SCOAP3 and the pre-emptive "flip" model for Gold OA conversion

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SUMMARY: Journal articles are purchased by institutions, or consortia of institutions, in bulk (jointly aggregated in journals, multi-journal fleets, or even multi-publisher fleets of fleets), whereas individual articles are published by authors individually, in their journal of choice (and only if and when they successfully pass that journal's peer review).
    Mark Rowse, former CEO of INGENTA, a journal subscription aggregator, has suggested that institutions and institutional consortia could "flip" collectively, from paying annually for subscription licenses that buy-in journals in bulk, to paying annually instead for the publishing (Gold OA) of their own institution's outgoing articles, likewise in bulk, in the same fleet of journals.
    SCOAP3 is an experimental implementation of a pre-emptive Rowsean flip, but it is local, and in a unique field (particle physics) that already provides 100% Green OA by self-archiving. SCOAP3's is hence simply a consortial subsidy ("sponsorship") to replace former subscriptions.
    This is unlikely to be globally scalable across disciplines, institutions, authors, articles and (competing) journals, not only because the asking price today is too high, but because successfully passing peer review is an individual author - article - journal - referee matter rather than something to be annually "bulk-subscribed" to, consortially, in advance.
    By way of an alternative, institutional Green OA self-archiving and mandates, unlike a Rowsean flip, can not only scale universally to provide 100% (Green) OA, but they can also prepare the ground for an eventual non-pre-emptive, non-Rowsean "flip" to Gold OA, by first offloading access-provision, archiving and their costs onto the network of Green OA Institutional Repositories, thereby helping to downsize publishing and its costs to just the costs of peer review.
    Those remaining costs can then be covered on an individual paper basis (non-bulk, non-consortial, non-aggregated, non-subscription, non-annual, non-pre-emptive) out of individual institutional subscription cancellation savings -- if and when Green OA should ever make subscriptions globally unsustainable. (Till then, no need for any pre-emptive conversion at all.)

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What follows is a note of caution about the generalizability of Mark Rowse's consortial "flip" model for pre-emptive conversion to Gold Open Access publishing and its current implementation by SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics), as promoted by CERN and the other participating institutions.

First, the important and unproblematic points of agreement:

1. CERN mandates Green OA self-archiving for all of its research output (and most particle physicists self-archive spontaneously in any case). 

If all other research institutions and universities, in all disciplines, worldwide, already did the same as CERN, then we would already have universal Green OA and there would be no problem with the SCOAP3 experiment, which would be risk-free, regardless of whether it proved scalable or sustainable. But as it is, only 44 other institutions and funders have so far done as CERN has done and only about 10-15% of annual research article output is being self-archived spontaneously.

2. CERN is very probably right that the eventual future of peer-reviewed journals will be that publishing costs are no longer recovered from user-institution subscription fees but from author-institution publishing fees. 

(Note that this is not "author pays" but "author-institution pays," as it should be, and does not entail diverting scarce research funds toward paying publishing fees.) 

However, if all other research institutions and universities, in all disciplines, worldwide, were, like CERN, already mandating the self-archiving of 100% of their research output today, hence if the archiving and access-provision service were already being offloaded onto the distributed network of OA Institutional Repositories instead of having to be provided by journals, then the essential cost of journal publishing would shrink to just the cost of providing peer review alone, and the asking price for that service alone would be far less than what is being charged currently for Gold OA and all the other products and services that are being co-bundled into Gold OA today (print edition, PDF, archiving, access-provision). Moreover, each author-institution's annual savings from its user-institution subscription cancellations would then be available to pay that much reduced asking price for peer review alone, per institutional paper published. (That would then be a natural, non-Rowsean "flip" that worked, thanks to universal Green OA.)

But there are several problems with the SCOAP3 approach at this time, and they arise from an incoherence at the heart of the "flip" model (in the pre-emptive form proposed by Mark Rowse, former CEO of the journal aggregator, INGENTA, in a proposal not unlike an even earlier one made by Arnoud De Kemp, then at Springer, for a "click-through oligopoly"):

3.1. The current asking price for Gold OA is vastly inflated. Because there is nowhere near universal Green OA self-archiving yet, paying for Gold OA at all today is not only premature and unnecessary (if, that is, our goal is OA itself, rather than something else [like lowering journal prices, maybe?]), but the current Gold OA asking price is unrealistically high. 

Green OA needs to come first, before conversion to Gold OA publishing. Then, if and when universal Green OA induces subscription cancellations, which in turn drive cost-cutting, and downsizing to the true essentials of OA publishing (with the print edition terminated and OA repositories taking over the burden of access-provision and archiving), peer review can be paid for by author-institutions, per outgoing paper published, instead of being paid for, as now, by user user-institutions, per incoming journal purchased. At the present time, however, there exist (a) neither the institutional need to pay to publish in order to provide OA nor (b) the institutional funds to pay to publish (because those funds are currently tied up in paying journal subscriptions, which are in turn covering the costs of publishing indirectly); in addition, (c) the price of publishing as it is currently done today, with everything that is still being co-bundled into it, is still far too high.

