Re: Do governments subsidize journals (was: Who gets hurt by Open

["Sally Morris \(ALPSP\)" <sally.morris@alpsp.org>]

Heather, Matthew:  See my article on journal costs. I reference two
studies - one said 44%, the other 66%.  I have changed nothing.

Don King's finding is that industry represents 75% of reading but only 25% 
of authorship (again, see my costs paper)

Sally Morris, Chief Executive
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
Email:  sally.morris@alpsp.org

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Matthew Cockerill" <matt@biomedcentral.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Thursday, September 15, 2005 11:23 PM
Subject: RE: Do governments subsidize journals (was: Who gets hurt by Open


> > On this topic, it probably hardly needs saying that, in those countries
> > where Government contributes to the costs of universities, univ library
> > subscriptions are in effect taxpayer (not Government - Govt doesn't have
> > any money of its own!) funded.  However, as various studies have shown,
> > only part of journals' income comes from university subscriptions - as
> > much has half may come from industry in some disciplines, not only
> > through subs but also offprint sales and advertising.  Under an
> > 'author-side payment' OA model, however, virtually all of the costs will
> > be borne by the taxpayer via research (or other institutional) funding
> Sally,
>
> Some responses to these points:
>
> Open Access journals get significant article processing charge revenue
> from authors who are in industry, and/or at non-government funded
> institutions. Is this greater or lower than industry's current
> contribution to subscription revenue? That remains to be seen. But if
> industrial 'freeloading' on the academic community were really seen as a
> problem that, there surely are better ways to address it, other than
> using it as an excuse to retain the current system of subscription
> barriers.
>
> If academics benefit from a switch to OA, it is not really an argument
> against OA to say that industry potentially benefits even more. If
> industry benefits from OA, then, economically speaking, that's good
> news, no?
>
> In terms of advertising: OA journals would also seem to have *more*
> potential to sell advertising, not less, as compared to closed access
> publishers, since online traffic will be increased, while personal print
> subs (for the type of journal like Nature, that gets significant ad
> revenue) would surely be unaffected by making the research open access,
> since personal print subscribers are taking it primarily for the
> frontmatter and classifieds, not the research articles.
>
> Finally, if reprint revenue *really* were a stumbling block to the
> economics of open access (and I do not believe it is) then a publisher
> could still retain exclusive rights to large scale commercial reprints,
> while making the research otherwise fully open access online.  BioMed
> Central's perspective is that full open access should ideally include
> full rights of reuse, including large scale printing, since there are
> many benefits that this brings. But an OA model that allowed everything
> but commercial reprints would be a major step forwards from the current
> status quo.
>
> Matt Cockerill
> BioMed Central
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