Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Friday, August 07, 2009

Toward equitable funding for OA publishing

Stuart M. Shieber, Equity for Open-Access Journal Publishing, PLoS Biology, August 4, 2009.

... [O]pen-access journal publishing is currently at a systematic disadvantage relative to the traditional model.

I propose a simple, cost-effective remedy to this inequity that would put open-access publishing on a path to become a sustainable, efficient system, allowing the two journal publishing systems to compete on a more level playing field. ...

Over the past several decades, a workable infrastructure has developed to handle the subscription-based mechanism for scholarly journals—publishers to manage logistics and production, subscription agents to handle order processing, library budgets to pay for the subscriptions, overhead from grants to fund those library budgets, and so forth. Unfortunately, there is no such infrastructure to support the processing-fee model. Imagine you are a publisher of a subscription-fee journal, a forward-thinking publisher who sees the benefit to scholarship or at least the inevitability of the open-access processing-fee model. You would like to convert one of your journals to an open-access model. However, you realize that, were you to take this bold step, yours would be the first journal in its field to charge processing fees. Prospective authors would suddenly be faced with the prospect of paying, say, US$1,500 to publish their articles in your journal, as compared to paying nothing for your competitors' journals. Even though the primary motivation for authors is gaining the journal's imprimatur and the quality of that imprimatur for your journal hasn't changed (yet), the US$1,500 may be perceived as a steep price for the imprimatur advantage of your journal over your competitors'. ...

The problem is, of course, that the US$1,500 article revenue to the journal that is provided by the processing fee under the processing-fee model is hidden in subscription charges in the subscription-fee model, and these are typically paid not by the authors ... Yet authors are now expected to pay these charges under the open-access processing-fee model. ...

To mitigate this problem—to place open-access processing-fee journals on a more equal competitive footing with subscription-fee journals—requires those underwriting the publisher's services for subscription-fee journals to commit to a simple “compact” guaranteeing their willingness to underwrite them for processing-fee journals as well.

The crucial underwriters are universities and funding agencies. ...

Funding agencies would ideally implement the compact by providing incremental funding for reasonable processing fees for articles in open-access journals, describing the results of research funded by their grants. ...

But not all research is grant-funded. Universities would commit on behalf of their authors to underwrite reasonable processing fees for articles in open-access journals for which funds are not otherwise available (in particular, for research not funded by grants). ...

It is important to keep in mind that the goal of the compact is not to increase access to the individual articles it underwrites. That goal is already reasonably satisfied by the possibility of open-access self-archiving that any author can unilaterally perform and that various open-access policies such as that of the National Institutes of Health promote. Rather, the goal of open-access funds as envisioned in the present proposal is to reduce the disincentives to authors and thus the risk to publishers of the processing-fee business model. ...