Heading for the open road: costs and benefits of transitions in scholarly communications
This new report investigates the drivers, costs and benefits of potential ways to increase access to scholarly journals. It identifies five different routes for achieving that end over the next five years, and compares and evaluates the benefits as well as the costs and risks for the UK.
The report suggests that policymakers who are seeking to promote increases in access should encourage the use of existing subject and institutional repositories, but avoid pushing for reductions in embargo periods, which might put at risk the sustainability of the underlying scholarly publishing system. They should also promote and facilitate a transition to open access publishing (Gold open access) while seeking to ensure that the average level of charges for publication does not exceed c.£2000; that the rate in the UK of open access publication is broadly in step with the rate in the rest of the world; and that total payments to journal publishers from UK universities and their funders do not rise as a consequence.
At a time of financial stringency for universities, research funders and publishers, it is important that all the stakeholders in the scholarly communications system work together to find the most cost-effective ways of fulfilling their joint goal of increasing access to the outputs of research. This report provides the first detailed and authoritative analysis of how this might be achieved over the next five years. We hope that it will stimulate new dialogue and new approaches to policy and practice across all stakeholders.
This work was jointly commissioned by the RIN, Research Libraries UK, the Wellcome Trust, the Publishing Research Consortium and the Joint Information Systems Committee. It is part of our Transitions in scholarly communications portfolio of projects.
The report annexes and an executive summary are available to download below. You can request hard copies via contact@rin.ac.uk
Please note: there was a small error of a mislabelled graph in an earlier version of the below report, which has now been replaced.
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It’s only a matter of time before social media and scholarly materials have to integrate and become one. They really ought to work together to make this policy a reality for the good of everyone.
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Green Open Access
It seems that Stevan doesn’t like a world that is sculpted by others. He is ‘vegan green’ when it comes to Open Access, and doesn’t seem to value publishers’ efforts whether they be societies or commercial publishers. The only reason Science and Nature are not the only journals in the world is because they do not satisfy all authors’ needs. We need a complex world of a multitude of publishers and multiplicity of journals, with different business models. If we didn’t need them, we wouldn’t have them. Stevan’s monochromatic (green) world is a ridiculous construct. Obviously he does not see or read the quite appallingly written efforts publishers receive and massage into publishable shape (often with extra experiments) or reject. We often improve an article and yet still reject it. If it is ever published it will be better for our (unpaid) efforts.
A major problem with most reports is that they focus on developed countries. Punch-lines like: “we are spending so much on research, our journals should be free” are simplifications. If all countries could operate like this, great. A Bigger Issue (the 20,000m view) is that traditionally the 1st world has bought the 3rd world’s output via journal subscriptions. Cancel this and you infect the 3rd world with laryngitis. You remove its voice. Authors from developing countries cannot pay for Gold Open Access and are not capable of going Green. Do Stevan et alia really want to reduce foreign aid?
Another Big Issue is the assumption that research funds beget all articles. Case studies are not funded. Do Stevan et alia think that the world’s physicians should post an article without peer-review? Do they want to read clinical studies and case reports without having any idea if the author has conducted the study properly? Or do they think their physicians do not need case reports? Do they think that “my surgeon has read ‘Surgery for Dummies’, I’ll be fine”?
There is a big gap between this Green rhetoric and reality. I believe that Stevan lives in the world of the physicist (thank you for the hydrogen bomb) rather than the world of the biologist-physician (thank you for telling me about cholesterol, the smear, the mammogram, IVF, antibiotics, my child). Also, concerning the role of the publisher, perhaps he should seek an internship at Elsevier to see how much effort is put into being the interface between author and reader. After a million words against publishers he should find a new career.
Do people realize that each biomedical article costs about $100,000 of research funds? If the library buys a journal costing $1,000 that has 100 articles in it, they are buying access to $10,000,000 worth of research? Seems like a bargain. It often happens that laboratories conduct research that produces no results (‘negative observations’). Unfortunately, it is often the case that other labs have often conducted the same research with equally disappointing results. I might guess that the money wasted on experiments that cannot work far exceeds the library budgets of the world.
