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Re: Fascinating quotation

On 23-Dec-04, at 8:44 PM, Sally Morris ((ALPSP)) wrote:


However, there are some big questions to be answered:

What does the publication (or submission + publication) charge need to
be, for the journal to remain viable and to satisfy whatever the
profit/surplus needs of the parent organisation may be?

Do authors have access to sufficient funds to cover that charge?
Open access can be accomplished by many means - author payment is only one
of the options. Outside of a very few wealthy countries, subsidized
academic journals - even in the subscription environment - are the norm. The reason for this is that academic journals (indeed, periodicals in
general) that focus on needs and issues of a particular region without a
huge, wealthy population base to purchase the subscriptions, are rarely an
opportunity for profit-making. They are published because the information
is important, not to make profits.

For societies as well, open access publications can be supported by means
other than author charges. For example, membership fees can be used to
subsidize publication programs.

It is possible that societies and associations are concerned about losing
members if their publications were openly accessible. This may or may not
be the case, and the situation could well be different for different
societies and associations. It may very well be worth investigating this.

The experience of the Oregon Library Association may be instructive here -
after they made their quarterly publication openly accessible, their
membership increased. Having openly accessible information available at
the society's web site enhances the prestige of the society, in my
opinion.

My guess is that many societies are assuming that members would drop out
if publications were open access, when they may actually have a great many
members who have online access to their publications through library
subscriptions already. Even if members do like to receive the print copy
personally, and see this as a good reason to continue membership, this is
compatible with open access.

Other options for funding open access publications include advertising
revenues and dual subscription / open access models, with the subscription
version covering the costs. There could be added value in the
subscription version of many types, from high quality printing to extra
content (letters to the editor, etc.) to inclusion in a system (such as an
aggregated database) with a great search interface, better linking, etc.

Here's another idea for societies: encourage members to self-archive an
open access copy of their articles, regardless of where published (the
society journal, a commercial publisher, etc.). Why not set up an
e-prints server on the society website and encourage members to share
their articles by submitting a copy there? (They should submit to their
institutional repository too, of course). Or, set up links to members'
articles, feature the works of members in newsletters, etc.?

One of my groups, the Academic Librarians in Public Services committee of
BCLA, has asked members about publications, etc., so as to post on the
ALPS website in the near future. There will be direct links to a few of
my works there soon. I'm not totally certain what to think about this -
but thoughts of dropping that BCLA membership are not exactly springing to
mind....:)

There is a very great deal that societies could do to encourage the
"green", or self-archiving, version of OA. Listservs and publications
could provide information to members, both about the opportunities for
their publishing, and the many new items now available to them thanks to
OA.

Of course, author charges are an option as well. My best ballpark guess
of how much it actually costs to peer-review, edit, and publish a
scholarly OA journal article, even a very high-end STM journal, is around
$500 U.S. per article. For my calculations, please see my "Imaginary
Journal of High End Chemistry" - initiated through Liblicense, and now on
the SPARC Open Access Forum. To see the Imaginary Journal, go to the
SPARC Open Access Forum Archive
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/List.html and search for
"Imaginary Journal". Comments and ideas for future issues are most
welcome!

As reported recently, SPARC Partner Optics Express is set to generate a
modest net revenue based on publication charges of $450 per article for
articles six pages and under, and $800 per article for articles over eight
pages.

The payment on production model of OA (I prefer this to author-charges,
which I see as misleading) does not need to rely on payments by individual
authors at all. The library membership model as used by BMC and others,
while not yet perfected of course, is definitely worthy of further
exploration. Joint library-faculty memberships might be worth a look as
well.

I'm sure there are many creative ways of changing the economics behind
scholarly publishing, so that we can accomplish access for all (open
access).

thoughts?

Heather G. Morrison
Project Coordinator
BC Electronic Library Network
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Phone: 604-268-7001
Fax: 604-291-3023
Email: heatherm@eln.bc.ca
Web: http://www.eln.bc.ca