RE: [SSP-L] Correction and expansion of aspects of Rick Weiss'

[Jan Velterop <jan@biomedcentral.com>]

ariticle on PLoS in Washington Post 5 August 2003
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The problem is access. Reasonably priced is better than overpriced,
obviously, but open access is even better. Since Academe pays the bulk 
of the cost of science publishing anyway, shifting payment from output
(subscriptions, access licences) to input (article processing charges) 
has great benefits, even if it should not be cheaper. Although it's 
bound to be cheaper in the aggregate, as the monopoloid journal 
characteristics (you can only get the information from the journal that 
publishes it) will at the very least be attenuated, perhaps even 
disappear altogether, and excessive profits will be a thing of the 
past. Competition will be for authors, who need to publish, but that 
has been the case all along anyway.

There is nothing wrong with fair profits in a system where there is 
genuine choice and real added value is produced. 

Journal publishers, society or commercial, that do not have excessive
profits or surpluses, do not have to fear much. Indeed, there is a great
opportunity opening up for them. There is a rapidly increasing 
willingness to pay at input. At least in the life and medical sciences. 
BioMed Central has already published thousands of input-paid articles 
and the group of funding bodies gathered at the Bethesda conference of 
April this year is discussing a set of principles, the draft of which 
contains the following:

"We realize that moving to open and free access, though probably 
decreasing total costs, may displace some costs to the individual 
researcher through page charges, or to publishers through decreased 
revenues, and we pledge to help defray these costs. To this end we 
agree to help fund the necessary expenses of publication under the open 
access model of individual papers in peer-reviewed journals (subject to 
reasonable limits based on market conditions and services provided)." 

Key is that open access is defined as a characteristic of *articles*, 
not *journals* or *publishers* (see here:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/bethesda/).

Non-excessive-profit or -surplus journal publishers may care to take a 
look at their revenues per article published. The context is an average 
amount of some $3500-$7000 for the large publishers, depending on the 
discipline. But one has to realise that that includes a net profit 
often approaching (sometimes exceeding) 50% (their book programmes 
often dilute the reported figures to below that percentage, because of 
the generally much lower profitability of books). So a revenue per 
article of less than $2000 would break even for them, with their 
expensive offices and marketing and sales forces included.

The model for small journal publishers without excessive profits and 
with an income per article below, say, $1500-$2000 is this:

1. Offer the choice to authors to have their articles published with 
open access on line if they pay an article processing fee (many 
institutions and funding bodies will now pay a reasonable fee on behalf 
of the authors; the $1500 that is now being charged by PLoS met with 
little resistance in circles of funding bodies);
2. Adjust online access prices every year according to the proportion of
articles that have been paid at input, enabling a smooth transition;
3. Price print copies separately on the basis of the cost of printing 
and associated overheads (I'm assuming that print copies would include 
the open access articles).

For small journal publishers in the life and medical sciences, society 
as well as commercial, who need an online environment that is eminently
affordable given realistic per article charges, BioMed Central is 
available to provide assistence and an alternative to HighWire. I'm 
sure Michael Keller would not object to some competition in the area of 
online provisions for small journals.

Jan Velterop
BioMed Central