Publishing Costs

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RICHARD POYNDER:
Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity: Mistaking intent for action?
Open and Shut, 26 September 2009

"The recent launch of the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE) has attracted both plaudits (e.g. here and here) and criticism (e. g. here and here). -- What is COPE? It is..." (click here to continue).

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Stuart Shieber, architect of Harvard's OA Mandate, asks:

"Do we continue the status quo, which involves only supporting a business model known to be subject to uncontrolled inflationary spirals, or do we experiment with new mechanisms that have the potential to be economically sound and far more open to boot?"

The answer is simple: The only reason the uncontrolled inflation of journal subscription costs is a problem at all (and also the reason the upward spiral continues uncontrolled) is the world's universities' inelastic demand and need for access to one another's peer-reviewed journal articles.

Hence the solution is for universities -- who also happen to be the universal providers of all those journal articles -- to provide Open Access (free online access) to their own institution's subset of that total journal article output by mandating that the peer-reviewed final drafts be deposited by their own institutional authors in their own institutional repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication.

Universal OA self-archiving moots the problem of uncontrolled subscription-cost inflation by putting an end to the inelasticity of the demand: If your university cannot afford the subscription price for journal X, your users will still have access to the OA version.

There is no need for universities to try to reform journal economics directly now. What is urgently needed, universally reachable, and already long overdue is universal OA self-archiving mandates from universities. Focusing instead on reforming journal business models pre-emptively is simply distracting from and hence delaying the fulfillment of this pressing need.

Harvard should focus all its energy and prestige on universalizing OA self-archiving mandates rather than dissipating it needlessly and counterproductively on journal economics and OA funds.

Once OA self-archiving is universal, journal economics will take care of itself quite naturally of its own accord.

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age, pp. 99-105, L'Harmattan.

ABSTRACT: What the research community needs, urgently, is free online access (Open Access, OA) to its own peer-reviewed research output. Researchers can provide that in two ways: by publishing their articles in OA journals (Gold OA) or by continuing to publish in non-OA journals and self-archiving their final peer-reviewed drafts in their own OA Institutional Repositories (Green OA). OA self-archiving, once it is mandated by research institutions and funders, can reliably generate 100% Green OA. Gold OA requires journals to convert to OA publishing (which is not in the hands of the research community) and it also requires the funds to cover the Gold OA publication costs. With 100% Green OA, the research community's access and impact problems are already solved. If and when 100% Green OA should cause significant cancellation pressure (no one knows whether or when that will happen, because OA Green grows anarchically, article by article, not journal by journal) then the cancellation pressure will cause cost-cutting, downsizing and eventually a leveraged transition to OA (Gold) publishing on the part of journals. As subscription revenues shrink, institutional windfall savings from cancellations grow. If and when journal subscriptions become unsustainable, per-article publishing costs will be low enough, and institutional savings will be high enough to cover them, because publishing will have downsized to just peer-review service provision alone, offloading text-generation onto authors and access-provision and archiving onto the global network of OA Institutional Repositories. Green OA will have leveraged a transition to Gold OA.

It is beyond my powers of comprehension to fathom why Cornell University would want to throw $50K of scarce library funds at funding Gold OA publication (for at most 1% of Cornell's annual journal article output) without first mandating Green OA (for the remaining 99% of Cornell's annual journal article output) at no cost at all.

Yes, $50K is a pittance compared to Cornell's $18M library budget (of which about half is for journal subscriptions, based on ARL statistics for 2006). But wasn't this supposed to be about providing OA to Cornell's research output?

If and when all of Cornell's annual journal article output -- about 7.5K articles per year, according to Web of Science -- is made Green OA by a self-archiving mandate, and all other universities do likewise, the planet will have 100% Green OA to all journal articles. If and when the availability of universal green OA induces institutions to cancel all their journal subscriptions, then Cornell's $9M annual windfall cancellation savings will be more than enough to pay the peer review costs for Gold OA for its annual 7.5K articles. Paying a much higher price per article pre-emptively now, when the relevant funds are still tied up in subscriptions, while not even providing Green OA to 100% of Cornell's own research output, is a real head-shaker.

The only advice I can give is that if Cornell as a whole cannot yet achieve consensus on adopting a university-wide Green OA mandate -- as MIT and other universities have done -- then the wiser of Cornell's Colleges, Schools and Departments could just go ahead and adopt "patchwork mandates" of their own (as Arthur Sale already recommended, presciently, in 2006, and as subsets of Harvard, Stanford, and other universities have recently done).

