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Re: universities experiment with paying OA fees

Anthony can speak for himself, but I will borrow a page from his notebook to make a few observations myself.

In his latest SOAN newsletter Peter Suber borrows an epistemological argument from John Stuart Mill to make the case that OA will help "take the friction out of the system as far as we can." I'm not sure he has provided a correct interpretation of Mill (who was more meritocratic and elitist than Peter makes him out to be), but that is an argument for another occasion. Here, in responding to Ahmed, I would observe that OA may remove some friction from some parts of the system while introducing it elsewhere.

Let's assume that there are five possibilities for paying OA fees: 1) from the author's own pocket; 2) from the author's department; 3) from some central administration source; 4) from the library's savings on subscriptions reallocated to pay fees; and 5) from external grant funding, whether foundation or government.

I won't comment about 4 and 5 here other than to mention that, for 4, there is no assurance that such savings would be redirected to subsidizing OA rather than, say, plowing it into digitization projects (which seem to be endless in number) or (as university presses would prefer) buying more monographs and that, for 5, such funding is rarely available for publishing in the humanities and not so available for social sciences either as it is for the sciences.

For 1, we reintroduce into the system all the inequities that exist between rich and poor schools (and better and less well paid faculty) and enhance the role of extraneous factors (such as the patronage that might come for a faculty member married to a wealthy heiress). Faculty who can afford fees will be better able to publish more articles in more prestigious (hence more expensive) journals. How does that serve the goal of leveling the playing field of publishing?

For 2 and 3, the differences between rich and poor schools will also be heightened. E.g., one way richer schools now compete with each other is to offer packages to new hires up front of a set amount to pay for a variety of research activities, from attending conferences, traveling to do field research, all the way to paying fees to publishers. The faculty at richer schools will get bigger packages enabling them to pay more and higher fees. But such packages are awarded in advance of proof of productivity, so some faculty will use up their funds in being very productive while others will not because they don't prove to be as productive. One wonders what becomes of such unused funds, but in any event they won;t help pay for the system, whereas faculty at poorer schools who might turn out to be highly productive will be deprived of the opportunity to publish as much as they might otherwise be able to do. Thus, Gold OA results overall in a reduction of productivity, not an enhancement of it.

Other schools will decide to use a system whereby faculty have to apply each time they want a grant to pay a publishing fee, either to a department or to a central administrative unit. This will create all sorts of extra costs in running the bureaucracy necessary to make all the decisions, and it will undoubtedly lead to a lot of politicking and influence-peddling as faculty compete for the limited resources to pay OA fees. (How will the pot be divided among the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, for instance?) They will be thus constrained in their freedom to publish where they would prefer, and there may be a cost to journals, too, in having peer-reviewed some articles whose authors are not then successful in raising the funds from their university sources to pay the fees. Will OA advocates have the honesty to tally up these additional administrative costs in their cost/benefit comparisons with the current system?

So, while I am happy to agree with Ahmed that the current system leaves much to be desired, I am far from convinced, as he is, that "Gold OA publishing will indeed lower the total cost of the scholarly journal communication system." Costs may be saved in one area only to reappear in another. I hope those who talk about "efficiency" will know where to look to identify all the new costs as well as the savings.

P.S. And don't forget, as Anthony and others have often mentioned, that any Gold OA (or Green OA) system removes the entire commercial sector from contributing much to the costs of supporting the publication system, beyond fees that their employees who wish to publish are required to pay (unless fee discrimination is introduced between the profit and nonprofit sectors to make up the difference). More of those costs, even if they turn out to be lower overall (as I question), will have to be absorbed by universities.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


Anthony:

In my opinion, the best option for creating a true efficient market
economy for Gold OA publishing is to allow/encourage authors to
write the cost of publication in their grant application and to let
them handle the payment just like any other item they spend the
money on. This will completely decentralize the process and
individual researchers will try to optimize the cost of their
publishing activities just like any other cost. Of course this does
not mean researchers will publish in the least expensive journals.
Rather, they will take the cost in their consideration, something
that is completely absent in the current subscription market, among
other factors.

