RE: Do governments subsidize journals (was: Who gets hurt by Open

["Matthew Cockerill" <matt@biomedcentral.com>]

> On this topic, it probably hardly needs saying that, in those countries
> where Government contributes to the costs of universities, univ library
> subscriptions are in effect taxpayer (not Government - Govt doesn't have
> any money of its own!) funded.  However, as various studies have shown,
> only part of journals' income comes from university subscriptions - as
> much has half may come from industry in some disciplines, not only
> through subs but also offprint sales and advertising.  Under an
> 'author-side payment' OA model, however, virtually all of the costs will
> be borne by the taxpayer via research (or other institutional) funding

Sally,

Some responses to these points:

Open Access journals get significant article processing charge revenue
from authors who are in industry, and/or at non-government funded
institutions. Is this greater or lower than industry's current
contribution to subscription revenue? That remains to be seen. But if
industrial 'freeloading' on the academic community were really seen as a
problem that, there surely are better ways to address it, other than using
it as an excuse to retain the current system of subscription barriers.

If academics benefit from a switch to OA, it is not really an argument
against OA to say that industry potentially benefits even more. If
industry benefits from OA, then, economically speaking, that's good news,
no?

In terms of advertising: OA journals would also seem to have *more*
potential to sell advertising, not less, as compared to closed access
publishers, since online traffic will be increased, while personal print
subs (for the type of journal like Nature, that gets significant ad
revenue) would surely be unaffected by making the research open access,
since personal print subscribers are taking it primarily for the
frontmatter and classifieds, not the research articles.

Finally, if reprint revenue *really* were a stumbling block to the
economics of open access (and I do not believe it is) then a publisher
could still retain exclusive rights to large scale commercial reprints,
while making the research otherwise fully open access online.  BioMed
Central's perspective is that full open access should ideally include full
rights of reuse, including large scale printing, since there are many
benefits that this brings. But an OA model that allowed everything but
commercial reprints would be a major step forwards from the current status
quo.

Matt Cockerill
BioMed Central
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