Open Access Via National and Global McNopoly? (Part 1 of 2)

Comments on "Open Access in the UK: Reinventing the Big Deal"
Richard Poynder's interview of publisher Jan Velterop in Open and Shut

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Publisher Wheeling & Dealing, Part I:
Comments on Richard Poynder’s Overview of Velterop Interview

Richard Poynder:
“The scholarly communication system has been in serious difficulties for several decades now, a problem generally referred to as the “serials crisis”…. the price of scholarly journals has consistently risen faster than the consumer price index… the Big Deal [single or multiple institutions committing to continue to pay single or multiple publishers the asking price for site licenses to all the journals to which they already subscribe in exchange for co-bundled access to all the journals to which they do not subscribe, at no extra cost] is by its very nature monopolistic… it locks libraries into an expensive and inflexible system that they can only extricate themselves from with great difficulty. Keen to find an alternative approach, the research community began to take an interest in Open Access (OA)."

It is important to keep in mind throughout this discussion that the origin and objective of the OA movement was not the serials crisis but the research accessibility problem: making peer-reviewed research accessible to all users, not just to users at institutions that can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published. The two problems are related, but they are not the same problem, and the solution to one is not necessarily a solution to the other.

Richard Poynder:
“The Big Deal… meant that anyone working in a higher education (HE) institution in the UK got free-at-the-point-of-use access to AP’s entire journal portfolio”

What about UK users not working at a HE institution?

Richard Poynder:
“most subsequent Big Deals were signed not with national funding bodies but with library consortia”

What about UK users other than those at consortial institutions?

Richard Poynder:
“to find an alternative approach [to the serials crisis], the research community began to take an interest in Open Access (OA). If papers were made freely available on the Internet, they reasoned, not only would researchers have access to everything they needed, but self-archiving (or green OA as it later became known) might ease the affordability problem, by enabling libraries to begin to cancel some of their journal subscriptions”

OA self-archiving was born not as an alternative approach to the serials crisis but as a natural way to use the new online medium to maximize research usage and access. (But, yes, the thought was and is that it will eventually solve the serials crisis too.)

Richard Poynder:
“bulk purchase “membership” schemes that OA publishers like BioMed Central and Springer began to offer… bought the institution’s researchers the right to publish in OA journals without having to pay on a per-article basis”

This is not the same deal when journal is pure Gold and hybrid Gold.

Pure Gold is pure “membership” (how many peer-reviewed articles per journal per institution are publishable per year, per membership deal? is acceptance guaranteed? how many journals in the deal?).

Hybrid Gold is consortial subscription membership (incoming), plus pay-to-publish membership (outgoing) (raising the same questions as above).

Richard Poynder:
“[there was the] belief that OA publishing … would impose price restraint on publishers… with author-pays-OA, the buying decision is made by researchers themselves, not by an intermediary. And since authors are able to publish in a variety of different journals, they can shop around…”

Authors pay, but journals accept/reject. Author-pays creates conflict of interest for the journal (quality standards versus revenue). And authors don’t want the cheapest journal but the highest quality journal. (There is a solution – no-fault peer review – but it can only work after publishing has been forced by global Green OA to downsize to just the peer-review service alone.)

Richard Poynder:
“Membership schemes also tend to push authors in the direction of those publishers that their library has a publishing contract with, thus limiting choice”

Correct. And this choice constraint is perhaps even worse for authors’ own outgoing articles than for their incoming reading matter.

Richard Poynder:
“[With] gold OA funds… the money does not come from the author’s own research budget, so price is unlikely to be a deciding factor when an author is looking for an OA journal in which to publish”

Why should it be? Shouldn’t quality standards be the deciding factor? And why should publication be paid out of a researcher’s (scarce) research funds? (After Green OA has become universal, the no-fault peer review service can be paid out of a fraction of the institution’s annual subscription cancelation windfall savings.)

Richard Poynder:
“as self-archiving took off, subscription publishers soon concluded that it posed a serious threat to their revenues. And… insisted on self-archiving embargoes”

Under researcher pressure for OA (e.g., PLoS petition in 2001, BOAI, Berlin Declaration), 60% of publishers (including most of the top publishers) endorsed immediate, no-embargo Green OA.

