Re: universities experiment with paying OA fees

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btinternet.com>]

I think there have been some very reasoned and sensible comments 
on this thread especially from Ahmed Hindawi, which I hope to 
comment on later, but also from David. Yes - he is correct. 
Authors from throughout the world for all the time that I have 
been in publishing have complained about US society journals 
charging page charges and other charges. Peter Suber makes a 
great deal of this. HOWEVER the practice of charging is almost 
entirely restricted to the US association environment. I have had 
responsibility for journals at Academic Press London, Oxford 
University Press and Chapman & Hall (Thomson) and can recall only 
one journal that had page charges on their programmes - and that 
was Journal of Theoretical Biology in the 1970s where the 
charging was (I recall) an entrepreneurial activity by the 
editor.

Page charges are not common (indeed very rare) for journals owned 
by associations outside the US or by commercial companies 
anywhere. A few weeks ago I heard a presentation from the editor 
of a journal in high energy physics who said the the levying of 
page charges in his community by the associations self-publishing 
journals serving it was discontinued due to the growing 
popularity of journals published by Elsevier that were taking 
away authors. I do not know whether or not this is true but it 
was his understanding.

I just want to re-make the one point. David aims for total OA, an 
environment in which all content is available on the open web 
immediately it is peer-reviewed. I think we can agree that in 
this environment the subscription model is not viable and it is 
probable that the cost of running a journal will need to be met 
by author payments in most cases and probably in some disciplines 
for all serious journals. The concept of a serious journal is (I 
appreciate) a vague one but it is understood by academics. If you 
want to see a multiplicity of a non-serious journals look at 
DOAJ.

Maybe some potential authors will get waivers. Most authors will 
need to get funding to publish. If they cannot get funding and 
they cannot afford (personally) to pay they will not be able to 
publish in a serious journal.

Like the majority of publishers I believe that the 
author-pays/free-access model is an excellent one for those 
disciplines that have the level of funding available. Many of us 
are following the OUP experience with Nucleic Acid Research 
closely. My own UCL colleagues are working with OUP to monitor 
this and the hybrid options being actively pursed by the Press to 
their credit.

It is the attempt to force all academics and those publishers 
that serve them to adopt an OA model by force that sticks in the 
throat of many - and I am one of them. If academics are in a 
position to choose to pay for OA that is great. If not - why 
should they be forced? This question is of course rhetorical. I 
am sure that there will be plenty of explanations about why it is 
necessary to mandate.

Anthony

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Prosser" <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2008 1:28 AM
Subject: RE: universities experiment with paying OA fees

> I'm afraid that discrimination is a fact of life where there is 
> not an unlimited budget.  Universities (and departments and 
> research groups) make decisions on what research to pursue, 
> what departments to fund, which groups to allocate space to, 
> which journals and books to buy, what equipment to buy, how 
> many researchers and students to send to conferences, etc., 
> etc. In each case there is discrimination.  It is not 
> unreasonable to suppose that there may be the same type of 
> discrimination when it comes to where researchers publish.
>
> And let's not forget this is already happening.  Page, figure, 
> and reprint charges are already factors that researchers take 
> into account when they decide where to publish.  Over the years 
> Anthony will have heard the complaints of many UK researchers 
> that they could not publish in US society journals because they 
> did not have the funds to pay the charges.  There is a utopian 
> myth that all under the subscription model authors are free to 
> publish where they want - they're not!
>
> I disagree with Sandy regarding the degree to which authors 
> will be able to shop around.  It is certainly true that 
> prestige is a hugely important factor in shaping an author's 
> decision on where to submit their paper, but it's not the only 
> one.  As I say, in the past the presence of page charges have 
> been sufficient deterrent to those without funds to pay.  But 
> in many fields the differences between prestige (or at least 
> its proxy, impact) can be quite small.  So if you know that 
> your work is not quite good enough for the top-ranked journal 
> in your field, you may have three or four 'B' rank journals 
> that you would be happy to publish in.  In that case the 
> publication charges may play a part in making shaping your 
> decision.
>
> This is even before looking at whether there will be a 
> relationship between 'prestige' and cost to authors.  I have a 
> suspicion that some society publishers are going to be able to 
> provide greater prestige at lower cost than some of their 
> commercial rivals and so the prestigious 'A' journal in a field 
> may be cheaper than the less prestigious 'B' journals!
>
> David
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> [mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Anthony Watkinson
> Sent: 31 May 2008 04:59
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Subject: Re: universities experiment with paying OA fees
>
> I am glad that David Prosser does some hedging. It is not the
> author who is going to pay. It is the funder or university. Any
> university administered fee will surely result in some
> discrimination unless funding is unlimited. Unlimited funding --
> the Wellcome situation as I see it is not going to be common, is
> it? Who will discriminate and how? I would love to hear David's
> ideal model because certainly it has yet to emerge in practice. I
> mean this seriously. Many OA evangelists reject the need for any
> explanations of how the totally OA future is going work as far as
> scholars are concerned -- though they aim for a totally OA
> future.
>
> Not all scholars would like their heads of department or (horror)
> the provost's office deciding where they are able to publish. Is
> this what David means by "discussions on campus".
>
> I am not aware that the major OA publishers explain their costs
> in detail and give explanations of why fees have gone up so much.
>
> Anthony