Testing the Royal Society's Assumptions about Open Access

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SUMMARY: The Royal Society -- a green publisher lobbying against funders mandating that authors should GO on GREEN (by self-archiving) to provide OA -- is instead offering to provide OA for a fee. The asking fee factors in all current publishing expenses and revenues per article, including the print run and other values added (all currently paid for by institutional subscription revenue, with no sign of any decline) on the assumption that subscription revenue will fall to zero. Is it reasonable to expect article author-institutions today to pay for everything that is already being paid for today by other subscriber-institutions, just in order to provide free online access to the author-institution's peer-reviewed final drafts? Is peer review not the only added value they should ever have to pay for? And should they have to pay for it even while it is all being paid for by institutional subscriptions? Should they not just self-archive -- as the UK, US and EC are proposing to mandate -- and then if the "assumption" (really a hypothesis) that subscription revenue will as a result fall to zero ever proves correct, will the institutional subscription revenue savings not be the natural source from which to pay for the peer review? A priori author fees are fine for those with cash to spare, but surely they are not the royal road to 100% OA today: Mandated self-archiving is.

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In the SPARC Open Access Forum, Ian Russell -- Head of Publishing, The Royal Society and new CEO of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers -- wrote:

IR: "The Publishing Board of the Royal Society... felt... the fees for EXiS Open Choice should be set at a level which would allow for a viable publishing operation should EXiS Open Choice become the dominant model. The fees would therefore allow us to recover our costs should all authors choose the EXiS route and assuming that subscription revenue fell to zero [emphasis added]."

Assuming that subscription revenue fell to zero? But where is the evidence supporting that assumption? Indeed, where is the evidence of subscription revenue falling at all, as a result of authors self-archiving their own peer-reviewed final drafts online?

And in setting the a-priori fee level, were all current products/services and their costs/revenues factored in? for example, the production and distribution of the print edition, which is currently subscribed to by institutions worldwide?

Are the authors then, today, expected to pay to supply the print editions to the subscribing libraries of the world, if they wish to make their own articles OA?

Or does the Royal Society have evidence that if authors self-archived their own final peer-reviewed drafts online, as the research funders propose to mandate, then subscribing institutions would no longer want the print edition?

And if the print edition were no longer wanted, would its costs not need to be subtracted from the products/services and the costs/revenues that the Royal Society is here factoring into the asking price for the author's costs, a priori?

And might there not be other products/services, with their associated costs/revenues (mark-up, PDF, the online edition), that might likewise prove redundant or obsolete in a world in which the author's own final peer-reviewed drafts were all that was wanted? (Is that not all part of "assuming that subscription revenue fell to zero"?)

And if so, might the publisher's contribution not then reduce to merely the provision of peer review?

And is this not a question that the market (rather than publishers, by a priori assumption) should decide, once research institutions and funders have exercised their natural and long-overdue online-age prerogative to mandate that publicly funded research should be made openly accessible to all of its would-be users online (through the self-archiving of the author's peer-reviewed final draft online) rather than just to those who can afford to pay for the publisher's version, as now?

The peer review is indisputably both an added value and a necessity in all this: The peers review for free, but the process of peer review needs to be implemented, and that implementation needs to be paid for. But that can hardly be said a priori about all the other associated products and services, and hence their associated costs and revenues.

Right now, peer review is being paid for by revenues from all those other associated products and services, and paid for by subscribing institutions. If/when the institutional subscription demand for all those other associated products and services were ever to "fall to zero" (as assumed here), surely the institutions' own associated annual windfall subscription savings will correspondingly "rise from zero" pari passu with that fall, to become the natural source out of which to pay for the implementation of the peer review, several times over.

As for the other associated products and services (print edition, PDF, archiving, distribution, access-provision): if indeed subscription revenue from them "falls to zero" (because the author's online final peer-reviewed drafts turn out to be all that anyone wants any more) then the market will have spoken: The author's final peer-reviewed drafts are all that anyone wants any more. Why should research funders, or anyone, keep paying for other things that no one wants enough any more to pay for? (And why should they now agree to do that at this time, in full, and in advance, a priori?)

Or perhaps the assumption that subscription revenue will fall to zero if the authors are mandated to self-archive their final peer-reviewed drafts online is incorrect? Who can know this a priori, without doing the empirical test that the proposed self-archiving mandate itself would amount to?

For until that empirical test is actually performed, the only sure thing is that OA and its already demonstrated benefits to research access, usage and impact are needed, and needed now -- indeed already well overdue. A self-archiving mandate will provide that OA. That too has been demonstrated already. But all the rest is an open empirical question, for the market to decide.

IR: "We feel that most of the author fees in the market at present are set at an unsustainably low level and are setting unrealistic expectations among academics and other stakeholders. Some of the learned society publishers we have been speaking to have expressed concerns that the true author fee they would need to charge in an "author pays" world is much greater that the fees introduced by publishers so far and are concerned about looking uncompetitive. We want to introduce some clarity and go public with the fees that we - as a small learned society publisher with rejection rates of up to 75% - would need to charge in a fully "author pays" world."

The market today is a subscription market, and it is paying all the costs of all products and services associated with journal publishing today. What is missing is OA. Mandated author OA self-archiving will provide that missing OA, and its demonstrated benefits to research, researchers, and the public that funds them, with certainty. The rest is all pre-emptive speculation in place of objective testing and evidence (and rather self-serving speculation at that, aimed at pre-setting arbitrarily what should really be for the market to decide: whether anything else needs to paid for, and if so, when, how much, and how (by user-institution subscription fee or by author-institution publication fee).

Mandating author OA self-archiving, now, is the way to set the natural (and long-overdue) online-age process into motion that will determine whether OA can co-exist with the present subscription system, or requires a transition to OA publication -- and if the latter, what products and services still have a market, and what that market is willing to pay for them. What has already been delayed far too long, and should not be delayed a moment longer, is research institutions and funders mandating that the findings of the research they fund should immediately be made accessible to all of its would-be users online, and not only to those who can afford to pay for the publisher's version, as in the paper era.

IR: "You can of course argue that our fees are high, but they are what they are: what we would need to charge to stay in business without the benefit of philanthropic grants to maintain our publishing operation. We are confident that we are cost efficient and that our fees are in line with what most learned society publishers would need to charge in a fully OA model."

Fine. Now what needs to be determined -- by the market, empirically -- is whether all the products and services wrapped into the current "publishing operation" still have a market in an OA world, or whether perhaps the only thing that is still needed is peer review. That is the way to find out what needs to be charged for what in order to stay in business in an OA world. Not by insisting that the research institutions and funders pay for it all up-front at this time (which is precisely what the Royal Society is doing, if it names its asking price for paid OA a-priori, and opposes funder-mandated OA self-archiving by authors).
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum