From: Jan Velterop <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2015 20:21:49 +0200

I’ve been thinking about how to level the open access/paywall playing field
for authors (see below). I’ve meant it to be of interest to librarians.
What I suggest may already be done in places; I’m just not aware of it. If
it is being done already, I would appreciate it if that information was
shared, together perhaps with an assessment of its success (or failure).

———————

Early career researchers are often reported to express the view that they
face a dilemma. Submit to – and hopefully publish in – an open access
journal, with possibly a relatively low impact factor, or in a traditional,
pay-walled journal with a relatively high impact factor.

Given the large number of traditional pay-walled journals with low, or no,
impact factors, I find this not the most credible argument. And even for
‘glam’ journals there are now good open access alternatives.

And yet, there are moments when I understand researchers when they are
having to decide where to submit their papers. Do they choose an older
subscription-supported journal, or a younger APC-supported open access
journal? In the latter case, they’ll have to find the funds to pay the
Article Processing Charge; in the former, they don’t, since subscriptions
are paid out of the library budget.  It does make a difference to a
researcher's perception. Even though in many cases it is the funder who
provides the money for the APCs, the researchers are aware of the cost and
part of the decisions they take are financial/economic ones, even if
sometimes subconsciously. They are not confronted with financial/economic
decisions if they submit to a paywalled journal. Convenience may set in,
perhaps in the form of a certain laziness, and a decision to stick with the
old hassle-free subscription journals is easily taken.

It may happen here and there, but what I have not seen is attempts by the
library community to confront researchers with the cost of paywalled
journals. I'm not talking about the subscription price, but about the cost
to the system of a single paper published in such a journal. It is a
significant cost. For subscription journals published by the major
publishers, this is on average in excess of $5000 (there are differences
depending on the publisher), and for the ‘glam’ journals presumably more,
much more (Phil Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature, estimated costs of
$30,000–40,000 per paper in 2013 [
http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676].
That’s costs to the publisher; costs to the system will be higher, as they
include profits.)

Now imagine that universities, perhaps via their libraries, take care of
any payment to publishers, be they subscription charges or APCs, and then
reclaim a per-article fee from their grants whenever researchers publish
their articles. The amounts for APCs identical to the amount charged by the
open access journal in question, of course; the amounts for articles in
subscription journals on the basis of the average per-article revenue of
the publisher of those journals. (These amounts may be reasonable
estimates, I imagine, as they will seldom be known in detail.) The amounts
thus reclaimed for articles in subscription journals could then be used for
the journal acquisitions budget.

I have no illusion that this would solve all the problems of the cost of
scientific publication, but it will increase general awareness of the true
cost of publishing in subscription journals, and may help to level the
playing field, to use an old cliché, between open access and pay-walled
literature in the mind of scientists at the point when they decide where to
publish their papers.

Worth developing the thought further?

Jan Velterop

(This post online:
http://theparachute.blogspot.nl/2015/07/levelling-open-access-paywall-playing.html
)