Humanities and Social Sciences Journals: ideas on how to transition to OA

[Heather Morrison <hgmorris@sfu.ca>]

Following are some thoughts on how humanities and social sciences 
publishers can move forward toward open access, inspired by Mary 
Waltham's brave preliminary foray into research on the economics 
of these journals, The Future of Scholarly Journals Publishing 
among Social Science and Humanities Associations, available for 
download from:

http://www.nhalliance.org/news/humanities-social-science-scholarly-journal-publis.shtml

In brief: Humanities and social sciences publishers might wish to 
consider the marketing advantage of OA in positioning their 
associations / societies and journals for the future. Members of 
scholarly societies are scholars. Open access works to the 
advantage of these scholar-members, who likely have many reasons 
for belonging to a society, such as fulfilling the service 
component of expectations for an academic. Why not actively 
engage members in the transition? This could be helpful not only 
to transition journals to open access, but also healthy for the 
association, too.

Institutional subscribers - libraries and consortia - are vocal 
advocates of open access. Why not engage them in discussion about 
how to transition? For example, would they consider hybrid 
site-license / open choice approaches? Since this is a priority 
for libraries, would moves like this help to protect society 
publishers from cancellations in these difficult economic times? 
This post re-analyzes Waltham's data on the feasibility of an 
article processing fee approach for the 8 journals studied. It is 
suggested that self-selection of journals may have resulted in 
high-end rather than average costs. Factoring in advertising 
revenue, it seems possible that the publication cost for 
online-only for even these high-end journals with rejection rates 
in the range of 90%, could be well under $1,000. Assuming that 
members and institutional subscribers continue to support the 
journals / associations, needed APFs could be reduced 
substantially, perhaps to 0. Which is indeed, what most OA 
journals charge: nothing! Waltham's 8 non-OA journals are 
contrasted with 716 journals listed in DOAJ under the same 
general subject areas.

For details, please see The Imaginary Journal of Poetic 
Economics, at:

http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2009/09/humanities-and-social-sciences-thoughts.html

Heather Morrison, MLIS
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com
Associate Editor, Scholarly and Research Communication
http://www.src-online.ca/