Why?
One reason is that ‘negative observations’ (NOs) are not cited. Since journals have to have a good Impact Factor to be purchased, most journals choose not to publish them. NOGO (Negative Observations in Gynecologic Oncology) is an exception; there are probably more. Libraries should not be over-influenced by the statistically nonsensical Impact Factor.
Green Open Access is no solution. It is sabotage. A mixture of Open Access, Hybrid and Tolled-Access is fine. Open Access deters inflated subscription rates.
If society re-valued library budgets, then there would be no argument. Consortia have eroded prices more than Open Access.
From my own perspective, as a small publisher with lower prices, another problem is that consortia do not seem to desire to support smaller publishers and are only focused on Big Deals. If you support Big Journals from Big Publishers at the expense of small publications, you fail to support publishers that could severely erode the Big Publishers’ dominance (by competing for articles), you support the status quo. Facilitating access to diverse journals will eventually bring a brave new informed world.
Green Open Access is already yesterday’s idea.
TheScientificWorld’s Open Choice model means that articles are selected on basis of peer-review, not the ability of the author to pay. Such journals also need libraries to subscribe.
Graham V Lees PhD
TheScientificWorldJournal
Anonymous said on 06 May 2011 at 4:18pm:
A particular problem in the UK is that users may be included in more than one license for a particular journal. A green or gold OA approach takes away this problem; traditional publishing models cannot escape it. Did the analysis take this into account? Or maybe it isn’t relevant to the scenarios?
Michael Jubb said on 14 April 2011 at 5:00pm:
We can all agree, I take it, that if we could by magic translate ourselves into an open access world tomorrow, that would be a very good thing. But we are not there now, and there are important questions to address as to how we might get there, how it might be funded, and how to make sure that it is sustainable. What Stevan misses in his comment below is that the report he is criticising is about how a transition might work over a five-year period. And in his criticisms he is, I fear, wrong on all three counts.
1. Short-sighted? Stevan claims that it is short-sighted to examine OA from a national point of view. But funding for research, and for the costs of disseminating and publishing research, is provided overwhelmingly on a national basis. Governments and funders may take a broad global view, but they also have to take national interests into account. That is especially the case when levels of take-up of OA differ among leading research nations (China being a case in point).
2. Premature? Stevan’s view that Green is the way to go is well-known. Many take a different or more nuanced view. And to argue that it is premature to examine – during a transition period - how the costs and benefits of Gold might differ at different levels of APCs is simply perverse. It’s certainly something that funders want to know about. And there are real issues about the distribution of costs across different universities, and also different countries, particularly during a transition period.
3. Mistaken? It is surely not mistaken to note that there are risks for publishers, and to the current scholarly publishing system, during a transition to OA, and particularly to Green OA. We can argue about how severe the risks are, and indeed about whether we care if the transition leads to the demise of some publishers. But it is perverse not to recognise that the stakes are high for individual publishers and perhaps for the industry as a whole.
Anonymous said on 08 April 2011 at 7:19pm:
Stevan Harnad, University of Southampton http://www.openscholarship.org/
The Research Information Network (RIN) report (Cook et al 2011) basically confirms the immediate practical implication of the Houghton report (Houghton et al 2009): Provide green open access (OA) now (through researchers self-archiving the final refereed drafts of their journal articles in their institutional repositories). That is the solution that is entirely within the hands of the research community, and also the one that confers by far the greatest cost/benefit ratio.
Having reaffirmed this immediate practical course of action, that should have been the end of it. But the RIN report goes on to dip into three secondary issues that are, respectively, short-sighted, premature, and mistaken – with respect to OA itself, as opposed to whether and when publishing converts from subscription-based to Gold OA:
1. SHORT-SIGHTED: It is short-sighted to estimate OA benefits from a national point of view, particularly for the Green OA option, which is already fully within the research community’s reach, and is also the option that the RIN report, like the Houghton report, is recommending.