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Against Squandering Scarce Research Funds on Pre-Emptive Gold OA... 15 May 2009  

Pre-Emptive Gold Fever Strikes Again... 23 Apr 2009  

On Throwing Money At Gold OA Without First Mandating Green OA 28 Mar 2009

University of California: Throwing Money At Gold OA Without 8 Mar 2009  

Conflicts of Interest in Open Access... 1 May 2009  

Green OA is no threat to grants: Pre-emptive Gold OA, today, might 24 Jan 2007

More OA Somnambulism: Conflating the Journal Affordability and... 5 Mar 2009  

SCOAP3 and the pre-emptive "flip" model for Gold OA conversion 23 Jun 2008

Harvard's Stuart Shieber on Open Access at CalTech and Berkeley... 17 Apr 2009

Publisher anti-OA Lobby Triumphs in European Commission... 13 Jul 2007

Physics World: The CERN Gold OA Initiative 8 Mar 2007  

On "Open Access" Publishers Who Oppose Open Access Self-Archiving 3 Mar 2007  

Gold and Green Keynotes at IATUL 2007 11 Jun 2007  

Cliff Lynch on Open Access 12 Jan 2007 

Journal Affordability, Research Accessibility, and Open Access 14 Jun 2008  

Clarifying the Logic of Open Choice: I (of 2) 23 Mar 2007  

OA Primer for the Perplexed: I 25 May 2008  

Critique of EPS/RIN/RCUK/DTI "Evidence-Based Analysis of Data..." 8 Oct 2006

Pre-Emptive Gold OA. There is a fundamental strategic point for Open Access (OA) that cannot be made often enough, because it concerns one of the two biggest retardants on OA progress today -- and the retardant that has, I think, lately become the bigger of the two.

(The other major retardant is copyright worries, but those have shrunk dramatically, because most journals have now endorsed immediate Green OA self-archiving, and the ID/OA mandate can provide immediate "almost-OA" even for articles in the minority of journals that still do not yet endorse immediate OA.)

The biggest retardant on OA progress today is hence a distracting focus on pre-emptive Gold OA (including the conflation of the journal affordability problem with the research accessibility problem, and the conflation of Gold OA with OA itself, wrongly supposing that OA or "full OA" means Gold OA -- instead of concentrating all efforts on universalizing Green OA mandates.

Conflating the Journal Affordability Problem with the Research Accessibility Problem. Although the journal affordability problem ("serials crisis") was historically one of the most important factors in drawing attention to the need for OA, and although there is definitely a causal link between the journal affordability problem and the research accessibility problem (namely, that if all journals were affordable to all institutions, there would be no research access problem!), affordability and accessibility are nevertheless not the same problem, and the conflation of the two, and especially the tendency to portray affordability as the primary or ultimate problem, is today causing great confusion and even greater delay in achieving OA itself, despite the fact the universal OA is already fully within reach.

The reason is as simple to state as it is (paradoxically) hard to get people to pay attention to, take into account, and act accordingly:

Just as it is true that there would be no research accessibility problem if the the journal affordability problem were solved (because all institutions, and all their researchers, would then have affordable access to all journals), it is also true that the journal affordability problem would cease to be a real problem if the research accessibility problem were solved: If all researchers (indeed everyone) could access all journal articles for free online, then it would no longer matter how much journals cost, and which institutions were willing and able to pay for which journals. After universal Green OA, journals may or may not eventually become more affordable, or convert to Gold OA: It would no longer matter either way, for we would already have OA -- full OA -- itself. And surely access is what Open Access is and always was about.

It is this absolutely fundamental point that is still lost on most OA advocates today. And it is obvious why most OA advocates don't notice or take it into account: Because we are still so far away from universal OA of either hue, Green or Gold. 

Green OA Can Be Mandated, Gold OA Cannot. But here there is an equally fundamental difference: Green OA self-archiving can be accelerated and scaled up to universality (and this can be done at virtually zero cost) by the research community alone -- i.e., research institutions (largely universities) and research funders -- by mandating Green OA. 

In contrast, Gold OA depends on publishers, costs money (often substantial money), and cannot be mandated by institutions and funders: All they can do is throw money at it -- already-scarce research money, and at an asking-price that is today vastly inflated compared to what the true cost would eventually be if the conversion to Gold OA were driven by journal cancellations, following as a result of universal Green OA. For if universal Green OA, in completely solving the research access problem, did eventually make subscriptions no longer sustainable as the means of recovering publishing costs, then (a small part of) the windfall institutional savings from the journal cancellations themselves -- rather than scarce research funds -- could be used to pay for the Gold OA.

