RE: Springer Open Choice uptake affects 2011 journal pricing

["Laura Cox" <laura.cox@frontlinegms.com>]

Anthony,

I am responding on behalf of John and myself as the authors of 
the ALPSP journal publishing practice surveys.  Unfortunately, we 
did not ask the question about page and colour charges so I do 
not have data that I can share with the list.  Hopefully this is 
something that can be explored in the next version of the survey.

However, from our collective experience, the publishers that do 
charge page charges are some, but not all, of the US learned 
societies.  Colour charges are charged by some publishers, but 
only if the colour is to appear in the printed version of the 
journal, there would be no charge for colour in the online 
version.

Kind Regards

Laura Cox
Managing Director
Frontline GMS Ltd


-----Original Message----- From: 
owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu 
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Anthony 
Watkinson Sent: 02 July 2010 04:12 To: 
liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu Subject: RE: Springer Open Choice 
uptake affects 2011 journal pricing

Bill has now posted the sources and they are indeed not great 
especially if you drill down through the references. I can see 
the problem over the NIH figures: some publishers must be 
charging a lot or the NIH figures (which I have not looked up) 
cannot mean what they seem to mean. I repeat what I have said - 
commercial publishers do not charge page charges usually and in 
some large cases not at all. I made the qualification because my 
informants made that qualifications. My own experience/practice I 
mention. My picture is also that most non-US learned society 
publishers do not charge page charges: perhaps someone from ALPSP 
has firmer information on this latter poin: ALPSP have done a 
number of surveys (mostly researched by John Cox) and he can 
perhaps comment. I know he is on this list

Anthony

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Bill Hooker
Sent: 30 June 2010 05:16
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Springer Open Choice uptake affects 2011 journal pricing

> I do not know how the Kaufman-Wills figure in the calculation 
> referred to

Briefly, the study found that "...more than half of DOAJ [Open 
Access] journals did not charge author-side fees of any type, 
whereas more than 75% of ALPSP, AAMC, and HW subset [Toll Access] 
journals did charge author-side fees."  There were around 250 
journals in each (OA and TA) subset.

> At no stage did I publish a journal that levied page charges.
[...]
> I have just checked with people in two very large publishers 
> among the top four in terms of size - and quality - in 
> scholarly publishing.

I think that leaves less than half of the STM market.  I had a 
quick look back at my own "study" and sure enough, all the 
journals I actually looked at are Science/NPG/Cell/PNAS and 
society journals.

So what of the NIH estimate that they spend $100 million per year 
on author-side charges, in support of some 80,000 manuscripts? 
(Sources: 1, 2 below -- the sources for those figures aren't 
great -- I wonder if the NIH has anything better?  I can't get 
parts of their site to load at the moment.)  If that's even 
remotely accurate there must be a subset of TA journals charging 
very high author-side fees indeed.

> Some journals did levy colour charges (colour is optional)

This is something of a side note, but for a good many biomed 
papers, colour is not optional.

***