OA and commercial publishers

1
OA and commercial publishers

• Thomas Krichel
• 2005-05-14

2
me

• I am academic economist by training.
• Now an assistant professor at the Palmer School
  of Library and Information Science.
• My main reason for complacency is the creation of
  RePEc, a large digital library for academic
  economics.

3
this talk

• In the first part, I will stick to the subject
  and represent some views from commercial
  publishers..
• In the second part, I have some open ideas.

FIRST PART
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me and commercial publishers

• I never worked for a commercial publisher.
• Two of my former lovers did.
• My future boss, John Regazzi did.
• I use his piece The Shifting Sands of Open
  Access Publishing, Serials Review 2004
  30275-280.
• I also use data from slides by Michael Mabe, from
  his talk STM Publishing Open Access, given at
  the Open Access Summit, Cologne, 2004-12-07
  http//www.zbmeb.de/summit/PPmabe.ppt

5
commercial publishing OA

• Commercial publishing means publishing to make
  financial gain.
• Publishing means either
• make public
• be an agent to which someone gives rights in
  exchange for the agent gathering income from.
• There is no conflict between OA and commercial
  publishing per se.

6
limits to the OA phenomenon

• Mainly the OA movement is limited to open access
  to research publications normally appearing in
  STM journals, conference proceedings
• Other areas not yet affected
• books and monographs
• teaching materials
• primary data

7
STM article field

• Most of the STM articles come through scientific
  journals.
• Some industry figures
• there are about 16k journals
• there are about 2k publishers
• 600 commercial
• 1400 not-for-profit
• 1.2-1.4 million articles per annum, growing at
  about 3 per annum
• 1 million unique authors
• 10-15 million readers

8
the scholarly journal

• Scholarly journals provide four functions
• registration
• certification
• dissemination
• archive
• Doing this, publishers create value and thats
  what they live on.

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open access journals

• Options for open access include
• open access to back issues even if current issues
  remain closed
• author pays open access
• institutional substitution
• advertising (?)
• Partly founded on the belief that electronic
  technology reduces cost.

10
size of OA (Johns figures)

• 2 of the STM journals are open access.
• There is a directory funded by OSI (Soros).
• Less than 20 of journals listed in the DOAJ are
  author pays
• 28 are free online of pay for print journals
• Others are subsidized.
• OA mainly in the biomedical and social sciences.
  Physical sciences have little.

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OA publishing unsustainable?

• Current business models appear unsustainable
  without subsidies or loss.
• http//www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_wtd003185.html
  estimates as
• 1950--1025 per article for OA
• 1425--2750 per article for non-OA
• because of cost of access control
• Current costs are for accepted papers
• PLoS charges 1520 ?
• BioMedCentral charges 520 ?
• Submission fees may be on the way.

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author pays is problematic

• Creates financial barriers to publication where
  currently there are only quality ones
• Institutional rationing of who gets to publish
  and where threatens academic freedom
• Faculty pressure to liquidate library for funds
  to publish
• poor authors excluded or have to be subsidised by
  the rest.
• Big business get to read for free articles paid
  for by universities.

13
quality and sustainability

• One idea for survival of OA journals would be to
  publish a lot.
• Interestingly enough, OA journals publish fewer
  papers than conventional.
• OA averages 30 per annum
• Elsevier averages 150 per annum
• So where is the alleged loss of quality?
• Most OA journals struggle in vain to get quality
  contents.

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PLoS spiral

• While quality is difficult to achieve, it is
  achieved, some OA publishers will get a lot of
  money.
• They will claim that their high costs come from
  high rejection rates.
• The high cost will be a quality signal.
• This will lead to a system that is more expensive
  to maintain than the current subscription model.

15
from riches to rags

• Rich universities are worried that since they
  publish a lot, it will end up costing them more.
• This is most famously express in a 2004 Cornell
  University study by Davis et al.
  http//techreports.library.cornell.edu
  8081/Dienst/UI/1.0/Display/cul.lib/2004-3
• Since the top of the academic food chain is based
  at leading universities, this is bad news for OA.

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SECOND PART

• The idea of a journal is a relict of paper
  technology, when making text public was
  expensive.
• Not making a paper publicly available appears
  technically silly because there is no cost to
  putting it up on the web.
• Conventional citations are a paper mans
  hyperlink.

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the Internet shock

• The digital document Internet enlarges the
  opportunity set of actors.
• In the past, discipline communities, which in the
  past faced technological constraints that have
  tied it together.
• The expanded opportunity set is likely to lead to
  divergent behavior.

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STM journal

• Scholarly communication happens between scholars.
  
• Scholarly communities will decide where to go,
  and will rely on visionary leaders, like Paul
  Ginsparg for Physics and yours truly for
  Economics.
• Innovation is only likely to come from within
  scholarly communities.
• Conservation is likely to come from libraries.

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http//openlib.org/home/krichel

• Thank you for your attention!