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Re: Open Access Initiative From The Company Of Biologists

At 19:07 02/10/03 -0400, Frank Norman wrote:

Re. Company of Biologists, David Goodman wrote:
> Although all such experiments are most welcome, I am still considering
> the implications of a journal some of whose articles are freely
> accessible and some of whose are not. It will be interesting to observe
> the proportion.



Yes, it is interesting.  It strikes me that in a sense this is the worst
of both worlds.  I still have to pay to subscribe to these journals to
provide complete access, but my faculty may in addition be paying to
publish in them, if they are so minded.  Will the subscription prices be
reduced at some point to reflect the number of free articles?




The CoB announcement is further confirmation that Web access to published

papers will be free. The subscription question relates to those libraries

that still want a print copy.



Peter Suber's blog on the COB announcement refers to the Walker-Prosser

model, which are actually two separate but related models. The differences

between them may help answer the question.



The Walker model, used by the Florida Entomological Society, bases its

author fees on reprint costs: "ESA's current price for IFWA is 75% of the

price of 100 paper reprints, which amounts to $95 for an article of

average length."

http://www.ingentaselect.com/vl=1644774/cl=68/nw=1/rpsv/catchword/alpsp/09531513/v15n4/s6/p279



At this level the author fee can't really impact on subscription prices.  
When FES unilaterally imposed this fee on all authors in 2001, "the

predicted drastic decline in institutional subscriptions did not occur. In

fact, the decline was only 6%. The result was a surge in publishing net

income".



The (as yet hypothetical) Prosser variant on this model is to charge

authors a fee that covers the publishing costs: "I would suggest that the

author charge should be set at or near the total required for online

publication of that paper. There is no advantage in starting with an

artificially low figure as authors will resent a rapid increase in

publication costs over time".



In this model "as the proportion of authors willing to pay increased, the

subscription price would continue to be reduced".

http://www.arl.org/newsltr/227/openaccess.html



The COB announcement says: "Authors choosing to take advantage of the open

access alternative will be charged a publication fee, which, as an

introductory offer, will be heavily subsidised by The Company of

Biologists".



This suggests something closer to the Prosser model, without saying

anything about subscription prices, but like FES, COB is a low price, high

quality publisher and this probably mitigates against subscription

reductions.



Frank raises the more important point of complete access to a journal's

contents. In contrast to the FES model of immediate free Web access to all

content, there is an acknowledged problem in the Prosser model: "The

journal becomes split with different access conditions for different

papers".



One concern is whether non-subscribers will get the full benefit of open

access in a split model, and whether authors will notice if they aren't.



There is a third model that solves the access problem while complementing

the hybrid model: the Harnad self-archiving model, where the author

publishes for no-fee and deposits the published paper in an OAI-searchable

institutional archive, with a journal reference - the complete publication

and access package http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm



Both publisher examples are using current uncertainty to experiment, but

they are unleashing new market forces controlled by authors that must have

an inevitable impact. Prosser notes, "as the benefits of open access

become clear ... no author will want to be at a disadvantage".



Ultimately the question boils down to whether libraries want to continue

paying for the print version of these journals, and whether authors want

to support open access to the publisher-produced or paged version. Web

copies will be free.



Steve Hitchcock

IAM Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science

University of Southampton SO17 1BJ,  UK

Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk

Tel:  +44 (0)23 8059 3256     Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865