(But I don’t doubt that, unless fixed, the recent Finch/RCUK U-turn, the result of successful publisher lobbying, will motivate publishers to adopt and lengthen embargoes and accept still more UK money instead for hybrid Gold OA…)

Richard Poynder:
“hybrid OA allows publishers to “double dip” — i.e. earn revenues from both APCs and subscriptions.”

If the UK paid publishers extra fees for Gold OA to all of its research output, that would increase publishers’ total subscription revenues by about 6%, and then the UK would get back 6% of that extra 6% as a rebate on their contribution to lowering worldwide subscription fees by 6%.

But let’s suppose instead that -- in a remarkable feat of collective vendor-cartel vs. consumer-consortium bargaining -- a cartel of all the world’s publishers (now all transformed into hybrid subscription/Gold publishers + pure Gold publishers) -- faithfully converted every penny of UK Gold revenue into UK subscription reductions for a consortium of all UK HE institutions. This would be tantamount to giving UK HE subscribers the bonus of hybrid Gold OA to their own outgoing research output at the same price that they are currently paying via subscriptions for incoming research output from the UK [6%] and the rest of the world [94%].

Here are some questions to ask about the probability, desirability, sustainability and scalability of such an arrangement:

Probability: Can the UK government negotiate on behalf of all potential UK users of research journals – not just HE institutions, but industries, big and small, public and private libraries, etc. – using UK tax revenues ear-marked for research, in order to ensure that they all have not only Gold OA to UK research output, but also subscription access to non-UK output (94%)?

And once that’s settled, can and would all the world’s publishers, Gold and Hybrid, collaborate in such a cartel? (Though long urged by journal publishers, this sort of McNopolistic collective producer-cartel/consumer-consortium bargaining is not notably successful in the case of global necessities such as water, food and oil -- and those are not even hybrid – otherwise surely McDonalds and Burger King would surely get into the whopping national prepaid Big Mac licensing business too.)

Desirability: Do we really want to lock in publishers’ current revenue streams in exchange for Gold OA? Are we so sure publishers are providing anywhere near fair value for fair cost today, with their current prices and current co-bundled print-era products and services (text-production, print edition, online edition, access-provision, archiving and peer review)? Do we want to lock in all those add-ons and price-tags year upon year, inescapably, with no hope of phasing out the inessentials, cost-cutting and downsizing?

As you read on, below, keep in mind that in promoting this Whopping New Deal -- Cartel/Consortial McLicense McNopoly bargaining -- Jan Velterop seems to agree (I'm not sure) that managing peer review is really all that’s left that publishers need to do in the OA era:

Is managing peer review for (say) 200,000 outgoing UK paper submissions per year (peers review for free) really worth locking in what the UK is currently paying for incoming subscriptions in perpetuo?

Because that’s what a Gold OA McNopoly would be, if peer review services were bought and sold nationally en bloc, instead of per individual paper, at a fair per-paper price for just the peer review management alone.

And the difference in price is roughly of the order of $1000-$5000+ per paper (as co-bundled today) versus $100-$200 per paper, per round of review, unbundled: in other words, a difference of the order of more than 10/1.

(An editor picks the referees; software plus an editorial assistant manage the review; the editor does the disposition once the reviews are received. -- I know how it goes: I edited a rigorously peer-reviewed journal for a quarter century.)

Does this sort of simple per-paper service transaction really warrant a national (or global) McNopoly, locking in all the obsolete co-bundled extras, and their prices?

Sustainability: Would paying a UK collective cartel/consortial McNopoly McLicense in exchange for Gold OA be stable year after year, with waxing and waning national finances? Subscriptions can be cancelled by the piece (journal), but where’s the bargaining power in a McNopoly? Lower your price or I’ll revert to subscriptions (and lose Gold OA)?

Scalability: Is it likely that other countries have the finances (or desire) to follow suit, and make similar national McNopoly arrangements too? Would little Belgium willingly lock itself into its current total national subscription outlay, in exchange for Gold OA for its outgoing (say) 20,000 papers a year? (Remember that the ratio between the print-subscription era cost and the downsized peer-review-alone cost is probably over 10/1.)

Richard Poynder:
“As a result, rather than reducing costs, Finch estimated that its proposal would require an additional £50-60 million a year, £38m of which would be needed to pay APCs”

Correct. But the worst of it is not that the UK pays more in exchange for making UK research Gold OA, instead of just mandating Green OA at no extra cost, but that the RCUK policy incentivizes publishers worldwide to offer hybrid Gold OA and increase their Green OA embargoes, thereby reducing Green Open Access to the rest of the world’s research (94%).

