tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post5667861620261778415..comments2024-03-17T08:30:21.129+00:00Comments on Open and Shut?: Open Access, brick by brickRichard Poynderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05433823131339077354noreply@blogger.comBlogger24125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-18415103627749115562012-04-09T12:16:40.181+00:002012-04-09T12:16:40.181+00:00As a recently retired editor of a journal for Emer...As a recently retired editor of a journal for Emerald can I just support Stevan Harnad's comments on the cost of peer review and its relationship to rejection rates? As editor I selected reviewers (which included myself), they reviewed for free. I uploaded the final and agreed articles to the publisher's web site using publisher software that converts to html and pdf. I then assembled and confirmed an issue of the journal. Only at this stage is the publisher's intervention required in order to attach metadata etc and ensure accessiblity to customers from their web site.Rejecting manuscripts is often a lengthy process because of the need for careful criticism but is still at no cost to the publisher. So from where does Elsevier derive its reviewing costs?mike mcgrathnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-81569431686258594512012-03-29T00:41:19.985+00:002012-03-29T00:41:19.985+00:00I enjoy reading these comments. I was happy to see...I enjoy reading these comments. I was happy to see the cost issue related to editorial work being addressed by people at PLoS.<br />As a programmer, aside from a PhD student, I wish to help to obtain such a goal; publication quality PDF, EPUB3, or HTML5, for scholarly work, done by the researchers themselves. I'm looking towards expanding Pandoc for such an authoring tool. I'm surprised they didn't prioritize this goal rather than heavily investing in commenting/web2.0/etc. style Journal homepages, which is more or less deserted by researchers (though I do like the idea myself, and would have used it, had my research been in the field of biology).<br />Knowing that this is indeed part of the long term goal for PLoS is very encouraging.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-3702255489371549282012-03-22T23:01:56.281+00:002012-03-22T23:01:56.281+00:00Mike Taylor wrote:
"I wonder what proportion...Mike Taylor wrote:<br /><br />"I wonder what proportion of all the articles Elsevier rejects end up published in another Elsevier journal?"<br /><br />something like this was mentioned in the Evolution of Science panel discussion, though it may have been NPG who said it. I can't remember when in the video it happened, unfortunately, though it was later on.David Robertsnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-18629227844984513142012-03-20T17:14:26.445+00:002012-03-20T17:14:26.445+00:00Having now (finally!) reach Richard's giant fo...Having now (finally!) reach Richard's giant four-part comment, I find that I have nothing to add in response to it beyond what I wrote in my most recent response to Claudio. The key points remain (A) we care about what Elsevier charges us, not what their expenses are; and (B) we must compare like with like, not compare PLoS's flagship 90%-rejection journal with Elsevier's rank-and-file.Mike Taylorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06039663158335543317noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-18938434245167929622012-03-20T13:11:42.938+00:002012-03-20T13:11:42.938+00:00ESTIMATING THE TRUE COSTS OF GOLD OA
It is rather...<b>ESTIMATING THE TRUE COSTS OF GOLD OA</b><br /><br />It is rather arbitrary and unrealistic to reckon the costs of Gold OA publishing independently of other factors that could raise or lower them.<br /><br />The two most important causal factors are (1) Green OA and (2) institutions' subscription budgets.<br /><br />Institutions cannot cancel essential journals if their contents are not otherwise accessible to their users.<br /><br />If Green OA is universally mandated, then authors' final, peer-reviewed drafts of all journal articles are deposited in institutional repositories and freely accessible to all users whose institutions cannot afford subscriptions to the journals in which they appeared.<br /><br />This makes it possible for institutions to cancel subscriptions, eventually making the subscription model unsustainable as the means of covering the costs of publication.<br /><br />Subscription cancelations force journals to cut inessential costs.<br /><br />With the refereed final drafts of all articles accessible to all through Green OA, journals no longer need to (1) provide the print edition, (2) provide the online edition or (3) provide access or archiving: The distributed network of Green OA repositories provides all that is needed. The rest are all obsolete products and services in the universally mandated Green OA era.<br /><br />When the costs of (1), (2), and (3) are unbundled from publication products and services made obsolete by universal Green OA, the only essential cost remaining is that of implementing peer review.<br /><br />Peers review for free, so the cost of peer review is just the cost of managing the peer review process, including the editorial expertise and judgment in choosing referees, adjudicating referee reports, and adjudicating revised drafts.<br /><br />If peer review is provided as a "no fault" service to the author's institution, per submitted draft, regardless of whether the outcome is rejection, revision, or acceptance, the cost of rejected articles can be unbundled from the cost of accepted articles; this not only lowers and distributes the cost of peer review, but it removes the risk of lowered peer review standards and over-acceptance for the sake of making more money through Gold OA.