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

["D Anderson" <danderson@corhealth.com>]

Good points. Another potential drawback of a model that relies on authors
to cover publishing costs is that publishers will have a strong incentive
to keep pushing up fees, since author-generated fees will be their primary
source of funds to cover costs. One potential scenario is a model in which
authors, or their institutions, bid up fees by trying to ensure
publication through ever-higher payments to publishers. A journal at risk
of going under might succumb to the temptation to accept, or expedite, a
marginal article if the sponsor was willing to pay an exorbitant fee.

Also, this model obviously would favor research sponsored by well-funded
commercial companies.

The end result is that control over what is published will shift from the
consumers of information, who ultimately decide what will be published
through their subscription dollars, to the sponsors of research.

Dean H. Anderson

COR Health
Insight ... not just news
http://www.corhealth.com


-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu]On Behalf Of Richard O'Grady,
Exec. Director, AIBS, 202-628-1500 x 258
Sent: Tuesday, August 12, 2003 2:33 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: PLoS pricing and the perceived ability of research grants to
cover publication costs

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