Richard Poynder:
“as directed by Finch, RCUK will require that authors prioritise gold over green, with institutional repositories relegated to the role of preservation and data archiving”

Not quite. Finch declared the latter (i.e., that Green is just good for preservation, not for OA), but RCUK still “allow” Green for OA if the chosen journal does not offer Gold.

(Mark Thorley’s clarification of the intended meaning of the “where a publisher does not offer Gold… journal must allow… [Green]” wording as meaning “You may choose Gold or Green”, does suggest that fundees may freely choose Gold or Green – though it is not at all clear why RCUK does not wish to fix the wording so that it says so.)

Richard Poynder:
“Nevertheless, [RCUK] has refused to change the wording of its policy, which clearly states that researchers must prefer gold over green”

And that, in itself, is a curious fact, especially if, as Mark Thorley keeps repeating, the wording actually means that researchers are free to pick either gold or green. (Ambivalence? Feeling the pinch from Finch – or rather, the bite from BIS?)

Richard Poynder:
“With Finch/RCUK, says Harnad, ‘publishers get their grotesquely inflated revenues, and the world gets gold OA in exchange’”

Gold OA to UK research, that is (6%)…

Richard Poynder:
“The question is whether at some point this could morph into Velterop’s New Big Deal and, if it did, whether such an approach would solve the affordability problem.”

Hybrid Gold can certainly morph into pure Gold, at the same total price as current subscriptions. (But the remaining 94% of the world is not going to follow the UK’s lead in double-paying for it pre-emptively – instead of mandating Green, and letting that provide OA, and perhaps eventually also forcing publishers to downsize to peer review service alone, paid, per submission, via fair and affordable Gold.)

Richard Poynder:
“…UCL’s David Price would like to see a kind of Big Deal approach used to help the transition to OA — what he calls a ‘true national licence’”

A UK national hybrid license (subscription + Gold) cannot possibly give the UK Gold OA to the UK’s own 6% output (plus subscription access to the rest of the world’s 94% output) for less than or even the same amount as the UK is paying for subscriptions today. Think it through:

If worldwide publishers’ subscription revenue were increased by 6% over what it is now, through hybrid Gold payment, and publishers were to give it all back to the UK in the form of a subscription rebate, then that would be exactly the same as saying “We will give you Gold OA for free, over and above what you are already paying us for subscriptions.” So if hybrid publishers do give back any of their 6% windfall, it is unlikely to be right back to the UK, but distributed to subscribers worldwide. The UK only gets back about 6% of that 6% (assuming the UK’s buy-in costs are about the same as its share of total research output).

So I think David Price should not be advocating a national hybrid Gold license but a national Green OA mandate (by RCUK, as well as by UK universities).

(And the mandatory deposit locus should be each institution’s repository -- where compliance can be verified by the institution, and the institution can showcase its own research assets -- not in some central institution-external repository.)

David Price (in interview with Richard Poynder):
“to help the UK transition to OA… For an agreed amount, publishers allow access to their content by all sectors in society”

Not quite. A national hybrid Gold license would mean the whole world gets OA to the UK’s 6% output, fine.

But then what about access to all the rest of publishers’ content for all sectors in UK society? How does that work? Free UK-wide online access to all content (both the UK’s 6% Gold and the rest of the world’s 94% subscription content?)?

More likely, this would just mean that UK HE institutions plus designated industrial user sites and libraries get subscription access to the rest of the world’s 94% output, at about the same cost to the UK as the cost of the UK’s current subscription costs, plus the Gold OA surcharge (say, 6% of publishers’ current worldwide subscription revenue, minus a rebate to the UK of 6% of 6%).

That’s a pricey transition for the UK in exchange for OA to its own research output – compared to just mandating Green OA at no added cost -- but it’s also an unaffordable, unscalable solution for the rest of the world (and probably not sustainable in the UK either). So it’s certainly not a transition scenario for global OA, but rather an obstacle to it (inducing publishers to offer hybrid Gold and to lengthen their Green embargoes).

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Publisher Wheeling & Dealing, Part II:
Comments on Jan Velterop's Responses to Poynder Interview