Re: Open Access Initiative From The Company Of Biologists

[Steve Hitchcock <sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

At 19:07 02/10/03 -0400, Frank Norman wrote:
> Re. Company of Biologists, David Goodman wrote:
> > Although all such experiments are most welcome, I am still considering
> > the implications of a journal some of whose articles are freely
> > accessible and some of whose are not. It will be interesting to observe
> > the proportion.
> Yes, it is interesting.  It strikes me that in a sense this is the worst
> of both worlds.  I still have to pay to subscribe to these journals to
> provide complete access, but my faculty may in addition be paying to
> publish in them, if they are so minded.  Will the subscription prices be
> reduced at some point to reflect the number of free articles?
The CoB announcement is further confirmation that Web access to published
papers will be free. The subscription question relates to those libraries
that still want a print copy.

Peter Suber's blog on the COB announcement refers to the Walker-Prosser
model, which are actually two separate but related models. The differences
between them may help answer the question.

The Walker model, used by the Florida Entomological Society, bases its
author fees on reprint costs: "ESA's current price for IFWA is 75% of the
price of 100 paper reprints, which amounts to $95 for an article of
average length."
http://www.ingentaselect.com/vl=1644774/cl=68/nw=1/rpsv/catchword/alpsp/09531513/v15n4/s6/p279

At this level the author fee can't really impact on subscription prices.  
When FES unilaterally imposed this fee on all authors in 2001, "the
predicted drastic decline in institutional subscriptions did not occur. In
fact, the decline was only 6%. The result was a surge in publishing net
income".

The (as yet hypothetical) Prosser variant on this model is to charge
authors a fee that covers the publishing costs: "I would suggest that the
author charge should be set at or near the total required for online
publication of that paper. There is no advantage in starting with an
artificially low figure as authors will resent a rapid increase in
publication costs over time".

In this model "as the proportion of authors willing to pay increased, the
subscription price would continue to be reduced".
http://www.arl.org/newsltr/227/openaccess.html

The COB announcement says: "Authors choosing to take advantage of the open
access alternative will be charged a publication fee, which, as an
introductory offer, will be heavily subsidised by The Company of
Biologists".

This suggests something closer to the Prosser model, without saying
anything about subscription prices, but like FES, COB is a low price, high
quality publisher and this probably mitigates against subscription
reductions.

Frank raises the more important point of complete access to a journal's
contents. In contrast to the FES model of immediate free Web access to all
content, there is an acknowledged problem in the Prosser model: "The
journal becomes split with different access conditions for different
papers".

One concern is whether non-subscribers will get the full benefit of open
access in a split model, and whether authors will notice if they aren't.

There is a third model that solves the access problem while complementing
the hybrid model: the Harnad self-archiving model, where the author
publishes for no-fee and deposits the published paper in an OAI-searchable
institutional archive, with a journal reference - the complete publication
and access package http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm

Both publisher examples are using current uncertainty to experiment, but
they are unleashing new market forces controlled by authors that must have
an inevitable impact. Prosser notes, "as the benefits of open access
become clear ... no author will want to be at a disadvantage".

Ultimately the question boils down to whether libraries want to continue
paying for the print version of these journals, and whether authors want
to support open access to the publisher-produced or paged version. Web
copies will be free.

Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton SO17 1BJ,  UK
Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel:  +44 (0)23 8059 3256     Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865