So instead of focusing all efforts today on ensuring that all institutions and funders worldwide mandate Green OA, as soon as possible, many OA advocates continue to be fixated instead on trying to solve the journal affordability problem directly, by wasting precious research money on paying for Gold OA (at a time when publication is still being fully paid for by subscriptions, whereas research is sadly underfunded) and by encouraging researchers to publish in Gold OA journals. This is being done at a time when (1) Gold OA journals are few, especially among the top journals in each field, (2) the top Gold OA journals themselves are expensive, and, most important of all, (3) publishing in them is completely unnecessary -- if the objective is, as it ought to be, to provide immediate OA. For OA can be provided through immediate Green OA self-archiving. Worst of all, even as they talk of spending what money they have to spare on Gold OA, the overwhelming majority of institutions and funders (unlike FWF) still do not mandate Green OA! Only 80 out of at least 10,000 do so as yet.

"Gold Fever." That is why I have labelled this widespread (and, in my view, completely irrational and counterproductive) fixation on Gold OA and journal affordability "Gold Fever": trying to pre-emptively convert journals to Gold OA -- to buy OA, in effect -- at a time when all that is needed, and needed urgently, is to mandate Green OA, and then to let nature take care of the rest.

(Universal Green OA will eventually make subscriptions unsustainable and induce publishers to cut costs, jettison the print edition, jettison the online PDF edition, offload all archiving and access-provision onto the distributed network of Institutional and Central Repositories, downsize to just providing the service of peer-review alone, and convert to the Gold OA model for cost recovery -- but at the far lower price of peer review alone, rather than at the inflated pre-emptive asking prices that are being needlessly paid today, without the prerequisite downsizing to peer review alone).

In other words, to see or describe Green OA as only a partial or short-term solution for OA is not only (in my view) inaccurate, but it is also counterproductive for OA -- retarding instead of facilitating the requisite universal adoption of Green OA self-archiving mandates: 

If universal Green OA were just a partial or short-term solution, for precisely what problem would it be just a partial or short-term solution? For universal Green OA is a full, permanent solution for the research accessibility problem; that in turn removes all of the urgency and importance of the journal affordability problem -- which can then eventually, at its own natural pace, be solved by institutions cancelling subscriptions once universal Green OA has been reached (since all research is thereafter freely accessible to all users universally), thereby inducing journals to downsize and convert to Gold. 

Instead trying to promote the Gold OA publication-charge model now, pre-emptively, is not only unnecessary and wasteful (spending more money, at an arbitrarily high asking price, instead of saving it), but it distracts from and blurs what is the real, urgent need, and the real solution, which is to mandate Green OA, now, universally. That -- and not pre-emptively paying Gold OA's arbitrary current asking price -- is what needs to be done today!

See:  "Gold Fever" and "Trojan Folly."

OA Books? The third most important distraction and deterrent to universal Green OA is to conflate OA's primary target -- journal articles, which are all, without exception, in all disciplines, author give-aways, written solely for the sake of research uptake and impact, not for royalty income -- with books, which are not OA's primary target, are not written solely for research uptake and impact, have immediate cost-recovery implications for the publisher, book by book, are not nearly as urgent a matter as journal-article access for research, and will, like Gold OA, evolve naturally of their own accord once universal Green OA has prevailed.

But for now, conflating OA with book access is simply another retardant on the urgent immediate priority, which is Green OA mandates (of which -- as we should keep reminding ourselves -- we still have only 80 out of 10,000, while we keep fussing instead, needlessly, about Gold OA, journal affordability, and book OA).

(Having said that, however, it must be added that of course the funder has a say in attaching conditions to the publication of a book whose publication costs the funder subsidizes! But then the greatest care should be taken to separate those special cases completely from OA -- whose primary target is journal articles -- and Green OA mandates, whose sole target is journal articles.)

Data-Archiving. Like book OA -- and in contrast to OA's urgent, primary target: refereed-journal-article OA -- data OA is not yet a clearcut and exception-free domain. Please see these postings on data-archiving.

Unlike articles and books, data self-archiving is not restricted by copyright transfer from the researcher to the publisher. In itself, this would seem to be a good thing: Authors can already archive their data if they wish to; they need not worry that it might violate their publisher's policy or rights.

So -- we should ask ourselves -- why don't most authors do it yet?

The answer is two-fold: If the author does not first provide OA to the journal article that describes and analyzes the research, the author's data are far less useful. So Green OA itself will facilitate and incentivize data-OA.

But, even more important, not all (perhaps not even most) researchers want to make their data OA, at least not until they have had all the time they need and want to data-mine it themselves (and sometimes that can require years). The incentive to gather data would plunge considerably if researchers were forced to declare it open season for all researchers to analyze their hard-won data as soon as it was gathered!

