Chronicle of Higher Education (Kaufman-Wills Group Study)

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Of possible interest.

Full article at <www.chronicle.com>, available to subscribers.
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Study Challenges Equation of Open-Access Publishing With an Author-Pays 
Business Model
By LILA GUTERMAN

The first large-scale comparison of open-access journals with traditional
journals has revealed evidence of a publishing industry in flux. A new
survey indicates that open-access journals -- those that make their
contents free to all readers upon publication -- have widely varying
business models.

More than half of all of the journals in the survey, whether open-access
or subscription-based, reported that they were likely to change their
business model in the next three years.

The survey's findings were described in a presentation on Monday at the
London Book Fair. The survey was conducted by the Kaufman-Wills Group,
publishing consultants based in Baltimore. It was financed by groups that
are affiliated largely with traditional journals: the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, the Association of American Medical
Colleges, the Association of Learned and Professional Publishers, and
HighWire Press, which produces online versions of journals and is operated
by Stanford University.

Cara S. Kaufman, a partner at Kaufman-Wills, said the survey grew out of
questions swirling around open access: "whether it's viable, whether it's
the best way to go about things, whether it will be better for science."

Starting last August, Ms. Kaufman and her colleagues at Kaufman-Wills sent
38-question surveys to journals hosted online by HighWire Press, to
journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, and to journals
published by members of the medical-college association. They received
responses from 367 journals, of which 248 were openly accessible.

Some of the findings proved unsurprising: Compared with traditional
journals, open-access journals by and large were younger; they printed
fewer editorial features like editorials and news articles; and more of
them finished the previous fiscal year in the red. Open-access journals
also received fewer submissions and were less selective in choosing among
those submissions.

But some results were unanticipated. Contrary to expectations, author fees
were charged by a larger fraction of traditional journals than of
open-access journals.

[SNIP]

Suggesting that the publishing industry is likely to continue to shift, 60
percent or more of journals in each category reported plans to test or
adopt a new business model in coming years.

Ms. Kaufman emphasized that the results were preliminary and suffered from
bias based on which journals participated and which did not. She is
planning to do further surveys of journals published by members of the
Association of Learned and Professional Publishers, and her firm will
publish the full survey results this spring. She is also planning to do
more-in-depth interviews with a smaller group of publishers.

Aisha Labi contributed to this article from London.

Copyright 2005 Chronicle of Higher Education

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