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Re: universities experiment with paying OA fees

Anthony:

In my opinion, the best option for creating a true efficient market economy for Gold OA publishing is to allow/encourage authors to write the cost of publication in their grant application and to let them handle the payment just like any other item they spend the money on. This will completely decentralize the process and individual researchers will try to optimize the cost of their publishing activities just like any other cost. Of course this does not mean researchers will publish in the least expensive journals. Rather, they will take the cost in their consideration, something that is completely absent in the current subscription market, among other factors.

This is of course not the institutional central funding model. For that, let me ask you the question about conference attendance. Researchers very frequently ask for the cost of attending their conferences from central funding places in their institutions. These might be their departments or some higher organizational level units. Whatever system is used for allocating these funds, why cannot a similar one used for allocating the funds for Gold OA publishing? I certainly don't see the cost of attending conferences escalating without limits, which means that there are some market forces at work, which prevents conference organizers from charging any amount they want, right? And I don't see researchers complaining about the system either.

Let me make one more comment on a different model here: institutional memberships. Even with that model, the market efficiency will be better than the current subscription world. Your institute might take a big deal subscription with, for example, Springer. This affects smaller publishers since it will be difficult to a smaller publisher to get the same institute to subscribe to its own journals even if these journals were priced at a signification lower level. This simply because the institute will have to pay the smaller publisher in addition to paying Springer. Switch to the Gold OA market, your institute might have a deal with Springer. However, no matter how the contract is written, it must take into account the number of articles published with Springer. It can be a step like scale, or it can be fixed for the next couple of years, but at the end, you will have to pay Springer more for publishing more articles from your institute. When another OA publisher approaches you, let us say a smaller publisher like Hindawi, with a lower per article cost, you should be willing to take an institutional membership with that publisher, because every article you publish with the lower cost OA publisher, is an article that you don't publish with the higher cost OA publisher. Your weighted average, the average cost you pay per article, will certainly be lowered by adding a new lower cost publisher. Your authors will be making their choices of course of where to publish, but at least smaller and lower cost publishers, will have a better chance of getting into the game.

There are many ways of creating an efficient market for Gold OA and yes, some of them are more efficient than others. But most (not all) of them are certainly more efficient than the current completely dysfunctional market of subscription based journals.

Your last question about the cost of major OA publishers does not have much to do with the issue of how to create an an inefficient Gold OA market. I am not sure what you want OA publishers to explain more than what they already do. PLoS financial statements are available on GuideStar.org if you want to look at them. BMC financial statements are available from Companies House in the UK. Hindawi does not publish its financial statements but we are reasonably open about our cost and the fact that we are profitable. I have given a talk last year at the STM conference in Frankfurt with detailed information about Hindawi's structure and revenues. The presentation of this talk is available on the STM website.

You are asking the OA publishers to reveal more information about their costs, which by the way are not that much different than a subscription publisher cost anyway, let me ask you about the openness and transparency of subscription publishers about their revenues. Can you tell me who of the major subscription publishers (commercial or not-for-profit) are willing to release the information of how much they generate per article on a journal by journal bases? If you are concerned about how much the scientific community will be paying for Gold OA publishing per article, and you should be, the numbers would not tell the whole story without knowing how much the community is currently paying per article. I know some industry-wide averages are estimated in several places. However, can you tell me if any subscription based publisher is willing to tell us for every journal how much they make revenue per article?

Let close by saying that any market efficiency, and consequently the lowest possible cost for consumers, is not achieved by the sellers' willingness to generate lower profits, but by their inability to generate higher profits. Gold OA publishing will indeed lower the total cost of the scholarly journal communication system, not because Gold OA publishers will not try to be as profitable as their subscription counterparts, but because they will not be able to do that due to market forces. The pressure on them to increase their cost efficiency and to lower their end user prices will be huge. The efficient market will drive less cost effective publishers out of business and will reward more cost effective publishers by larger market shares, something that we take for granted in almost any other market around us.

Best regards,

Ahmed Hindawi

Anthony Watkinson wrote:

I am glad that David Prosser does some hedging. It is not the author who is going to pay. It is the funder or university. Any university administered fee will surely result in some discrimination unless funding is unlimited. Unlimited funding -- the Wellcome situation as I see it is not going to be common, is it? Who will discriminate and how? I would love to hear David's ideal model because certainly it has yet to emerge in practice. I mean this seriously. Many OA evangelists reject the need for any explanations of how the totally OA future is going work as far as scholars are concerned -- though they aim for a totally OA future.

Not all scholars would like their heads of department or (horror) the provost's office deciding where they are able to publish. Is this what David means by "discussions on campus".

I am not aware that the major OA publishers explain their costs in detail and give explanations of why fees have gone up so much.

Anthony

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Prosser" <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, May 30, 2008 12:48 PM
Subject: RE: universities experiment with paying OA fees

Sandy

As you know, in the subscription business model users of journals (both authors and readers) are insulated from the cost of the journals they use. This has led to the disconnect between price and quality or service.

A shift to publication charges makes it possible that the users (while acting as authors) will see the costs and be able to make decisions on whether they are getting value for money. This could have an effect on prices as users will have an incentive 'shop around' based on the level of service they want from the journal. I hedge with 'possible' and 'could' because it is clear that if there is no transparency in the way the funds are set-up we could have the situation you describe. If the university pays the publisher without the author knowing the costs involved then we have the potential for a continuation of the current dysfunctional market (albeit with wider access).

One of the alleged disadvantages of such funds is that they will led to discussions on campus about what can be published, where, and at what cost. If we want the market to function then this is actually a good thing!

Best wishes

David