<br /><br />This much lower cost of post-Green OA no-fault Gold OA -- my guess is that it would be between $200 and $500 per submitted draft -- would not only be incomparably more affordable than today's pre-Green OA fees for Gold OA, but the money to pay for it would be available, many times over, from a fraction of institutions' permanent annual windfall subscription savings released by the cancelations made possible by universally mandated Green OA.<br /><br />The only essential element for having Gold OA at this much more realistic and affordable price is one cost-free act on the part of the universal providers of all research output: Institutional Green OA mandates (reinforced by research funder Green OA mandates).<br /><br />Without taking these costs and causal factors into account, estimates of the costs of OA are arbitrary and the wait for universal OA will continue to be long.<br /><br />Harnad, S. (2007) <a href="http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13309/" rel="nofollow">The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition</a>. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106. <br /><br />Harnad, S. (2010) <a href="http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/" rel="nofollow">No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed</a>. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8). <br /><br />Harnad, S. (2010) <a href="http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18514" rel="nofollow">The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now</a>. Prometheus, 28 (1). pp. 55-59. <br /><br />Harnad, S. (2011) <a href="http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/22401/" rel="nofollow">Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher Behavior Through University and Funder Mandates</a>. JEDEM Journal of Democracy and Open Government 3 (1): 33-41.Stevan Harnadhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14374474060972737847noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-41188295963253816842012-03-20T09:17:46.733+00:002012-03-20T09:17:46.733+00:00Thanks, Claudio, for reading and responding to my ...Thanks, Claudio, for reading and responding to my message.<br /><br />First, thanks for the clarification on journals vs. S&T journals. That is a horrible lack of clarity in Elsevier's reporting, and it's good to get things straighter from someone who knows more about what's going on. That said, it's weak sauce for me to cite "Claudio Aspesi, pers. comm. 2012" for this stuff. Is it published anywhere? Maybe in financial reports that I've missed?<br /><br />Great that you were able to get the 20% figure for proportion of Health Sciences revenue that is journals (though infuriating that it is still unsourced).<br /><br />Yes, I see the 230,000 figure for published articles on page 20 of the investment seminar report. Obviously that figure's going to vary from year to year. It's a shame that no one document has all the information we need for these calculations.<br /><br />Again, the costs incurred by a publisher's rejection of articles are not really of interest to a customer buying a subscription, who never sees these articles. From the customer's perspective, it's irrelevant whether Elsevier's revenue goes on editorial services for published articles, rejecting others articles, or indeed private jets or shareholder dividends. It's all money out of pocket, and that's all that matters.<br /><br />(As an aside, I question how much value rejection adds -- it's always seemed strange to me that journals boast about their high rejection rates as though that is a service that they provide rather than an unfortunate side-effect of space constraints. We all know the truth of rejected articles: they get reformatted (a tremendous waste of time) and sent off to another journal, and the process is repeated until the article is accepted anywhere. So rejection doesn't in any meaningful sense serve as a filter that keeps "bad" articles out of the pool -- at best, all it does is move them around. I wonder what proportion of all the articles Elsevier rejects end up published in another Elsevier journal? But anyway, that's beside the point. I should really blog about it separately.)<br /><br />Finally, it seems a little disingenous to compare the cost of publishing in an average Elsevier journal with that of publishing in PLoS's flagship journal, PLoS Biology (impact factor 14ish). Since PLoS ONE's healthy impact factor of 4.411 is far above the average IF of Elsevier journals, that is the correct point of comparison (and even that is being generous when one looks beyond Cell to the rank and file of Elsevier journals).<br /><br />In the end, I think your invocation of the Prisoner's Dilemma is spot on. That is an interpretation that deserves more exposition. I may blog about it on SV-POW!.Mike Taylorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06039663158335543317noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-63898653299556312922012-03-20T07:12:44.116+00:002012-03-20T07:12:44.116+00:00Claudio Aspesi has asked me to post this comment f...<b>Claudio Aspesi has asked me to post this comment for him:</b><br /><br /><i>I read Mike Taylor’ posts with interest. A few specific comments:<br /><br />1) I never said that journals account for 45% of Elsevier revenues. I said that S&T journals probably account for 45% of Elsevier revenues. I agree that the likely Elsevier S&T revenues from journals are in the region of 80% (in 2010, according to the company, they represented 78%, and journals grew faster (4%) than the rest of the division in 2011 (close to zero), still according to the company). Since S&T revenues were more than 50% of total Elsevier revenues in 2011, the 45% number for Elsevier S%T journals seem a reasonable assumption for 2011.<br /><br />2) In discussions with Reed Elsevier in March 2011, it indicated that journal revenues in Health Care are 20% of Health Sciences revenues (not 80% or anywhere near that number). <br /><br />3) The 230,000 articles number comes from a slide in the December 2011 investor seminar. It refers specifically to S&T journals. In fact, elsewhere in the presentation, the company indicates it publishes a total of about 300,000 articles/year, which would seem to also include the Health Sciences journals. In fact the ratio of articles between S&T and Health Sciences (230,000/70,000) appears reasonably close to the revenues ratio (40-45%/9-10%).<br /><br />4) Costs incurred in rejected articles are a cost that have to be incurred by someone (whether it is the publisher, the subscriber or the published authors in an OA journal), unless a journal abandons altogether screening for articles. While it is true that these costs are borne by all publishers, not all publishers bear the same ratio of costs incurred on rejected articles per article published. This ratio is not necessarily determined by each publisher, but by the behaviour of authors (when they submit their articles to a specific journal). If we assume two journals to publish the same number of articles each year, have exactly the same costs to publish an article and the same operating margin (or return on invested capital, or on any other metrics relevant to their respective owners), the one which receives the most articles (and therefore rejects the most) will incur higher total costs. These costs will have to be borne by someone, and they cannot be ignored. What we do not know is how relevant these costs are for different publishers. <br /><br />I agree, on the other hand, with Mike Taylor’s point that the costs incurred by the academic community (including the publishers’ operating profit) to disseminate an article on Elsevier S&T journals are still higher than on PLoS. After all, £4000/article (including operating profit) at Elsevier is a bit over twice the $2,900 charged by PLoS Biology (the publication mentioned as a closer comparable by some of the other commentators). Again, I want to underline it is somewhat dangerous to assume too much without knowing the cost of “rejecting” articles and the rejection rates of different journals, and – therefore – the real costs. Ultimately, however, if the academic community wants to lower its dissemination costs, it has to demonstrate it is willing to stand behind its stated convictions, abandon commercial subscription journals and live – at least for a while - with lower journal impact factors, rankings, etc. I suspect it is a classical prisoner’s dilemma for every scientist.</i>Richard Poynderhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05433823131339077354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-23319906459666772782012-03-19T20:45:41.241+00:002012-03-19T20:45:41.241+00:00Yeesh! I have only now seen that there was follow...Yeesh! I have only now seen that there was followup to my comment -- sorry to be so late in replying. I have not yet read Richard's long four-part comment, but wanted to respond to Claudio Aspesi's numbers.<br /><br />First, this: "In 2011 Elsevier had total revenues of £2058 million. S&T journals account for about 45% of that (the company does not disclose the exact number)"<br /><br />I, too, had difficulty in finding this percentage. Here's best I've been able to do. Tom Reller kindly pointed me to <a href="http://www.reedelsevier.com/investorcentre/Documents/presentations/investor-seminar-elsevier-s-t.pdf" rel="nofollow">an investor seminar report</a>. The chart on page 8 says that Elsevier revenues are split 50-50 between S&T (Science and technical), and that of S&T's 50%, 39% is from research journals. That implies that 78% of S&T revenue is from journals, which is confirmed by the chart on page 18. Unfortunately, the report says nothing about how revenue in Health Sciences breaks down, and my emails to various Elsevier personnel asking for this number have not received informative responses. In the absence of that information, I assumed for <a href="http://the-scientist.com/2012/03/19/opinion-academic-publishing-is-broken/" rel="nofollow">my new article in <i>The Scientist</i></a> that the same 78% applied (so that the overall percentage was also 78%).<br /><br />Is Claudio is right that in fact research journal account for only 45% of Elsevier revenue in total, then that would mean that only 6% is contributed from Health Science, i.e. only 12% of all HS revenue is from journals. That <i>seems</i> unlikely to me, but then as Richard points out, "Claudio tracks Elsevier for investors and so spends a lot of time perusing the publisher’s accounts", so I wouldn't necessarily want to argue with him. Nevertheless, I would <i>very</i> much like to see his source for the surprisingly low figure of 45%.<br /><br />Moving on ... "so that would make it £926 million. Assuming that the average operating margin of Elsevier (37%) applies to journals as well, costs would be £583 million."<br /><br />Wait, wait! Why would we care what the cost <i>to Elsevier</i> is? The fact that they take out 37% in profit neither increases nor reduces the costs to their customers -- all the customer cares about is what they have to pay, not how much of that is costs to Elsevier. So the number we care about here is £926 million (assuming that low 45% figure is correct).<br /><br />Next up ... "Since they publish about 230,000 articles/year" -- for the record, I should note that Elsevier's 2011 annual report gives a higher number of 240,000, which would make the per-article price 4% less.<br /><br />" ... that comes to £2,536/article, which seems much more in line with what PLoS charges." But that number is uninteresting: it's what it costs Elsevier to publish each article, but we care about what they charge the customer. So the relevant figure would be £926m/230,000 = £4026. That is currently $6400, which is nearly five PLoS ONE articles. So still astoundingly less good value for the scientific community, and remember that is using the very low figure of 45% for the proportion of Elsevier revenues that are from journals.<br /><br />Into the home straight now ... "Also bear in mind that a) the margin is probably higher for journals, so costs are probably lower " -- irrelevant, since we care what Elsevier charge, not what it costs them.<br /><br />"and b) that rejected articles also drive some costs; the higher the rejection rate, the higher the costs." Also irrelevant, since this is true of all publishers. (PLoS, too, could cut the publication fee if the rejected fewer articles.)<br /><br />So it seem the <i>best case</i> for Elsevier has them costing the academic community nearly five times as much as PLoS ONE (which, remember, is a relatively expensive OA option, costing half as much again as the average Gold OA fee of $906.Mike Taylorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06039663158335543317noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-70844304781480257182012-03-19T17:46:19.463+00:002012-03-19T17:46:19.463+00:00We have been saying for some time now that "o...We have been saying for some time now that "open access" the way it exists today will not solve the problem of affordability in scientific communications. Yes, there are some people making too much profit in all this but the more fundamental problem is not that but the processes involved in academic publishing. If we do not examine, how scientists should communicate at a more basic level, it would be difficult to resolve these issues. We at WebmedCentral have provided the community with an alternative. If all scientists engage with our model, databases like PubMed include us, and citation tracking bodies start tracking us, our model based on instant publication followed by post publication peer review has the potential to offer a lasting solution to this problem.Kamal Mahawarhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18042754907811335047noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-6449026035943196092012-03-17T22:05:49.275+00:002012-03-17T22:05:49.275+00:00Let's say that (despite the comments of other ...Let's say that (despite the comments of other experts quoted) the ARC is correct that the humanities are not "in a position to comply with a mandate". They could simply require that only the funded scientists make their articles freely available, e.g. 6 months after publication. The ARC has a classification system for disciplines (FoR codes), so if they cared to be completely explicit about who the mandate applies to, they could list he FoR codes for which the mandate applies.Alexhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03302812592407176747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-73137009840655208622012-03-17T16:40:35.288+00:002012-03-17T16:40:35.288+00:00AFFORDABILITY FOUR
Time will tell who is right, b...<b>AFFORDABILITY FOUR</b><br /><br />Time will tell who is right, but as I understand it, Eisen imagines a future somewhat like that envisaged by Tracz in 2006. That is, a world in which the writing, copy-editing, typesetting etc. etc. is all done by the author. Since the reviewing is done for free by other researchers one is left wondering what the role of publisher might be in such a scenario. <br /><br />Presumably, the bulk of a publisher's job would simply be to post papers into an online database (After all, researchers are now generally asked to recommend their own reviewers and the process is almost entirely automated). <br /><br />As publishing consultant Joe Esposito has <a href="http://listserv.crl.edu/wa.exe?A2=LIBLICENSE-L;e0459f04.1203" rel="nofollow">pointed out</a>, this amounts to little more than providing disk space. And this is essentially what the physics preprint server arXiv does. To do this, arXiv estimates, costs just <a href="http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/8789.html" rel="nofollow">$7 per paper</a>.<br /><br />But in a world increasingly populated by both institutional repositories, and central repositories like PubMed Central, one might wonder whether there is any meaningful role for publishers to play in the future. The research community can do it all itself. <br /><br />Why, therefore, <a href="http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/open-access-interviews-jan-velterop.html" rel="nofollow">asks</a> former BioMed Central publisher Jan Velterop, does not the research community move to the <a href="http://arxiv.org/help/endorsement" rel="nofollow">endorsement</a> model used by arXiv. If it did, he adds, it could save the taxpayer $3 billion a year of unnecessary expense. <br /><br />Perhaps Tracz’s initial views were right all along? <br /><br />In the meantime, one is tempted to ask: Why does <i>PLoS ONE</i> charge $1,350 to publish a paper? Eisen told me that this generates a significant surplus for the publisher. Since PLoS is a non-profit committed to “making the world’s scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource” should it not be charging a price more in line with the costs it actually incurs? <br /><br />Could it be that when it became a publisher PLoS lost sight of its mission, and succumbed to the temptations and luxuries associated with “being a publisher”. <br /><br />Recently Esposito <a href="http://listserv.crl.edu/wa.exe?A2=LIBLICENSE-L;e0459f04.1203" rel="nofollow">commented</a> on the Liblicense mailing list, “For those who have visited the offices of PLOS, which are among the more sumptuous of any publishing offices I have ever set foot in, there is the disconcerting feeling that all this is fleeting.”<br /><br />Taxpayers might be tempted to mutter, “Let’s hope so.”<br /><br />In any case, if PLoS truly remains committed to its mission should it not aim to operate out of less luxurious accommodation? <br /><br />Let me finish with one final question: Should <i>PLoS ONE</i> not consider lowering its article processing charge?Richard Poynderhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05433823131339077354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-40598604771655104522012-03-17T16:23:06.447+00:002012-03-17T16:23:06.447+00:00AFFORDABILITY THREE
But what does the experience ...<b>AFFORDABILITY THREE</b><br /><br />But what does the experience of the last decade or so tell us about OA publishers’ prices? When they launched both <i>PLoS Biology</i> and <i>PLoS Medicine</i> <a href="http://www.moore.org/newsitem.aspx?id=524" rel="nofollow">levied</a> a $1,500 article processing charge. Nine years later, this fee is 93% higher, at $2,900. <i>PLoS ONE</i> has also increased its prices since it launched. <br /><br />(For purposes of comparison, consider that a typical BioMed Central journal like the <i>Journal of Translational Medicine</i> initially <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC317385/" rel="nofollow">charged $525</a>. Today it charges <a href="http://www.translational-medicine.com/manuscript" rel="nofollow">$1,970</a> — a 275% increase).<br /><br />These price increases are striking, particularly given that when I <a href="http://poynder.blogspot.com/2012/02/oa-interviews-michael-eisen-co-founder.html" rel="nofollow">spoke</a> recently with PLoS co-founder Mike Eisen, he said to me, “the marginal cost of processing an article is going down, and will continue to do so, asymptotically approaching zero”.<br /><br />Why, then, I asked Eisen have PLoS’ prices risen rather than fallen. He replied, “the holy-grail — when the cost of the publication part of the process drops close to zero — is when we get publication ready content from authors … Our costs for <i>PLoS ONE</i> haven’t dropped that much yet because every paper still requires manual attention.”<br /><br />It might help here to consider how the views of Vitek Tracz, the founder of BioMed Central, have changed over time. Initially Tracz too assumed that OA publishing would cause prices to fall to the point where they approached zero. When I <a href="http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2006/05/interview-with-vitek-tracz.html" rel="nofollow">spoke to him</a> in 2006, Tracz described OA as a service. A service, he added that “will become a smaller and smaller component of the publishing business. More and more of what we do for authors today they will be able to do for themselves in the future, and as we develop more tools to allow them to do it themselves, so what we charge them will be less and less.”<br /><br />As an OA publisher, Tracz has first-hand knowledge of the issues and practicalities of OA publishing. Today, however, he says he does not expect OA to cause prices to fall much. When <a href="http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/logo/2010/00000021/F0020001/art00008;jsessionid=4j9uj1bifuct1.victoria" rel="nofollow">I spoke to him again</a> last year he told me, “I always assumed that OA publishing would be cheaper, but OA publishing is more complicated than we had initially envisaged. The logistics of it all quickly becomes very complicated, so it turns out not to be much cheaper than traditional publishing. This in turn means that the amount of money publishers can make is similar.”Richard Poynderhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05433823131339077354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-29577817224972723452012-03-17T16:18:11.122+00:002012-03-17T16:18:11.122+00:00AFFORDABILITY TWO
In passing, it might be instru...<b>AFFORDABILITY TWO </b><br /><br />In passing, it might be instructive to compare @Mike’s estimates of Elsevier’s per-article costs with those <a href="http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/uc399-i/uc39902.htm" rel="nofollow">given to</a> the UK Select Committee Inquiry into scientific publishing in 2004 by Richard Charkin of Nature Publishing. <br /><br />Charkin told MPs that the per-article costs of publishing in <i>Nature</i> were simply too high for OA to be a viable business model for the journal. “[I]n order to replace our revenues you would have to charge the author somewhere between £10,000 and £30,000 [$15,800 and $47,500) because the costs of editorial design and support are so high,” he said.<br /><br />How did Charkin arrive at that figure? “Very crudely, £30 million of sales: we get income of £30 million and we publish 1,000 papers a year. That is your £30 million,” he told MPs.<br /><br />@Mike appears to have used a similar method to arrive at his figures for Elsevier. But how accurate a method is it for calculating per-article costs? <br /><br />Not very perhaps. Aspesi suggests above that a more likely per-article cost for Elsevier would be £2,536 ($3,705). We could also note that Elsevier itself <a href="http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/intro.cws_home/review_process" rel="nofollow">estimates</a> that it costs on average $2,000 [£1,260] to peer review a paper. (Although it is not clear whether these are Elsevier specific estimates or not).