Hence institutions and funders should definitely encourage their researchers to deposit their data in their Institutional Repositories (IRs) as soon as they can, but to leave that up to them. In clear contrast, institutions and funders should mandate that the final, refereed, accepted drafts of all journal articles should be deposited in their IRs immediately upon acceptance for publication. 

Earlier Drafts.The story is approximately the same for unrefereed preprints as it is for data and for books: Researchers can be encouraged to deposit their earlier drafts (and in some fields authors have been doing so for years), but on no account should it be required. The only thing that needs to be required is the deposit of the refereed, accepted final draft of all journal articles. Publishing in a Gold OA journal can also be encouraged, but again, on no account mandated; and money need not and should not be thrown at it either (by any funder that has not already mandated Green OA), not only because the expense is not necessary in order to provide OA itself, but because the pre-emptive asking price today is arbitrarily high, subscriptions are still paying for most journals, and the majority of existing Gold OA journals do not even charge for publication, but continue to sustain themselves on subscriptions and subsidy!)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Trying to morph incoming institutional non-OA journal-fleet subscriptions into outgoing institutional Gold OA journal-fleet "memberships" is incoherent and cannot scale across journals and institutions; alongside an institutional Green OA mandate, however, it is innocuous: The Green mandates will ensure the real, leveraged, scalable, unstoppable progress toward global OA. Without an institutional Green OA mandate, pursuing local Gold OA "memberships" is not only futile but a retardant on real progress toward global OA, creating instead an illusory local sense of progress that further distracts from and obscures what really needs to be done locally to generate global OA.

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On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 8:32 AM, Ivy Anderson (UCoP) (IA) wrote (about University of California’s (UC’s) arrangement with Springer to renew Springer journals on condition that all UC authors’ articles published in Springer journals are made Gold OA and deposited in UC’s Institutional Repository (eScholarship) by Springer):

IA: “Researchers’ apathy toward voluntary self-deposit (except in narrow disciplines) has begun to be viewed by some as an indicator of indifference – if scholars truly cared (the argument goes), the game should be changing much more rapidly, since they themselves are the true owners of the system.”

It is not quite accurate to say that researchers are apathetic about self-deposits. Rather, most universities and funders (with the exception of the 68 that have already done so) seem to be apathetic (or, more accurately, narcoleptic) about mandating self-deposit (Green OA).

The attitude of researchers themselves has been surveyed in several international, interdisciplinary studies, and their expressed view is consistent:

"The vast majority of authors (81%)...[in a Key Perspectives] international, cross-disciplinary author study on open access [with] 1296 respondents... would willingly comply with a mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional or subject-based repository. A further 13% would comply reluctantly; 5% would not comply with such a mandate." (Swan 2005)

These author attitude-survey outcomes have since been confirmed in actual author behavior by Arthur Sale, whose studies have shown that, if (and only if) deposit is actually mandated, authors do indeed self-deposit, and their deposit rates rise from the global spontaneous (i.e., unmandated) rate of c. 15% to approach 100% within about 2 years of the adoption of the Green OA mandate. The 68 university and funder mandates to date are further confirming this (including NIH’s delayed upgrade to a mandate, with deposits up from <5% before the mandate to 60% within the first year of adoption).



The three main reasons researchers are not self-archiving until it is mandated are (1) worries that it might be illegal, (2) worries that it might put acceptance by their preferred journal at risk, and (3) worries that it might take a lot of time. They need Green OA mandates from their institutions and funders not in order to coerce them to self-archive but in order to embolden them to self-archive, making it official policy that it is not only okay for them to deposit their research article output in their institution's repository, but that it is expected of them, and well worth the few minutes worth of extra keystrokes per paper.

UC renewing Springer’s fleet of 2000 journals may have merits of its own, but apart from that it seems a pricey way to spare UC authors’ a few minutes’ worth of (Green OA) keystrokes.

IA: “The same can be said of author-sponsored gold OA (it is not that hard for an editorial board to resign and take its journal elsewhere – at least it should not be, if there were an obvious somewhere else to go).”

But a rather crucial difference is that universities and funders can mandate that their employees and fundees self-deposit, but they cannot mandate that their employees and fundees resign from editiorial boards, nor can they mandate that publishers provide Gold OA, as publishers are neither their employees nor their fundees.

Universities and funders can pay publishers to provide OA, evidently, but it is the wisdom as well as the scalability of that strategy that is at issue here! What looks as if it will work locally for one university, dealing with one publisher, does not scale up to 10,000 universities doing it with the publishers of 25,000 journals, not even for the subset of those journals that each university currently subscribes to: Annual university subscriptions to incoming journals or journal-fleets are fundamentally different from annual university “memberships” in exchange for the publication of outgoing articles: Articles are not published on the basis of an annual journal/publisher quota but on the basis of the individual peer-review outcome, per article, per journal.

IA: “Gold OA journals that require a one-to-one correspondence between ‘membership’ fees and author uptake are beginning to lose library support”

Exactly. (And "memberships" would never have had library support in the first place, if their incoherent scaling scenario had been thought through in advance, as above.)

Librarians have been at the vanguard of the Open Access movement from the beginning, often trying heroically, but in vain, to convince the faculty in other disciplines university-wide to deposit, as well as to convince the university itself to mandate deposit. There is now something the Library Faculty can do on its own, to provide an example for the rest of the university, along the lines of Arthur's Sale's suggestion that rather than just waiting for university-wide mandates, "patchwork mandates" should be adopted at the laboratory, department or faculty level. The Library Faculty at Oregon State University has just shown the way, adopting the planet's first Green OA Mandate by a Library Faculty.

IA: “My own conversations and observations lead me to believe that for most authors, the difficulties and uncertainties, rather than the desirability of the outcome, are the main obstacle. But if academic administrators believe that researchers don’t care, then support for institutional repositories, which entail their own costs, will wither in difficult times. Large acts are needed, ones which place a significant amount of research output on an open access footing in ways that capture people’s interest and imagination. Harvard’s mandate is certainly one such act.”

You seem to have answered your own question: Mandate Green OA, as Harvard did.

And as to difficult times: We're in them! And there are few lower-cost investments for a university today -- a linux server, a piece of free software, a few days sysad set-up time, and a few days a year sysad maintenance time... plus the adoption of a (free of charge) Green OA self-archiving mandate -- that can generate benefits anywhere near the order of magnitude of the benefits of OA.

IA: “UC’s largescale arrangement with a major publisher is another...”

Not unless you can explain how it is to scale from just an ad hoc local arrangement between one university (even one as big as UC) and one (big) fleet-publisher to something that can work for all universities and all journals without dissolving into Escher-drawing incoherence.

IA: “In UC’s arrangement with Springer, UC-authored articles will be deposited in our eScholarship repository. If enough other institutions followed suit (and 3 other European organizations have already preceded us), a large number of papers in those journals will be available in institutional repositories. Some of my librarian colleagues (the ones most skeptical of this experiment) have told me that if that happens, their institutions will cancel, and the system will convulse.”

Please explain to me how paying for Gold OA for a university’s own article output, in a particular journal or journal-fleet, via a university subscription/membership for that journal or journal fleet, will induce cancellations of that journal or journal-fleet: Who will cancel? The nonsubscribing institutions? (They have nothing to cancel.) The subscribing institutions? But then what happens to their own authors’ Gold OA output to that journal or journal-fleet? And what happens to their own users’ need for access to that journal or journal-fleet, if the Gold OA is no longer being paid for? And how do you cancel journals when they are still part Gold OA and part not?

My guess is that not even a small fraction of these awkward contingencies has even been considered by UC, let alone thought-through, in this somnambulistic plunge into institutional gilded OA deals. Nor is it in any publisher’s interest, in negotiating a Big Deal like this, to awaken their client to any of these troublesome complications (since complications concern how that client is to deal with that publisher's competitors, further down the road, once this particular “Big Deal” is no longer the only deal in town...).

Just to clarify: My beef is not at all with Springer, for trying to make the best deal they can. Springer is fully Green on immediate, unembargoed self-archiving by their authors. That means Springer is squarely on the Side of the Angels, insofar as OA is concerned. My beef is with the naivete of the universities who keep somnambulating toward the Escherian glitter without first grasping the green that is within their reach: Mandate Green OA and then make whatever subscription/membership deal you like and can afford. Just don't go for the Gold without first grasping the Green!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

In this JISC report, Houghton et al. estimate that the UK could save around £80 million per year by shifting from toll access to open access publishing or £115 million per year by moving from toll access to open access self-archiving. The greater accessibility to research could result in an additional £172 million worth of benefits per year from the government and higher education sector research alone. [See also 1 and 2.]

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Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the costs and benefits

Authors: John Houghton, Bruce Rasmussen and Peter Sheehan, Victoria University and Charles Oppenheim, Anne Morris, Claire Creaser, Helen Greenwood, Mark Summers and Adrian Gourlay, Loughborough University
Publication date: 27 January 2009
Publication Type(s): Reports
JISC theme(s): Information environment
Programmes: Repositories and Preservation programme

Press Release (JISC-ANNOUNCE)

January 27th, 2009: Sharing research information via a more open access publishing model would bring millions of pounds worth of savings to the higher education sector as well as benefiting UK plc. This is one of the key findings from a new research project commissioned by JISC.

