Scholarly publishing is a pretty large-scale pursuit....If the estimate of 25,000 journals is in the right ballpark, and each publishes 40 articles per year on average, about a million new articles is being added to the literature every year....And if the average rejection rate is 50%, these 25,000 journals actually process at least 2 million articles per year....
A veritable industry, this scholarly publishing. Good that there are professional, independent organisations that take on the drudge of all that work. Perish the thought that researchers would have to organise it all by themselves.
So everybody is thankful for what the publishers do? No. There is a problem: they want to be paid for what they do, and they don’t even do what we want them to do, which is to give everybody free, open access to whatever research they publish.
Two ‘solutions’ have been proposed. One that deals with the cost of publishing only; and one that deals with open access only, ignoring any issues of cost.
The solution that deals with cost only is the one that holds that the costs are too high and it’s all the fault of ‘commercial’ publishers. Instead, all scientific publishing should be done by not-for-profit scholarly societies. On the face of it, journals published by these NfPs (NfP journals don’t exist – just NfP publishers, who still wish to see their journals turn a surplus – the non-tax-payer's equivalent of, or euphemism for, profit) do seem to have lower subscription charges. Which is sort of easy, if one makes a subscription a compulsory part of membership. And levies page charges. And pays no tax. Many society publishers can offer relatively low-priced subscriptions, and still make revenues that on a per-article basis, are similar to what is being realised by commercial – I prefer to call them independent – publishers....
It certainly works. The point, however, is that such publishing is not scalable....[I]t isn’t the NfP status that is the cause of lower prices; it is the fact that the membership yields much of the revenues needed to support the journals. And imagine 25,000 journals each sustained by enough society members to result in low subscription prices. It just doesn’t stack up. Otherwise we should have seen strong growth in NfPs. Interestingly, the contrary took place. Independent publishers started to flourish because societies couldn’t deal with the growing volume of articles and the increased international and interdisciplinary nature of science....
The ‘solution’ that deals with open access only, ignoring any issues of cost, is of course what is known as ‘self-archiving’....
I couldn’t have said it better than Stevan Harnad himself, on 10 December 2006, on the AMSCI Open Access Forum (not yet archived there as I'm writing this): “I, for one, have never doubted that [publishers making journal articles open after a short embargo] could cause cancellations. But anarchic author self-archiving, of each author's postprints, in each author's own IR, in uncertain proportions and at uncertain rates, are [sic] another story”. Precisely.
Which means that self-archiving is also not scalable. As long as there is only a small number of authors engaged in self-archiving, and it is done anarchically and unpredictably, it will work. Publishers will have little practical problem with it and librarians will not cancel subscriptions on that basis alone. Take the anarchy and unpredictability out of it, however – for instance via self-archiving mandates – and it would all be, to borrow Stevan’s phrase, another story.
Putting it another way: if self-archiving were to succeed, it would fail....
It is possible, of course, that the chaos of self-archiving leads to a phase transition to a stable and truly scalable method, open access publishing, a.k.a. ‘gold’, but it seems a rather circuitous and acrimonious route to take. Why not stimulate ‘gold’ straight away, especially since a rapidly increasing number of publishers offer it? Why not lobby for an open-access-mandate, instead of for a self-archiving-mandate?...
The advantages of ‘gold’ are huge. Immediate open access to the research literature; costs move – up or down – with the research activity itself; a functional market, with fair price levels as a consequence; discouragement of spurious, speculative, or ‘ultra-light’ submissions; elimination of visibility as an element in perceived quality; and I’m probably forgetting to mention a few.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