<br /><br />There are other aspects of @Mike’s comparison that we might want to question. As we know, <i>PLoS ONE</i> pioneered a “lighter” review system. This has proved somewhat controversial, not least because one consequence of this is that the journal accepts 65% to 70% of the articles it publishes. (Elsevier <a href="http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/intro.cws_home/review_process" rel="nofollow">estimates</a> average acceptance levels at between 25% and 50%). <br /><br />Since publishing costs are directly related to acceptance rates this must inevitably significantly lower <i>PLoS ONE’s</i> costs. A fairer approach, therefore, would be to compare Elsevier’s costs with what <i>PLoS Biology</i> or <i>PLoS Medicine</i> charge, which in both cases is $2,900. Aspesi concludes therefore that Elsevier’s costs seem “much more in line with what PLoS charges.”<br /><br />On the Solomon and Björk <a href="http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/apc2/" rel="nofollow">study</a> that @Mike cites, we should note that this included many journals based in the developing world catering to local authors. As such, it might not be very helpful for present purposes. Moreover, for some unaccountable reason, the authors also included a number of <a href="http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/03/06/predatory-open-access-publishers-the-natural-extreme-of-an-author-pays-model" rel="nofollow">predatory OA publishers</a>. It is far from clear that these publishers send all their papers out for review, so they can presumably afford to offer much lower rates. <br /><br />We also need to do more than just compare current costs. We need to look at costs over time as well. This is important because many believe that the serials crisis is a product of the fact that scholarly publishing is a <a href="http://www.infotoday.com/it/dec02/poynder.htm" rel="nofollow">dysfunctional market</a> — that is, a market without adequate mechanisms to restrain prices.<br /><br />@Mike believes that OA publishing will be different, because it will send out appropriate market signals that will prevent the run-away price increases characteristic of subscription publishing. @Björn suggests that this would only happen if we first saw the “complete destruction of journal rank”. <br /><br />I think @Björn is right, but I am aware that Stuart Shieber has published <a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2011/11/16/how-should-funding-agencies-pay-open-access-fees/" rel="nofollow">some suggestions</a> on how he thinks a market signal could be introduced into OA publishing.Richard Poynderhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05433823131339077354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-2578086330617987542012-03-17T16:12:07.763+00:002012-03-17T16:12:07.763+00:00AFFORDABILITY ONE
I realise I would have been bet...<b>AFFORDABILITY ONE</b><br /><br />I realise I would have been better writing a new blog post rather than adding such a long comment, but I wanted to keep the discussion all in one place. I have, however, had to break my comment into four parts in order to cope with the length limit of Blogger comments.<br /><br />In what I say, I am going to assume we all agree that OA publishing is intrinsically better than subscription, or Toll Access (TA), publishing. Indeed, I will even assume that TA publishers like Elsevier would be perfectly happy to adopt Gold OA today if they could be sure that doing so would not cause any decline in their revenues/profits, either during the transition to OA or in the new OA environment. I also assume we all agree that OA is inevitable. <br /><br />What is at issue then is when we can expect OA to become the norm, and what the consequences of that will be in terms of the costs of disseminating research.<br /><br />And the key question, in my view, is whether OA publishing will solve the affordability problem that has plagued the research community for several decades now — a phenomenon commonly referred to as the “serials crisis”. <br /><br />I am thinking that both @Bill Hooker and @Diane take the view that since the primary objective of OA is to solve the accessibility problem, then solving the affordability problem would be no more than a “nice to have” addition. I can entirely sympathise with this view. However, I suspect that taxpayers would not. And it is they, after all, who ultimately fund scholarly communication. <br /><br />Let us suppose that all the issues facing scholarly communication, in all their complexity, were explained to taxpayers, and in a way that was both accurate and comprehensible. What would they conclude? I’m betting they would determine that both problems — accessibility and affordability — are of equal importance, and that it is therefore essential to solve both of them.<br /><br />However, whatever taxpayers concluded the <a href="http://www.infotoday.com/it/sep11/The-Big-Deal-Not-Price-But-Cost.shtml" rel="nofollow">signs are</a> that those responsible for distributing taxpayers’ money to the research community are likely soon to begin refusing to foot the bill for scholarly publishing unless prices do start to fall. <br /><br />If I am correct, then costs are going to have to come down, one way or another. So whether OA publishing is cheaper than TA publishing is probably more important than most researchers appreciate.