Professor John Houghton from the Centre of Strategic Economic Studies at Melbourne's Victoria University and Professor Charles Oppenheim at Loughborough University were asked to lead research that would throw light on the economic and social implications of new models for scholarly publishing.

The research centred on three models which include:

- Subscription or toll access publishing which involves reader charges and use restrictions;

- Open access publishing where access is free and publication is funded from the authors' side; and

- Open access self-archiving where academic authors post their work in online repositories, making it freely available to all Internet users.

In their report, Houghton et al. looked beyond the actual costs and savings of different models and examined the additional cost-benefits that might arise from enhanced access to research findings.

The research and findings reveal that core scholarly publishing system activities cost the UK higher education sector around £5 billion in 2007. Using the different models, the report shows, what the estimated cost would have been:

- £230 million to publish using the subscription model,

- £150 million to publish under the open access model and

- £110 million to publish with the self-archiving with peer review services

plus some £20 million in operating costs if using the different models.

When considering costs per journal article, Houghton et al. believe that the UK higher education sector could have saved around £80 million a year by shifting from toll access to open access publishing. They also claim that £115 million could be saved by moving from toll access to open access self-archiving.

In addition to that, the financial return to UK plc from greater accessibility to research might result in an additional £172 million per annum worth of benefits from government and higher education sector research alone.

JISC's Chair Professor Sir Tim O'Shea said, "The argument for moving from more traditional subscription or toll-based publishing to a model that allows for greater accessibility and makes full use of the advances in technology cannot be ignored. This report shows there are significant savings to be made and benefits to be had."

"JISC will work with publishers, authors and the science community to identify and help to remove the barriers to moving to these more cost-effective models," he added.

Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, commended the report and added that, "as a research funder that provides additional funds to its grantholders to meet the cost of open access publishing, I am delighted that this report vindicates this approach and shows that the benefits of enhanced accessibility outweigh the costs of supplementing research funds with 'author-pays' open access publishing fees".

Professor Ian Diamond, speaking on behalf of Research Councils UK said,"RCUK welcomes this substantial and interesting report. It will be of great use to the Research Councils as we develop our future policies in relation to publishing and in particular open access."

Download full report

Submission fees as a potential means of covering peer review costs have been mooted since at least 1999 and much discussed across the years in the American Scientist Open Access Forum. They are indeed a promising and potentially viable mechanism for covering the costs of peer review.

However, today, when 90% of journals (and almost 100% of the top journals) are still subscription-based, publication charges of any kind are still a deterrent. There is a case to be made, however, that submission charges -- for peer review -- applied to all submissions, regardless of whether they are ultimately accepted or rejected, are a more understandable and justifiable expense than publication charges, applied only to accepted articles (and bearing the additional burden of the cost of the peer review for all the rejected articles too).

It remains true, however, that at a time when most peer-reviewed journals are still subscription-based -- and when Green OA self-archiving is available as the authors' means to make all their published articles OA -- it is an unnecessary additional constraint and burden for authors (or their institutions or funders) to have to pay in any way for OA. While subscriptions are still paying the costs of peer review, the only source for paying publication charges -- whether for submission of acceptance -- is already-scarce research funds.

It makes incomparably more sense to focus all OA efforts on Green OA self-archiving and Green OA self-archiving mandates at this time. That will generate universal (Green) OA. If and when that should in turn make subscriptions unsustainable, then the subscription cancellation savings can be used to pay for a transition to Gold OA charges to cover the costs of the peer review.

Today, in contrast, such charges (whether for submission or acceptance) are not only a gratuitous additional burden for authors, their institutions and their funders, but they are a distraction from the immediate need for universal Green OA self-archiving and Green OA self-archiving mandates from all research institutions and funders.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

I am not at all sure that Kudos are in order for Oxford University Press (OUP), just because they offer authors at subscribing institutions a discount on their hybrid Gold OA fee:

Unlike the American Psychological Association (yes, the much maligned APA!), the American Physical Society, Elsevier, Cambridge University Press and all the other 232 publishers (57%) of the 6457 journals (63%) that are on the side of the angels -- fully Green on immediate post-print self-archiving -- OUP is among the Pale-Green minority of 48 publishers (12%) of 3228 journals (32%) (such as Nature, which back-slid to a postprint embargo ever since 2005).

OUP's post-print policy is:

12 month embargo on science, technology, medicine articles
24 month embargo on arts and humanities articles
Pre-print can only be posted prior to acceptance
Pre-print must not be replaced with post-print, instead a link to published [toll] version
Articles in some journals can be made Open Access on payment of additional charge

Should we really be singing the praises of each publisher's discount on their hybrid Gold OA fee for the double-payment they are exacting (from the subscribers as well as the authors)?

