Open Access News

In May 2006 Cell Science became the first scientific Journal to introduce the payment of royalties to authors.At the crest of the emerging wave of ‘open access’ online Journals, Cell Science has marked its 2nd anniversary with the first introduction of a micropayment system to make scientific research more widely available, affordable and rewarding to authors.Although only a recent entrant into the global Scientific, Technical & Medical (STM) publishing market which an estimated annual turnover of $11bn (2004, Simba), Cell Science aims to transform the way in which scientific journals are funded to enfranchise authors and reduce the cost burden to readers and institutions....

[T]he new Cell Science initiative to pay authors royalties [encourage academics to publish in OA journals].Given that the prices of scientific periodicals are currently often inversely related to their scientific impact, the introduction of micropayment models might provide a mechanism to allow the revenue of a journal to be coupled to its demand....

The problem is exactly how to remove the onus of hefty library subscription payments without merely offloading the financial costs of publishing onto the shoulders of the scientific authors themselves as is presently the case.It is all well and good to relieve the burden of publication costs from wealthy institutions, but requiring authors to pay for publication within open access journals is hardly a fair or ideal alternative, and this especially disadvantages those researchers from Africa, Eastern Europe, Central and South America....

So what alternatives are there to the traditional subscription-based and the pay-to-publish open access models within the Brave New World of the Internet? Apparently overlooked by the Wellcome Trust, amongst others, is a third publication model which answers many of the short-comings of both the current models. The solution, first instituted by Cell Science, is a micropayment funded model, wherein a small revenue is generated every time an article or edition is accessed by an end user.In volume such micropayment royalties would cover not only publication costs, but also the payment of royalties and third party payment processing fees.Journals would rise and fall according to fairer market principles, with more popular Journals collecting higher revenues and paying out more in royalties to the most popular authors.Good research would be readily available, affordable and accessible, and would be paid dividends.Excellent research might conceivably even repay itself from publication revenues.Libraries would no longer have to pay vast sums to subscribe to bundles of journals that few people read....Authors would consider levels of royalty payments in their assessment of which Journal to publish in, and not solely impact factors or prestige.A truly competitive market for STM publishing could be created, with those Journals which offer less interesting fare or smaller royalties falling by the wayside....

Although its modus operandi is more akin to that of a co-operative than of a corporation, for the convenience of accounting and raising investment, Cell Science was founded in 2002 as a Private Limited Company with a capital outlay of no more than $30,000.Funded through limited advertising and micropayments, it was intended that its editors would be paid in the form of dividends and its authors in the form of royalties....

Cell Science has initially offered scientific reviews from leading International authorities, although from 2007 it is expected that the full publication of original research findings will commence. Cell Science is intended ultimately to provide a flexible level of publication for a wide range of scientific correspondence, from articles to short dispatches. In addition scientific correspondence, in support or contradiction of papers previously published, will be welcomed, as debate is the engine of scientific advance. It will be interesting to see how Cell Science fares within an intensely competitive market place, and whether it will successfully form the crest of a wave of economic change within the well-heeled and comfortable enclave of scientific publishing.

Comments. Here are some first thoughts on this interesting model.

1. I hope Cell Science implements this plan. Creative thinking about business models and real-world experiments can only help. However, while I encourage this experiment, I also have some early thoughts on its potential pitfalls.
2. Cell Science won't be the first journal to pay its authors. See my 2003 article, Open access when authors are paid. Also see the Open Access Rewards System from AZoM. However, Cell Science might be the first to pay authors in micropayments.
3. Because Cell Science would charge readers micropayments for access, it is proposing affordable access, not open access. Affordable is better than expensive and I praise any kind of affordable access as a step in the right direction. But even very affordable access is inferior to free access. The problem is not the size of the access fee, which may be vanishingly small, but the fact that access must be limited to those who pay it. That requires DRM, and that requires shutting out the software that already mediates serious research --software to facilitate full-text searching, indexing, mining, summarizing, translating, querying, linking, recommending, alerting, "mash-ups" and other forms of processing and analysis. The full promise of full OA (no price barriers, no permission barriers, no technical or DRM barriers) is that it opens content to machine access, not just to human access.
4. I doubt that micropayments to authors will be any kind of incentive to publish in Cell Science. But we'll see. However, if the payments are large enough to be an incentive, then I worry about a problem from another direction. I've argued that the scholarly custom (now 350 years old) of writing journal articles without payment not only supports OA, but also supports academic freedom. Because scholars are paid salaries by their employers rather than royalties by their journals, they are "free...from the market...[and] can write journal articles without considering what would "sell" or what would appeal to the widest audience. This frees them to be controversial, or to defend unpopular ideas, a key component of academic freedom. It also frees them to be microspecialized, or to defend ideas of interest to only a few people in the world."
5. I don't sense that authors are complaining about the 350 year old custom of publishing research without payment. Given university salaries, they're happy to write journal articles for impact, not money. They're complaining that their own publishers limit their impact by locking away their work behind access barriers and metering it out only to (a dwindling base of) paying customers. OA is attractive because it increases impact even if it doesn't pay royalties.