Open Access News

The recent announcement by PLoS that they're increasing some of their fees has provided plenty of fodder for those on all sides of the issue.  On liblicense-l, Peter Banks uses the occasion as proof that the PLoS business model is unsustainable.  Jan Velterop, commenting on the Nature article, comes to quite a different conclusion, pointing out that it typically takes seven years for a new journal to break even anyway, so that the adjustments at PLoS are just part of the normal evolution of things....

Many librarians seem happy to get on the OA bandwagon, as long as somebody else is going to pay.  Take it from funding agencies, or take it from the research budget, or take it from a society's membership fees -- just don't take it from my budget!  OA is a great and wonderful thing -- as long as somebody else is paying for it.  Frankly, I don't understand this.  It's not my money, it's not the library's money -- it's the institution's money.  My university gives me authority to spend a considerable amount of cash in order to advance its work.  My particular specialty is supposed to be in helping the institution manage scholarly information -- to get access to what they need, to use it as efficiently as possible, to provide support for collaboration and the advancement of knowledge....If I consider the work of PLoS to be important -- essential, even -- then why is it less reasonable for me to contribute $10,000 to its operations that it is for me to send $10,000 to one of the commercial publishers for access to a single title?...

The argument is made from time to time that if the funding for scholarly communication shifts from the readership side (subscriptions) to the production side (author's fees, or funder's fees, or however you want to characterize it), the larger research institutions are going to bear a greater burden than they do under the current system.    Peter Suber, whose work I quite admire, attempts to skewer this argument by pointing out that most of the OA journals in DOAJ don't charge any publication fees whatsoever.  The implication is that if authors published in those journals, we could have OA without any increase in overall costs.  I suppose this might be so, but those making the argument are using a narrower frame, and looking just at the question of what would happen if we replaced subscription revenue with publication side revenue.    The assumption here (contrary to the assumption underlying Peter's rebuttal) is that the overall cost of publishing doesn't change.  If that's the case, then obviously some institutions will pay less and some will pay more.  And those paying more will be those producing most of the articles.

But I don't see a problem here (theoretically -- the political problems are huge, of course).  Why shouldn't the big research institutions pay the additional costs involved in disseminating high-quality, peer-reviewed, copy-edited and value-added research literature?  We won't want to, of course.  (Nobody actuallys wants to pay for open access).   It doesn't seem like any great leap from the current situation in which research universities provide the bulk of the subscription revenue -- the purpose is still, ultimately, to fund quality publishing....

[The new PLoS] fees are much closer to the figures that the commercial publishers were suggesting were necessary back when BMC was charging $550 per article and the OA partisans were bashing the publishers for coming up with unnecessarily inflated numbers for what publication really costs....If that's the case, and it turns out that OA publishing (no matter how it is funded) is not really going to be significantly cheaper overall than the subscription-based system, librarians are going to have to fairly ask the question -- if you want Open Access, are you willing to pay?

Comments.

1. I agree with T. Scott that the new PLoS fees raise the question whether OA publishing costs less than conventional publishing. But the PLoS fees are not yet comparable to the costs cited by commercial publishers --who really did, BTW, cite "unnecessarily inflated numbers" for their publication costs. For example, Nature has claimed that publishing one article costs it £30,000. See Richard Charkin's oral testimony before the UK House of Commons (scroll to p. Ev 2, Q16). Charkin is the CEO of Macmillan, parent company of Nature.
2. But even when we put those inflated numbers to one side, the PLoS fees haven't yet risen to the levels of commercial publishing fees. The two flagship PLoS journals not only provide quality at the highest end of the scale, but provide professionally written lay synopses of each article. Their expenses are higher than the average journal and yet their fees are still well below those charged by Springer or Elsevier for OA articles.
3. Moreover, there are still good reasons to think that OA publishing does cost less than traditional publishing: it dispenses with print (or prices the optional print edition at cost), eliminates subscription management, eliminates DRM, eliminates lawyer fees for licenses and enforcement, reduces or eliminates marketing, and reduces or eliminates profit margins. In their place it adds back little more than the cost of collecting author-side fees or institutional subsidies.
4. And just for clarification: In the article of mine that T. Scott cites, on university costs in a world in which all journals converted to OA, I wasn't denying that high-output research universities would pay more than low-output universities. I've always agreed that they would, just as they pay more now for subscriptions, and I don't see this as a reason to resist the rise of OA journals. (I'm glad that T. Scott agrees on this point.) I only argued that high-output institutions would pay less for author-side fees than they pay now for subscriptions.