OA and commercial publishers

1. Thomas Krichel 2005-05-14 OA and commercial publishers

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

4. 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; 30:275-280. • 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 that’s what they live on.

9. 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 (John’s 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

14. 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.

16. 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 man’s hyperlink.

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. Thank you for your attention! http://openlib.org/home/krichel