RE: Springer Open Choice uptake affects 2011 journal pricing

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btinternet.com>]

Bill has now posted the sources and they are indeed not great 
especially if you drill down through the references. I can see 
the problem over the NIH figures: some publishers must be 
charging a lot or the NIH figures (which I have not looked up) 
cannot mean what they seem to mean. I repeat what I have said - 
commercial publishers do not charge page charges usually and in 
some large cases not at all. I made the qualification because my 
informants made that qualifications. My own experience/practice I 
mention. My picture is also that most non-US learned society 
publishers do not charge page charges: perhaps someone from ALPSP 
has firmer information on this latter poin: ALPSP have done a 
number of surveys (mostly researched by John Cox) and he can 
perhaps comment. I know he is on this list

Anthony

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Bill Hooker
Sent: 30 June 2010 05:16
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Springer Open Choice uptake affects 2011 journal pricing

> I do not know how the Kaufman-Wills
> figure in the calculation referred to

Briefly, the study found that "...more than half of DOAJ [Open Access]
journals did not charge author-side fees of any type, whereas more than 75%
of ALPSP, AAMC, and HW subset [Toll Access] journals did charge author-side
fees."  There were around 250 journals in each (OA and TA) subset.


> At no stage did I publish a journal that levied page charges.
[...]
> I have just checked with people in two very large publishers among the
> top four in terms of size - and quality - in scholarly publishing.

I think that leaves less than half of the STM market.  I had a quick look
back at my own "study" and sure enough, all the journals I actually looked
at are Science/NPG/Cell/PNAS and society journals.

So what of the NIH estimate that they spend $100 million per year on
author-side charges, in support of some 80,000 manuscripts?  (Sources:
1, 2 below -- the sources for those figures aren't great -- I wonder if the
NIH has anything better?  I can't get parts of their site to load at the
moment.)  If that's even remotely accurate there must be a subset of TA
journals charging very high author-side fees indeed.


> Some journals did
> levy colour charges (colour is optional)

This is something of a side note, but for a good many biomed papers, colour
is not optional.