From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2011 17:43:10 -0800
Jan,
You really are not grasping the basic economics here. In an author-
pays situation, a number of articles are submitted. The "journal" (if
that is still the appropriate term) reviews all of them. Only accepted
articles carry a fee. Thus that fee must cover all of the rejected pieces
as well as the one that is accepted. The more submissions, the more
rejections; the more popular the service, the greater the overhead.
Thus author-pays journals will, as the market develops, be motivated
to reduce costs, and part of those savings will come from lighter editorial
review. The core economic issue is that the individual author or his or
her proxy (such as a "subscribing" institution) has to carry the entire system.
With toll-access (it need not be subscription-based, though it usually is),
overhead rises with increased submissions, which are a reflection of a
stronger brand. But the cost of this can be offset by finding new customers,
since the higher-ranked publications reach wider audiences. Higher-ranked
publications can also impose stiff price increases, which customers of course
detest, but the history of this business is clear in that customers
pay for quality.
You don't have these options with author-pays OA.
Toll-access publishers fight hard to get the best publications and the best
authors for those publications because that perceived quality can lead to
stronger revenues. There is no equivalent for author-pays OA.
As for the question of whether it "works," well, works for whom? The
toll-access
model works for the winners; it is heartless about the losers. It is
indifferent to
the fate of libraries except insofar as every vendor wants its
customers to survive,
even if just barely. The author-pays model works for discovery tools. It
disseminates content for anyone who wants to disseminate it. So it
works, too.
Speaking for myself, I don't care a fig if a publication is
toll-access or author-
pays. My interest is in organizations that are self-supporting, and both toll-
access and OA services can be.
Joe Esposito
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 2:24 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Jan Velterop <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2011 07:37:59 +0000
>
> Joe,
>
> There are many kinds of OA publishing as there are many kinds
> of subscription-based (SB) publishing. And the level of peer-review
> also differs, between journals, and often within journals. You
> question the potential for success of peer-reviewed OA journals
> because "there is no large customer base over which the overhead
> can be spread." How so? Unless you are talking about magazine-type
> journals with personal subscriptions (of which there are a few, but as
> a portion of the total number of journals, theirs is a fraction of a
> percent) there is a customer base of hundreds, occasionally more
> than a thousand, libraries for most journals. That compares to the
> number of potentially paying researchers, which is more than a
> million (given the number of articles currently being published every
> year).
>
> The business problem of how to keep submissions coming is there
> for OA publishing as well as for SB publishing. Subscriptions to
> 'empty' journals aren't very sustainable. The SB model has an
> added business problem: how to keep libraries subscribing and
> paying.
>
> You call it a "fundamental problem" for author-pays OA publishing
> (which is in reality 'author-side-paid OA publishing') that it "does not
> add value to the people who pay for it". That is misunderstanding
> the academic 'ego-system'. It is "Publish or Perish", not "Read or Rot"
> putting the need, and that means the value-add, squarely, or at least
> largely, on the side of the author. And also, an author can choose
> where to publish, a reader needs access to everything in his or her
> field. OA journals have no monetizable monopoloid position anymore,
> in the way the SB journals do. Indeed, author-side-paid OA resolves
> the economic contradictions and monopoly problems inherent in the
> SB model.
>
> Jan Velterop
>
>
> On 30 Nov 2011, at 00:57, LIBLICENSE wrote:
>
> From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:19:27 -0800
>
> Not present in this discussion is the fact that there are many
> different kinds of OA publishing. The flagship PLOS journals,
> for example, have an editorial policy that resembles that of
> established toll-access journals. But PLOS One has a
> different kind of peer review. The first kind is probably too
> expensive to thrive (as OA), since there is no large customer
> base over which the overhead can be spread. The latter kind,
> which is now being widely imitated, is thriving now, but the
> long-term prospects are uncertain.
>
> The business problem is how to keep the submissions coming
> for the PLOS One model. This may not be a problem for PLOS
> itself or its One service because of the strength of the brand.
> But what about all the other publishers that are working with this
> author-pays "lite" peer review model? Why would an author submit
> material to one such service over another? In the absence of
> old-fashioned peer review, the OA services will be hard to
> distinguish from one another.
>
> The fundamental problem with author-pays OA publishing is that
> it does not add value to the people who pay for it. It adds value
> to the people who do not pay for it. In economics, internal
> contradictions have a way of revealing themselves given enough time.
>
> Joe Esposito
|
