Re: Another Poynder Eye-Opener on Open Access

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Quite a long piece on PLOS (that is, Richard Poynder's, not 
Professor Harnad's comment).  I am surprised with myself for 
having read it, and astounded that anyone wrote it.

No doubt Poynder's piece is going to receive a great number of 
comments, and I won't be surprised if my fellow bloggers at what 
Professor Harnad derisively refers to as the Scholarly Scullery 
decide to write about this, but I think Poynder is making an 
analytical error in working at too granular a level.  Thus he 
poses the question of whether PLOS One subsidizes the PLOS 
flagship journals.

"Subsidy" is the wrong term.  An analogy:  Elite U.'s English 
department offers a Chaucer seminar every year, which draws on 
average 4 students.  Elite U. also offers a course called Sex in 
Literature every semester, which attracts (!) 500 students each 
semester.  The university handles its accounts by giving each 
course credit for every student enrolled.  Those credits are then 
compared to the expense of offering each course. Some courses are 
thus deemed to have surpluses, some deficits.

In this analogy, the Chaucer seminar "loses" money, the Sex in 
Literature course makes a bundle.  But it's the wrong way to look 
at it, as students don't purchase education a la carte; they buy 
the menu (in other contexts, this is known as the Big Deal).  To 
say that Elite U. is "subsidizing" Chaucer misses the point. 
Would you have an elite academic institution that did not offer a 
class on Chaucer?  (I fear someone is going to tell me that 
Chaucer is not taught at their institution.)

PLOS has different kinds of peer-review systems, different fees, 
different expectations from its authors and readers.  But it's 
one entity.  I think it is very cleverly managed.

Joe Esposito

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 5:07 PM, Stevan Harnad 
<amsciforum@gmail.com> wrote:

> Poynder, Richard (2011) PLoS ONE, Open Access, and the Future of
> Scholarly Publishing. Open and Shut. 7 March 2011.
> http://poynder.blogspot.com/2011/03/plos-one-open-access-and-future-of.html
> ABSTRACT: Open Access (OA) advocates argue that PLoS ONE is now
> the largest scholarly journal in the world. Its parent
> organisation 'Public Library of Science (PLoS)' was co-founded in
> 2001 by Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus. What does the history of
> PLoS tell us about the development of PLoS ONE? What does the
> success of PLoS ONE tell us about OA? And what does the current
> rush by other publishers to clone PLoS ONE tell us about the
> future of scholarly communication?