<br /><br />None of us, of course, can predict the future, but let me offer a few thoughts on this. <br /><br />In the early days of the OA movement (12 or so years ago) it was taken for granted that OA publishing would significantly reduce the costs of distributing research. Over time this claim has tended to evaporate, and OA advocates and publishers are now generally silent on the topic. @Mike and @Bill however say they still believe (or hope) that OA will solve the affordability problem. @Björn Brembs, by contrast, seems less convinced. <br /><br />@Mike cites as evidence that OA publishing is cheaper than TA publishing the fact that PloS’ prices are orders of magnitude lower than what he estimates to be the per-article costs of publishing a paper with Elsevier. Where <i>PLoS ONE</i> charges $1,350 to publish a paper, he says, the cost per-article of publishing with Elsevier is somewhere between £6,000 and £10,000 ($9,400 and $15,700).Richard Poynderhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05433823131339077354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-31965705741297545642012-03-16T21:16:59.836+00:002012-03-16T21:16:59.836+00:00It is plainly untrue for the ARC to imagine that m...It is plainly untrue for the ARC to imagine that members of the general public are not interested in research produced by ARC grants. The mistake the ARC makes is assuming that all researchers work in large institutions, especially universities. They should begin to think of school teachers, farmers including fish farmers, environmentalists, conservationists, engineers, computer professionals, and the list could go on - all members of the 'general public' and most vitally interested in Australian research funded by the ARC, but precluded from reading it due to a price barrier.<br /><br />The net result is of course to depress the contribution that private enterprise can make to the Australian economy arising from Australian taxpayer-funded research.Arthur Salehttp://www.cis.utas.edu.au/cisview/staff_profile.jsp?user=ahjsnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-20959331057062279942012-03-15T22:45:26.027+00:002012-03-15T22:45:26.027+00:00With regard to gold OA article pricing, let's ...With regard to gold OA article pricing, let's put ourselves in a gradstudent's or postdoc's shoes. In the hypothetical case of universal gold OA, imagine you have a great manuscript and have the choice to publish it in Cell (to stay with Elsevier) for 20k or with the new Imaginary Journal of Cellular Biology for 7 bucks (Arxive price). The market says that Cell will have to reduce prices to compete. The student/postdoc will say: I'd rather use my personal funds, if I have to, and publish in Cell.<br /><br />That's why, in the absence of a complete destruction of journal rank, there is no market driving down prices - and I don't see why gold OA should singlehandedly abolish journal rank. Thus, as I see it, there's not really much sense in pushing for gold OA before journal rank is destroyed. Or am I missing something?Bjoern Brembshttp://brembs.netnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-85156018114255902042012-03-15T09:18:49.900+00:002012-03-15T09:18:49.900+00:00Thank you to everyone for your comments. I hope to...Thank you to everyone for your comments. I hope to address some of these points separately, but on the specific issue of Elsevier’s per-article costs I asked the investment analyst <a href="http://poynder.blogspot.com/2012/03/scholarly-publishing-where-is-plan-b.html" rel="nofollow"> Claudio Aspesi </a> for his views. Claudio tracks Elsevier for investors and so spends a lot of time perusing the publisher’s accounts. Below is his reply. <br /><br /><i>In 2011 Elsevier had total revenues of £2058 million. S&T journals account for about 45% of that (the company does not disclose the exact number), so that would make it £926 million. Assuming that the average operating margin of Elsevier (37%) applies to journals as well, costs would be £583 million. Since they publish about 230,000 articles/year, that comes to £2,536/article, which seems much more in line with what PLoS charges.<br /><br />Also bear in mind that a) the margin is probably higher for journals, so costs are probably lower and b) that rejected articles also drive some costs; the higher the rejection rate, the higher the costs. If we had access to internal figures, we would want to look at cost/article submitted, rather cost/article published. </i><br /><br />Wouldn't it be great if Elsevier were to publish the necessary data to allow us to estimate more accurately what its average cost-per article was?Richard Poynderhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05433823131339077354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-33937056740116004852012-03-15T08:02:00.274+00:002012-03-15T08:02:00.274+00:00Peter: I calculated total cost of publishing a pap...Peter: I calculated total cost of publishing a paper with Elsevier simply by dividing their total income from journal subscriptions by the total number of articles that they publish. So the resulting number is what it costs the academic community as a whole to publish a paper and get their current level of access to it.Mike Taylorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06039663158335543317noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-68045805195206113592012-03-15T06:43:23.810+00:002012-03-15T06:43:23.810+00:00Another comment (from ‘biomedical-land’):
