to my students when they've TA'd so I didn't have to support them directly. Divided by papers produced (not including reviews) I get an average of 190,000/paper.
Now that includes setting up the lab, so big ticket items will presumably amortize over future papers to bring my $/paper down.
If I calculate just grant dollars spent/paper (I'm on hard money, so a large fraction of my salary is paid by the university, and I can claim grad students are "free" if they TA) I come out with a very competitive $89,000/paper. I'll have to mention this in my next grant application!
As I noted before there's a study with some per-grant pub numbers here:
http://go2.wordpress.com/?id=725X1342&site=drugmonkey.wordpress.com&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1016%2Fj.amjmed.2005.02.015
On average, each grant produced 7.58 MEDLINE manuscripts (95% confidence interval [CI]: 7.47 to 7.69) and 1.61 publications in a core journal (95% CI: 1.56 to 1.65). A total of 6.4% of R01 grants were not associated with any publications
during the study period.
Am I the only person who finds it a little terrifying how expensive the papers are? I'd never tried costing it out before and I'm rather appalled.
DM, what's the average grant $?
What the fuck is a "core journal"?
Core journal includes index medicus, none of which I read, and ISI-now-Thomson's top 100--presumably including C/N/S but I don't know what else.
I'm with CPP, depends on the journal. But unless you're purchasing your mouse litters and sacrificing them the day they arrive in the mail (highly doubtful!) I think you've vastly underestimated the cost of your mice.
At my university, it costs about $5 per cage per day to house and feed them. So on the upper end, let's assume that could be as much as $5 x 365 days x 2 years x 50 litters = $1.8 million dollars for mouse costs for your project.
At one point a few of us calculated that a single Cell paper costs about 0.5-1 million dollars when you add up all the co-authors and various costs over the average 2-3 years that it takes to do that much work, even as a group effort. This is why it's extremely difficult to publish a high-impact paper from a poor lab.
Of course I was talking about this with regard to how hard it is to get a faculty position without a high-impact paper.
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