Professor Feinman,
While you are certainly correct that publishers will try to maximize
the revenue of their journals regardless of whether they are open
access or subscription-based, the ability of a publisher to charge
significantly more than their service is worth will be greatly reduced
in an open access model. The reason for this is quite simple; "gold"
open access publishing will lead to a more efficient market.
There are several inefficiencies within the subscription market that
will be reduced or eliminated in an open access world.
1)If authors are responsible for paying the costs associated with
publishing in a particular journal, there will be a greater pressure
on publishers to keep their prices at a competitive level. In the
subscription world, authors generally do not take the price of a
journal into consideration when choosing where to submit their work.
While there certainly are exceptions, authors tend to submit to
journals based on their prestige, speed, production quality, etc. In
an open access world, authors would still take into consideration the
prestige, speed, and production quality of a journal, but they would
also tend to pay greater attention to the costs associated with each
journal. Authors willing to pay a higher Article Processing Charge to
publish in a journal with faster publication speeds or a better
reputation would certainly be free to do so, but publishers would be
under far greater pressure to keep their prices in line with the
services that they provide.
2)In an open access world, it would be much easier to determine the
costs associated with publishing in a given journal. Adding to the
problems described in the point above, the subscription-based
publishing model makes it nearly impossible for anyone apart from a
journal's publisher to know how much revenue is collected per article.
Since one cannot easily tell how many subscribers a journal has, it is
impossible to know the 'cost' (whether it is paid on the author's side
or on the reader's side) of publishing in a particular journal. So
even the most conscientious of authors have a difficult time avoiding
'overpriced' journals in the subscription world.
3)In an open access world, the barrier to entry for new publishers, or
new journals from existing publishers, will be less than in the
subscription world. Since a subscription-based journal must attract a
certain number of subscribers in order to break even, which generally
takes years even for the most successful of titles, it is very
difficult to establish new journals to compete with well-established
titles, even if the new journal provides a significantly better
service at a lower price. Moreover, having a small number of
subscribers means that a new journal will have a very limited
readership, which makes it even more difficult to get a new
subscription-based title off-the-ground. In an open access world, if
authors in a particular field do not have any reasonably priced
journals in which to publish, it will not be too long until some
'greedy' publisher comes along and creates a new journal that can
provide a better value for these authors.
While open access publishers will be just as concerned with the
financial success of their journals as subscription-based publishers,
their ability to charge more than their service is worth will be
greatly reduced. While increased access is certainly the main benefit
of open access publishing in the short run, a more efficient market
for scholarly publishing may prove to be its greatest benefit in the
long run.
Because of the reasons mentioned above, I have mixed feelings about
the Wellcome Trust and CERN policies towards 'gold' open access
publishing. The hidden benefit of 'gold' open access is that it
provides a solution to many of the problems that exist within the
subscription market. Unfortunately, neither the policy of the Wellcome
Trust nor that of CERN's SCOAP3 have a mechanism for increasing the
competition between publishers, so one cannot expect that they will
lead to greater efficiency in the publishing market. If funders offer
publishers a certain amount of money for each article they publish
(say $3,000), publishers will have no incentive to charge any less
than that amount.
The best approach for research funders to take is simply to allow
their grant recipients to include publication charges in their grant
requests, just as they do for expenses related to attending a
conference. This way, researchers will be able to choose how much of
their research funds they would like to spend on publishing in a
journal, funds which could otherwise be spent on conferences, graduate
students, equipment, etc... Only by making the costs of a journal
visible to authors can we expect to see a more efficient market, since
authors (not research funders, university departments, librarians, or
readers) choose where articles are published.
As Matt said in his email:
Under an open access publishing model, you immediately have a much
more effective market. The customer (the research community) can
choose the publication service that offers the best value, ensuring
that prices are kept down. This kind of 'substitutability' generally
doesn't exist with the subscription model - hence the problem of
journal inflation.
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Paul Peters
Head of Business Development
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
http://www.hindawi.com
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