Green O...Another comment (from ‘biomedical-land’): <br />Green OA is poorly appreciated amongst biomedical researchers and institutes (most outside USA have never heard of it or believe it is only practised in other fields), whereas Gold OA is gaining reasonable ground. Biomedical researchers see author charges as a major disincentive to publishing through Gold OA journals because few funding agencies provide for them. This is a shame because biomedical research is relatively expensive, making Gold OA publishing good value. <br />I find it surprising you say <br />‘The danger is that if the research community throws money at OA journals, while allowing Green OA to be subverted and held back, it will discover that publishers increasingly adopt Gold OA, but price it at a level that simply protects their current income.’<br />Surely, high publisher profits are not the problem. The problem is that their profits are coming at the expense of access to information. You need to factor in the cost of this arrangement.Dianehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07213988812821546072noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-91972604341827193702012-03-15T06:16:50.788+00:002012-03-15T06:16:50.788+00:00I like to think my recent essay 'Unshackling b...I like to think my recent essay 'Unshackling basic knowledge' in the Australian magazine Policy 2011/12 27(4)48-5 <br /><a href="http://www.policymagazine.com/" rel="nofollow">This is a link</a> also helped prompt the NHMRC's announcement.Dianehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07213988812821546072noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-63980522677317713952012-03-14T11:48:11.320+00:002012-03-14T11:48:11.320+00:00Many thanks to Richard for a comprehensive and val...Many thanks to Richard for a comprehensive and valuable post.<br /><br />@Mike_taylor. What are the costs you quote FOR. Publisher-incurred costs or author-incurred costs or both?Peter Murray-Rusthttp://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-88995021685255427732012-03-14T09:29:53.201+00:002012-03-14T09:29:53.201+00:00Thanks for this very comprehensive and informative...Thanks for this very comprehensive and informative article. Just one point of (I think) correction, and a couple of thoughts.<br /><br />"What those pledging to boycott the publisher incorrectly assume, however, is that Elsevier is the only culprit."<br /><br />I don't think this is <i>at all</i> true. As a boycott signatory myself, I can tell you that I see <i>all</i> the big barrier-based for-profit publishers are part of the problem. The Elsevier-only boycott is a matter of eating an elephant one bite at a time.<br /><br />"They also fail to see that OA publishing looks set to prove just as expensive as subscription publishing."<br /><br />I dispute this. Exact figures are of course hard to come by, but in <a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=419287" rel="nofollow">a letter to Times Higher Education</a> I estimated the total cost of publishing a paywalled article with Elsevier at £10,130. In response to a comment from Kent Anderson I revised that down to £6,078; in an article in preparation I arrived at what I think is a more accurate figure of £6,689. Whatever the precise figure, it's evidently a great deal more than the $1350 =~ £850 that PLoS ONE charges, and in the region of 10-18 times as much as the average Gold-OA fee of $906 =~ £570 calculated by Solomon and Bjork (in press).<br /><br />"The danger is that if the research community throws money at OA journals, while allowing Green OA to be subverted and held back, it will discover that publishers increasingly adopt Gold OA, but price it at a level that simply protects their current income."<br /><br />I don't believe that would be possible. If my figures above are close to correct, and Elsevier were to protect their income by winding their Gold-OA fee up to £6,689 =~ $10,500, the market would decide.Mike Taylorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06039663158335543317noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-12443193189304542432012-03-14T02:40:42.395+00:002012-03-14T02:40:42.395+00:00GREEN ARCHITECTURE
BH: "if we must pay the s...<b>GREEN ARCHITECTURE<br /><br />BH:</b> "<i>if we must pay the same but can get 100% [Gold] OA for our money then I can live with that outcome too.</i>"<br /><br />So could I -- if Gold OA were actually happening as fast as Green OA could have happened. But it isn't. We're still just waiting, and waiting…<br /><br />So let universities and research funders worldwide follow the UK's lead, not Australia's lag: Forget about Gold OA for now and mandate doing the researcher keystrokes that would have given us 100% [Green] OA 20 years ago, had they only been done, unmandated, 20 years ago.<br /><br />The reward will not only be 100% [Green] OA now, but Gold OA at a fair price soon thereafter.<br /><br />To keep on yearning and waiting for Gold is just throwing more good time and money after bad.Stevan Harnadhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14374474060972737847noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-20694669221914034322012-03-13T19:52:08.142+00:002012-03-13T19:52:08.142+00:00"The danger is that if the research community..."The danger is that if the research community throws money at OA journals, while allowing Green OA to be subverted and held back, it will discover that publishers increasingly embrace Gold OA, but price it at a level that simply protects their current income."<br /><br />I retain some hope that, because OA makes journals economic competitors rather than complements, market forces will keep Gold OA from ending up as expensive as the subscription model. Besides, if we must pay the same but can get 100% OA for our money then I can live with that outcome too.Bill Hookerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00366270586730870964noreply@blogger.com