I would stop applauding as progress for OA every self-interested step taken by those publishers who do not first take the one essential OA-friendly step: going (fully) Green.

Yes, OUP are lowering fees annually in proportion to hybrid Gold OA uptake, but they are meanwhile continuing to hold the post-print hostage for 12-24 months.

In reality, all the fee reduction means is an adjustment for double-dipping -- plus a lock-in on the price of Gold OA, and a lockout of Green OA.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Poynder, Richard (2008) Open Access: Doing the Numbers. Open and Shut. Wednesday, 11 June 2008

Excerpt: "Can OA reduce the costs associated with scholarly communication? If so, how, and when? If not, what are the implications of this for the "scholarly communication crisis?" These are important questions. But without accurate numbers to crunch we really cannot answer them adequately. Wouldn't it be great therefore if other publishers decided to be as "open" as APS in discussing their costs? One thing is for sure: If OA ends up simply shifting the cost of scholarly communication from journal subscriptions to APCs without any reduction in overall expenditure, and inflation continues unabated, many OA advocates will be sorely disappointed..."

Richard Poynder has written another of his penetrating, timely and incisive analyses of the causal dynamics underlying the OA movement. His relentless probing is invaluable. Nor is it anodyne neutral journalism that he keeps offering us: Richard is engaged and thinking deeply, and causing more than one uncomfortable moment to both proponents and opponents of OA if ever they lapse in their own critical thinking or actions.

As usual, though, I cannot agree 100% with everything Richard writes in his latest provocative and stimulating essay, this time on the true costs of journal article publishing. My demurral is on two points: (1) whether the question of the true costs of the various components of journal publication (which I too have cited, as an important unknown, many times in the past) needs to be answered right now (i.e., whether any practical action today is in any way contingent on knowing those costs in advance -- I think not) and (2) whether reducing the costs of journal publication is or ought to be one of the explicit objectives of the OA movement. (I think journal unaffordability is merely one of the two principal factors that drew the research community's attention to the need for OA. Journal cost reduction is not itself the explicit objective of OA.)

The need for Open Access (OA) is driven by two problems: (i) journal affordability and (ii) research accessibility -- in other words, spending less money and accessing more research. Richard Poynder points out in his essay that it is not known whether or not universal Gold OA publishing would save money.

But OA is not the same thing as Gold OA publishing. (Richard is of course fully aware of this.) Once universally adopted, Green OA self-archiving and Green OA self-archiving mandates can and will (and do) provide 100% OA, solving the research accessibility problem, completely. This is not a matter of speculation: it is a simple, practical, inductive fact, already demonstrated by the existing Green OA self-archiving (15%) and the existing Green OA self-archiving mandates (45).

The rest, in contrast, is all a matter of pre-emptive (and paralytic) speculation and counter-speculation: Can-we, could-we should-we reach 100% OA directly via Gold OA alone? Would it save money? Would it make publishing unaffordable to some in place of making research inaccessible to others? Would Green OA give rise to Gold OA (and the above hypothetical problems)? Or would it lower the costs of publishing?

No one knows the answer to these (and many other) questions about hypothetical contingencies regarding universal Gold OA and its hypothetical costs. The only thing we do know is that Green OA, if all universities mandate it and all researchers do it, will provide OA itself, solving the research accessibility problem completely. And that is all we need to know. The rest is about what we need to do.

Publishers are fond of pronouncing embargoes. If I could pronounce an embargo, it would be on all irrelevant, ineffectual and irresolvable conjecturing and counter-conjecturing about the "true costs" of this and that, in place of doing the obviously doable, obviously beneficial (and so far orthogonal) thing, which is to self-archive and mandate self-archiving so as to provide open access to all our (peer-reviewed) research output at long last.

Because of its long period of co-habitation with the exigencies and eccentricities of print-era journal publication, the research community has forgotten that it itself provides (for free) both the research and the peer review, and that the research community (researchers, their institutions and their funders) is now, in the online era, also in the position to provide access to that peer-reviewed research output (for free). But instead of going ahead and doing that, we are instead taken up by the hypothetical economics of the journal publishing industry, as if that, and not the research itself, were the real issue.

Providing and mandating Green OA is a no-brainer, like providing and mandating seat-belts, or smoke-free zones. It is obvious in the latter two cases that speculating instead about hypothetical economic effects on the tobacco or car-manufacturing industry instead of doing the obvious would be absurd.

