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Re: Institutional Journal Costs in an Open Access Environment

Bill's revised figures don't change the conclusions I explained in my post of April 27.

It remains true that a Spring Open Choice model ($3,000 per article author fee) , if adopted across all of the journals Bill studied, would result in substantial savings for all of the institutions, including the large research university. That institution (University of Michigan) would only pay more under an open access model if authors' fees exceeded $3,363 (assuming no authors fees were paid from grant funds). It is true that research universities will pay more than non-research universities under an author pays model (as they do now), but (judging from Bill's data) it's not necessarily true that they will pay more than they currently do under a subscription or licensing model. That depends on the size of the authors' fees -- and also the extent to which authors' fees can be supported by grant funds.

Ray English
Director of Libraries
Oberlin College
440-775-8287

On May 10, 2006, at 9:08 PM, William Walters wrote:

Good afternoon.

I have discovered and corrected a methodological error in my study that has some bearing on the results. I've posted the corrected paper -- the version that will appear in JASIST -- at <http://www.library.millersville.edu/public_html/walters/ journal_costs.pdf>

The correction affects the total system-wide revenue estimates as well as the results for the Equal-Revenue Model -- the model in which total Open Access revenue (from all institutions combined) is held equal to total subscription revenue under the current system.

My original paper ensured that the Equal-Revenue assumption held true *for my sample* -- a stratified random sample that includes two or three institutions from each U.S. News & World Report category (Doctoral Universities, Master's Universities, etc.).

The problem with the old version of the paper is that the the sample does not reflect the true distribution of colleges and universities among the various institutional categories. The sample includes three doctoral institutions and two master's institutions, for example, although there are actually more than twice as many Master's Universities as Doctoral Universities. The aggregate revenue estimates must therefore be adjusted to account for the actual number of institutions within each category. (The new, adjusted, revenue estimates are presented in Table 4 and described on pages 11 and 12.)

In the old version of the paper I relied strictly on the sample data, underestimating the relative number of small colleges -- institutions with low publishing productivity. I therefore overestimated the total (systemwide) PLoS-Model revenue and consequently underestimated the amount that would need to be paid by the research universities in order to "make up the difference."

My general conclusions are not affected by this correction, and the abstract for the paper remains the same as before. There are substantial changes in the quantitative results, however. Specifically, I now estimate that within the four disciplines included in the study,

-- the PLoS Model brings in only 15% as much revenue as the Conventional Model -- not 28%, as reported earlier

-- a switch from the current pricing model to the Equal-Revenue Model would increase the University of Michigan's costs by 237% -- not 83%, as reported earlier

-- in general, institutions larger than Brandeis (about 1.1 million volumes) can expect to pay more under the Equal-Revenue Model -- not institutions with more than 3.9 million volumes, as reported earlier.

As several people have mentioned, these results are valid only if we assume that all Open Access journals charge publication fees, and that academic institutions are responsible for paying those fees (with tuition money, grant money, government funding, or some other source of income).

These corrections do not alter the main conclusion of the paper -- that the wholesale implementation of either Open Access model would reduce costs for the vast majority of institutions while dramatically increasing the proportion of the total system-wide cost paid by the major research universities.

Bill

William H. Walters, PhD
Assistant Professor of Librarianship
Collection Development Librarian
Helen A. Ganser Library
Millersville University
Millersville, PA 17551-0302