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

["Ian Russell" <ian.russell@cytherean.co.uk>]

What a quite extraordinary post.

So a careful piece of research by a well respected consultant 
with an extremely impressive knowledge of, and background in, 
academic publishing comes up with a figure of $7000 for the 
average processing fee for the journals examined and in a few 
paragraphs of waffle Heather has reduced this to zero.

I guess that the assumption by Heather that 45% of the publishing 
costs for all HSS journals can be met from advertising revenue 
tells you all you need to know.  Anyone with any knowledge of 
publishing would find this ridiculous.

Then again, perhaps the title of Heather's blog tells you all you 
need to know, or perhaps it should just be shortened to Imaginary 
Economics...

Ian Russell
ALPSP

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Heather Morrison
Sent: 02 September 2009 23:20
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Humanities and Social Sciences Journals: ideas on how to transition
to OA

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-p
ublis.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-t
houghts.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/