Richard Poynder's essay is hence for the most part correct, yet nevertheless inadvertently fanning the flames -- or perhaps I should say firming the wax -- of inaction in one sector (research accessibility) in favor of pre-emptive, ineffectual and, at bottom, unnecessary speculation and counterspeculation in another (journal affordability).

Still, Richard exposes the underlying dynamics so much more clearly and coherently than others that even if this latest essay feeds the filibuster, it sharpens the focus too...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Some authors today no doubt try to buy their way into fee-based Gold OA journals, and some Gold OA journals that are short on authors no doubt lower their quality standards to win authors. But something very similar is already true of the lower-end subscription-based journals that prevail today, and this will continue to be true of lower-end journals if and when Gold OA becomes universal. The demand for quality, however, (by [some] authors, referees and users) will ensure that the existing journal quality hierarchy continues to exist, regardless of the cost-recovery model (whether user-institution subscription fees or author-institution peer-review fees). The high-quality authors will still want to publish in high-quality rather than low-quality journals, and journals will still need to strive to generate track-records as high-quality journals -- not just (1) to attract the high-quality authors and work, but (2) to retain the high-quality peer-reviewers and (3) to retain users. Usage will in turn be (4) openly tracked by rich OA impact metrics, which will complement peer perceptions of the journal's (and author's) track record for quality.

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It is likely that some fee-based Gold OA journals today (while Gold OA publishing is the minority route, in competition with conventional subscription-based publishing, rather than universal) are in some cases compromising the rigor of peer review and hence the quality of the article and journal. However, journals have always differed in quality and rigor of peer review, and researchers have always known which were the high and low quality journals, based on the journals' (open!) track-records for quality.

If and when Gold OA publishing should ever becomes universal (for example, if and when universal Green OA self-archiving should ever put an end to the demand for the subscription version, thereby making subscriptions unsustainable and forcing a conversion to fee-based Gold OA publishing) then the very same research community standards and practices that today favor those subscription journals who have the track records for the highest quality standards will continue to ensure the same standards for the highest quality journals: The high-quality authors will still want to publish in high-quality rather than low-quality journals, and journals will still need to strive to generate track-records as high-quality journals -- not just (1) in order to attract the high-quality authors and work, but (2) in order to retain the high-quality peer-reviewers (who, after all, do their work voluntarily, not for a fee, and not in order to generate journal revenue, and who will not referee if their advice is ignored for the sake of generating more journal revenue, making journal quality low) as well as (3) in order to retain users (who, although they no longer need to subscribe in order to access the journal, will still be influenced by the quality of the journal in what they choose to access and use). Usage will in turn be (4) openly tracked by rich OA impact metrics, which will complement peer perceptions of the journal's (and author's) track record for quality. This will again influence author choice of journals.

So, in sum: Some authors today no doubt try to buy their way into fee-based Gold OA journals, and some Gold OA journals short on authors no doubt lower their quality standards to win authors. But something very similar is already true of the lower-end subscription-based journals that prevail today, and this will continue to be true of lower-end journals if and when Gold OA becomes universal. The demand for quality, however, (by [some] authors, referees and users) will ensure that the existing journal quality hierarchy continues to exist, regardless of the cost-recovery model (whether user-institution subscription fees or author-institution peer-review fees).

Moreover, the author, user and institutional demand for the canonical print edition is still strong today, and unlikely to be made unsustainable by authors' free final, refereed drafts any time soon, even as Green OA mandates gradually make them universal. And there are already, among Gold OA journals, high-end journals like the PLoS journals, that are maintaining the highest peer-review standards despite the fact that they need paying authors. So quality still trumps price, for authors as well as publishers, on the high-quality end. Not to mention that as more and more of traditional publishing functions (access-provision, archiving) are offloaded onto the growing worldwide network of Green OA Institutional Repositories, the price of publishing will shrink. (I think the cost of peer review alone will be about $200, especially if a submission fee of, say, $50, creditable toward the publishing fee if the paper is accepted, is levied on all submissions, to discourage low-probability nuisance submissions and to distribute the costs of peer review across all submissions, rejected as well as accepted.)

(I also think that the idea of paying referees for their services (though it may have a few things to recommend it) is a nonstarter, especially at this historic point. It would (i) raise rather than lower publication costs; the payment (ii) could never be made high enough to really compensate referees' for their time and efforts; and referee payment too is (iii) open to abuse: If authors will pay to publish lower quality work, and journals will lower standards to get those author payments, then referees can certainly lower their standards to get those referee payments too! And that's true even if referee names are made publicly known, just as author-names and journal-names a publicly known) In short, universal OA, and the negligibly low costs of implementing classical peer review, would moot all that.)