Green OA self-archiving is not a subscription-cost-saving matter. It is a research-access matter. Journal contents have no national boundaries. The immediate benefit to the UK from providing Green OA to UK research output will be the enhanced uptake and impact of UK research globally. This will no doubt encourage the rest of the world to provide Green OA to their research output too. (It is not just the UK that is reading the Houghton and RIN reports.)
As the rest of the world reciprocates with Green OA, the UK also gains in access to research from the rest of the world. Journal subscription cancelations – if and when they are eventually induced by Green OA – will not begin happening while only the UK contents of journals have been made Green OA. You can’t cancel a journal because its UK-authored articles happen to be available free. Cancelations can only happen once the practice of Green OA self-archiving has become universal.
In fact, the countries that are early adopters of Green OA self-archiving will derive an extra competitive advantage in the uptake and impact of their research output, until the playing field is levelled as other countries catch up by making their own research output Green too.
2. PREMATURE: The RIN report dwells needlessly on how high article processing charges (APCs) for Gold OA could and should be.
Not only are neither conversion to Gold OA publishing nor the APC asking price for Gold OA in the research community’s hands, but it is particularly premature to focus on APC asking prices at a time when it is the Green OA option that is the optimal one, and entirely within the research community’s reach, whereas only a minority of journals are as yet Gold OA.
The market will take care of APCs if and when their time comes. Right now, OA itself is the priority, and the way to provide immediate OA is for universities and funders to provide Green OA, today, rather than to keep focusing instead on what the APCs for Gold OA might turn out to be if and when Green OA ever induces a transition to Gold OA.
What is certain is that the money currently being paid out by institutions for publication – in the form of institutional subscription fees – is enough to cover the current costs of refereed research publication. That same money could pay for publication via Gold APCs, but if Gold OA comes into its own after universal Green OA has prevailed, Green OA itself, with its distributed network of institutional repositories, will have taken over the full burden of text-generation, archiving and access-provision that is currently being borne by publishers: The print and online edition of the journal will no longer need to be produced, the author’s refereed final draft will become the version-of-record, and hence the APCs will shrink to just the cost of peer review.
Today’s Gold APC costs and estimates are certainly not based on such a post-Green scenario; hence calculations based on scaling those costs up to all journal articles are premature and irrelevant.
3. MISTAKEN: Coupled with the needless preoccupation with current and future Gold APCs – at a time when what is really needed is full speed ahead with Green OA – the RIN report curiously characterizes Green OA as “unsustainable.”
But what is it that’s unsustainable? Certainly not OA self-archiving by authors: That can be done for every refereed paper published on the planet for as long as research continues to be conducted. Obviously what RIN means here is that Green OA might eventually make subscription publishing unsustainable. But if and when universal Green OA ever makes subscription publishing unsustainable that means subscriptions will be cancelled by institutions, journals will cut costs, downsize to providing peer review alone and convert to Gold OA APCs; and institutions will pay those much-reduced APCs out of a fraction of their annual windfall subscription cancelation savings.
The RIN report’s recommendations on the length of the delay (embargo) before publishers make their own versions of record OA – like its premature preoccupation with the price of Gold APCs and its needless preoccupation with publishers’ current revenue streams – are irrelevant to Green OA.
Green OA is based on the author’s refereed final draft, not the publisher’s version of record. Publisher embargoes on OA to the version of record are more a matter of the sustainability of subscription publishing, hence whether it continues to co-exist in parallel with Green OA or converts to Gold OA.
Cook J, Hulls D, Jones D & Ware M (2011) Heading for the Open Road: costs and benefits of transitions in scholarly communications. Research Information Network (RIN) http://www.rin.ac.uk/system/files/attachments/Dynamics_of_transition_for_screen.pdf
Harnad, S. (2010a) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus, 28 (1). pp. 55-59. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18514/
Harnad, S. (2010b) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8). http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/
Houghton, J.W., Rasmussen, B., Sheehan, P.J., Oppenheim, C., Morris, A., Creaser, C., Greenwood, H., Summers, M. and Gourlay, A. (2009). Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the Costs and Benefits, London and Bristol: The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2009/economicpublishingmodelsfinalreport.aspx
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