PLoS pricing and the perceived ability of research grants to cover publication costs

["Richard O'Grady, Exec. Director, AIBS, 202-628-1500 x 258" <rogrady@aibs.org>]

As the publisher of a non-profit biology journal, I offer the following
counter-argument to Jan Velterop's 8/7 posting about PLoS pricing
(repeated at the bottom of this email):

Regardless of research funding levels in the biomedical sciences, and
regardless of the argument that publication in the peer-reviewed
literature is the final step of doing research in any area of science and
should therefore be paid for by the scientist's funding sources, it is the
case that individual grant awards in non-medical areas of biology and in
many other areas of the sciences typically include very little, if any,
money for publication costs that would be sufficient to support an
"author-pay"  system.  Funding the cost of publication through submission
or publication fees is not likely to be possible unless the likes of the
National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency, and similar agencies change their
policies re allowable costs in their grants as well as either convince
Congress to increase their budgets dramatically.

* For example, few National Science Foundation grants in biology provide
more than $1,000/yr to support publication expenses.  So a biologist with
good NSF funding, generating six research articles a year, does not have
$10,000 to $20,000/yr in his/her grant to pay the cost of publishing
his/her research at anything near the price levels that PLoS or Velterop
are suggesting.

* Furthermore, the PLoS approach would disenfranchise and prevent from
publishing those scientists who are working on projects that are not
externally funded, are funded through sources that preclude paying
publication charges, or are funded at a low level.  For example:

* Faculty members doing research with college or foundation grants that do
not support publication charges.

* Scientists working for government agencies, NGOs, institutes, or
industry that do not provide their employees with funds for publication
costs.

* Faculty members at non-tier 1 universities, or small colleges, doing
research with college or foundation grants that do not support publication
charges.

* Researchers' unanticipated findings and resultant papers that arise
during the course of a grant but aren't budgeted for.

* Junior faculty members publishing so as to be in position to apply for
their first grant.

* Postdoctoral fellows publishing so as to be in position to apply for a
job or funding.

* Graduate students, and even undergraduate students, doing a degree on a
show-string and have generated research results worthy of publication.

Research produced by the kinds of scientists listed above is regularly
published, for example, as part of the content of AIBS's monthly
peer-reviewed journal, BioScience, as well as in most other BioOne
journals (note that the median print subscription price of the 60+
journals in this collection is approx. $160/yr/ea, and this price is
closely tied to recovering the journal's editing, production, and overhead
costs, about 75% of which remain even if a single paper copy is never
printed).  Such research--funded by the public and now ready for
dissemination--would be excluded from ever reaching the public under any
model that is based upon having the author pay for the cost of publication
(I disagree that $1,500/article is anywhere near sufficient to cover such
costs, but that's for another email).  As a consequence, the research
would not get published and the journal would not have a pool of authors
able to pay the prices--year in, year out, consistently--that it needs to
keep its operations staffed, housed, and equiped.  The journal would
either cease to exist and its contents lost and/or scattered, or, more
likely, the journal would be sold to a commercial publisher by its society
before it collapsed entirely so that the society could at least retain
editorial control of the journal's content while giving up ownership of
the journal's publication operations and pricing.

The PLoS model is inconsistent with how most scientific research is funded
and gets published. Covering publication costs through paid subscriptions
appears to be the best way not only to allow journals from non-profit
publishers to recover their costs of editing, production, and overhead,
but also to avoid discriminating against and excluding most of the very
scientists whose collective work constitutes the scientific literature.

Richard T. O'Grady, Ph.D. Executive Director, American Institute of
Biological Sciences Publisher, BioScience 1444 Eye St. NW, Suite 200
Washington, DC 20005

V 202-628-1500 x 258
F 202-628-1509
rogrady@aibs.org
www.aibs.org


At 02:51 PM 8/7/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>Date: Thu,  7 Aug 2003 14:51:30 EDT
>Sender: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
>
>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