This is of course not the institutional central funding model. For
that, let me ask you the question about conference attendance.
Researchers very frequently ask for the cost of attending their
conferences from central funding places in their institutions. These
might be their departments or some higher organizational level
units. Whatever system is used for allocating these funds, why
cannot a similar one used for allocating the funds for Gold OA
publishing? I certainly don't see the cost of attending conferences
escalating without limits, which means that there are some market
forces at work, which prevents conference organizers from charging
any amount they want, right? And I don't see researchers complaining
about the system either.

Let me make one more comment on a different model here:
institutional memberships. Even with that model, the market
efficiency will be better than the current subscription world. Your
institute might take a big deal subscription with, for example,
Springer. This affects smaller publishers since it will be difficult
to a smaller publisher to get the same institute to subscribe to its
own journals even if these journals were priced at a signification
lower level. This simply because the institute will have to pay the
smaller publisher in addition to paying Springer. Switch to the Gold
OA market, your institute might have a deal with Springer. However,
no matter how the contract is written, it must take into account the
number of articles published with Springer. It can be a step like
scale, or it can be fixed for the next couple of years, but at the
end, you will have to pay Springer more for publishing more articles
from your institute. When another OA publisher approaches you, let
us say a smaller publisher like Hindawi, with a lower per article
cost, you should be willing to take an institutional membership with
that publisher, because every article you publish with the lower
cost OA publisher, is an article that you don't publish with the
higher cost OA publisher. Your weighted average, the average cost
you pay per article, will certainly be lowered by adding a new lower
cost publisher. Your authors will be making their choices of course
of where to publish, but at least smaller and lower cost publishers,
will have a better chance of getting into the game.

There are many ways of creating an efficient market for Gold OA and
yes, some of them are more efficient than others. But most (not all)
of them are certainly more efficient than the current completely
dysfunctional market of subscription based journals.

Your last question about the cost of major OA publishers does not
have much to do with the issue of how to create an an inefficient
Gold OA market. I am not sure what you want OA publishers to explain
more than what they already do. PLoS financial statements are
available on GuideStar.org if you want to look at them. BMC
financial statements are available from Companies House in the UK.
Hindawi does not publish its financial statements but we are
reasonably open about our cost and the fact that we are profitable.
I have given a talk last year at the STM conference in Frankfurt
with detailed information about Hindawi's structure and revenues.
The presentation of this talk is available on the STM website.

You are asking the OA publishers to reveal more information about
their costs, which by the way are not that much different than a
subscription publisher cost anyway, let me ask you about the
openness and transparency of subscription publishers about their
revenues. Can you tell me who of the major subscription publishers
(commercial or not-for-profit) are willing to release the
information of how much they generate per article on a journal by
journal bases? If you are concerned about how much the scientific
community will be paying for Gold OA publishing per article, and you
should be, the numbers would not tell the whole story without
knowing how much the community is currently paying per article. I
know some industry-wide averages are estimated in several places.
However, can you tell me if any subscription based publisher is
willing to tell us for every journal how much they make revenue per
article?

Let close by saying that any market efficiency, and consequently the
lowest possible cost for consumers, is not achieved by the sellers'
willingness to generate lower profits, but by their inability to
generate higher profits. Gold OA publishing will indeed lower the
total cost of the scholarly journal communication system, not
because Gold OA publishers will not try to be as profitable as their
subscription counterparts, but because they will not be able to do
that due to market forces. The pressure on them to increase their
cost efficiency and to lower their end user prices will be huge. The
efficient market will drive less cost effective publishers out of
business and will reward more cost effective publishers by larger
market shares, something that we take for granted in almost any
other market around us.

Best regards,

Ahmed Hindawi

Anthony Watkinson wrote:


I am glad that David Prosser does some hedging. It is not the
author who is going to pay. It is the funder or university. Any
university administered fee will surely result in some
discrimination unless funding is unlimited. Unlimited funding --
the Wellcome situation as I see it is not going to be common, is
it? Who will discriminate and how? I would love to hear David's
ideal model because certainly it has yet to emerge in practice. I
mean this seriously. Many OA evangelists reject the need for any
explanations of how the totally OA future is going work as far as
scholars are concerned -- though they aim for a totally OA future.

Not all scholars would like their heads of department or (horror)
the provost's office deciding where they are able to publish. Is
this what David means by "discussions on campus".

I am not aware that the major OA publishers explain their costs in
detail and give explanations of why fees have gone up so much.

Anthony