3.2. The Rowsean "flip" model is globally incoherent and unscalable. SCOAP3 consortial sponsorship/membership is not only based on an arbitrarily inflated asking price today, with inessentials (like the paper edition or the publisher's PDF) gratuitously co-bundled into it, but the consortial payment model itself is incoherent and unscalable, for two reasons:

(i) Why should institutions that can access all journal articles for free (Green) pay for Gold until/unless they have to (in order to get their own research output published)?

And (ii) on what basis are institutions to negotiate in advance with each individual journal (there are 25,000 in all!) how many of their researchers' papers will be accepted and published, per year, as if that too were some sort of annual subscription quota! Publishing is individual paper- and journal-based, not consortial bundled subscription-based.

4. Consortial institutional payment for co-bundled incoming journals does not translate into consortial payment for the peer review of institutions' individual outgoing articles. Consortial payment for publication gives the illusion of making sense only if one considers it locally, as CERN is doing, for one field (particle physics, a field that already has Green OA), with a set of collaborating institutions, ready and willing to "flip" to paying the same journals jointly for publishing, much as they had been paying jointly for subscribing. But this Rowsean "flip" model stops making sense as one scales up globally across fields, institutions, publishers and journals -- and particularly to that overwhelming majority of fields that do not yet have Green OA.

We are meant to imagine all institutions, pre-emptively paying all journals -- co-bundled, subscription/license-style -- in advance, for an annual "quota" (again subscription-style) of accepted publications. This is rather like paying for all meals, for all consumers, by all vendors, through advance annual "institutional" meal-plans, each consumer specifying to his institution, each year, what meals he intends to consume, from which vendor. And that still leaves out the crucial factor, which is that each vendor needs to "peer review" each individual meal-request to determine whether it is worthy of fulfilling at all (by that vendor)! It also leaves out the question of the price per meal, which today includes extras such as styrofoam containers, mustard, relish, salad bar, home delivery and a child's toy prize co-bundled into it, none of which the consumers may need or want any longer, once their institutional repositories can supply it all on their own...

5. Conclusions. In sum, the problem is not only that a Rowsean "flip" is profligate and premature at today's asking prices in fields where universal Green OA self-archiving has not yet downsized publishing and its costs to their post-OA essentials. Even apart from that, the Rowsean consortial "sponsorship/flip" model, simply does not scale up to all journals, across all fields, researchers and institutions, because it is based on the institutional co-bundled license/subscription model. That in turn involves an institutional library budget (1) pre-paying (i.e., subscribing to) a specific yearly quota of incoming journals (consisting of articles published by other institutions), per annual incoming journal (bundle), rather than (2) paying for the peer-review for each institution's own individual outgoing articles, per individual outgoing article.

Collective, bundled annual institutional subscriptions (for that is exactly what they would be!) are simply the wrong model for paying for individual, per-article peer review services. Twenty-five thousand peer-reviewed journals (publishing 2.5 million articles annually) cannot each agree in advance to accept an annual quota of N(i) articles from each of N (c. 10,000) institutions worldwide (and vice versa), even if many, most or all of the journals are "bundled" into a collective, bundled omni-publisher "Big Deal." Authors choose journals, journals compete for articles, and referees (not consortial subscribers) decide what gets accepted, where. (This could conceivably all be done in bulk for bulk publishers, on an annual pro-rated basis, based on last year's institutional publications, but then that would hardly be different from -- and certainly not simpler or more accurate than -- just paying each journal by the article.)

The Rowsean instant flip model has not been thought through beyond the confines of the special case of CERN, SCOAP3 and a long-self-archiving (hence Green) field (particle physics). As a consequence, instead of advancing universal Green self-archiving across all fields -- and thereby helping to set the stage for universal OA, and possibly eventual global cancellations, publication cost-cutting, downsizing, and conversion to per-article peer review services, paid for out of the institutional cancellation savings, via Gold OA (a gradual, global, leveraged, non-Rowsean "flip," driven by Green OA) -- the SCOAP3 consortium institutions are pushing through a (literally) pre-emptive solution for their library budget problems, in one special subfield (particle physics):

This would be fine (vive la liberté!), except that it also keeps being portrayed and perceived (by some, not everyone) as a scalable solution for achieving OA, which it most definitely is not. The prospect of an instant Rowsean "flip" is a local illusion, and hence a source of distraction and confusion for other fields and institutions worldwide, of which only 44 have as yet even made the successful transition to Green OA that particle physicists in general, and CERN in particular, have already made.

6. Recommendation. What is needed is prominent caveats and disclaimers clearly explaining the current unsuitability of the SCOAP3 "flip" model for the rest of the research world, along with the prominent injunction that the rest of the world's institutions and disciplines should first go Green, as CERN did, before contemplating any "flip-flops"...

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan: pp 99-106.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum