From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2015 22:50:48 -0500

Isn't it odd that, in selecting students for admission, even the
rejected ones are expected to pay some of the costs of review of their
applications, through application fees, whereas in journal publishing,
the tradition has grown not to charge rejected authors for the
processing of their submissions despite the costs involved? Why have
these two different traditions taken root as they have in academe in
different areas where reviews of submissions are undertaken?

Sandy Thatcher


> From: Jan Velterop <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2015 18:49:06 +0100
>
> There will always be people who have a problem with the idea of
> payment, be it for subscriptions, APCs, page/colour charges, or
> anything else to do with publishing. But scholarly publishing - of any
> sort - has costs. For proper XML coding, providing hosting, and
> administering peer review, by far the highest cost item for most
> publishers. Even the cost of tidying up some authors' messes in terms
> of the state of their manuscripts should not be underestimated.
>
> The options of funding those costs are limited. There are basically
> subscription fees, APCs, sponsorships/advertising, and subsidies. For
> those who would like to see open access, subscriptions are out, as
> they do not deliver open access. Sponsorships and advertising, even if
> they were able to cover costs adequately at all, are generally seen as
> undesirable, as they carry a high risk of conflict of interest.
> Subsidies are useful, but they can be fickle and are more often than
> not local or national and politically sensitive to potential cuts,
> making long-term sustainability questionable. An APC-model remains as
> a kind of distributed micro-subsidy that, because of its distributed
> and global nature, avoids the drawbacks of central subsidy.
>
> That doesn't mean APCs are without flaws, and a generally flawless
> model has not been found as far as I'm aware. Among APCs flaws are:
>
> They are charged on published articles only, thus carrying the cost of
> the process at a given journal that all rejected articles have had to
> go through as well. This logically leads to APCs generally being
> higher for more selective journals. (Submission charges might
> ameliorate this, but there seems to be zero appetite for that.)
>
> They are, especially in hybrid journals, not calculated on the basis
> of marginal costs, but on the basis of integral costs, which means
> that costs not related to the OA articles per se, but to the entire
> journal and its legacies (e.g. print, sales and marketing, etc) are
> carried by these APCs as well.
>
> They are not sufficiently - or not at all - differentiated taking into
> account the author's ability to pay, though waiver programs do help
> somewhat.
> They do, indeed, make it easier for unscrupulous people to take
> advantage of naive and inexperienced researchers. However, I detect a
> streak of cultural superiority in the way honest, if amateurish,
> efforts to establish new open access journals are so easily classified
> as 'predatory', especially if the English of their sites isn't quite
> how native speakers would like to see it, or if the names or addresses
> associated with the ventures are more 'foreign' than what the OECD
> world is dudes to (e.g. if they are from what is known as the
> 'developing' or 'emerging' countries).
>
> On that last point, it would actually be good for scholarly publishing
> if outfits in e.g. India, the Philippines, etc. would not just be
> doing the bulk of XML coding and other technical preparation, as they
> do now, but get more involved in editorial work as well. Visceral
> reactions to, and suspicions of, any publishing activity outside
> Anglo-Saxon/European countries (aspersions are even cast at Latin
> American SciELO) do not exactly help.
>
> Another element is the focus on money. Of course that it important,
> but it seems to have taken over from the original purpose of access
> for all: Open Access. Two strategies were originally seen as useful in
> that regard: 1) self-archiving, later called the 'green' route, and 2)
> 'born' open access at the point of publication, later called the
> 'gold' route. Neither of these avoids costs altogether. 'Green' needs
> subscriptions to survive, with their considerable cost; 'gold' needs
> the micro-subsidies known as APCs, or subsidies.
>
> But there is an elephant in the room: the cost of peer review.
> Although peer review is an academic exercise, its organisation and
> administration is currently outsourced to publishers, who gratefully
> accept that role, of course (to them it looks like the money is just
> thrown at them, and why wouldn't they pick it up?)
>
> Up to 99% of the cost of publishing is spent on peer review. Let me
> illustrate that with a simple calculation. About half a year ago on
> the Scholarly Kitchen blog it was reported that the technical
> preparation (xml-coding etc) and hosting costs an average of $47 per
> article at PubMedCentral
> (http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/04/08/revisiting-the-price-of-posting-pubmed-central-spends-most-of-its-budget-handling-author-manuscripts/).
> Any other publishing costs are essentially those associated with the
> organisation of peer review (and profits, of course). That means, the
> cost of peer review is an average of $2953 per article published in a
> typical hybrid journal with APC of$3000, and an average of $4953 in a
> typical subscription journal with revenues of $5000 per article. If
> these figures are correct - and I have no reason to believe they are
> materially wrong - the cost per article of technical preparation is
> less than one percent of the average per-article revenue of a typical
> subscription journal.
>
> So, massive savings could clearly be made. Reform of the way peer
> review is carried out offers much more scope for that than anything
> else in the scholarly publishing system. One humble suggestion:
> separate 'publishing' - the communication of research results, e.g. on
> what is still strangely called 'preprint' platforms - from the
> stratifying evaluation that is typically associated with journal
> publishing. And do the latter only for articles deemed worth going
> through the trouble and the expense of it. That way, at least, free
> and open scholarly communication is not being held hostage by the
> financial requirements of the career advancement and CV-boosting
> potential offered by publication in journals, especially in those with
> high impact factors.
>
> Jan Velterop
>
> On 27 Sep 2015, at 18:40, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2015 11:56:42 +0100
>
> Hi Jean-Claude,
>
> I agree with you 100%. APCs are deeply problematic (for all the
> reasons you mention) and they have done a great disservice to the OA
> movement. However, I do not think that this is a widely held view
> amongst OA advocates. Certainly I get a lot of push-back when I
> express such views.
>
> By the way, I did not say that Tracz invented APCs, but that he
> pioneered them - by making them the means of funding open access at
> BMC. My recollection is that the first person to propose the use of
> author fees was Stevan Harnad, on the American Scientist Open Access
> Forum. Perhaps Vitek Tracz/ Jan Velterop got the idea from there.
>
> Given your views on APCs I wonder whether your reservations extend to
> the whole BMC project. I suspect you have never published with the
> company but I see it has published an encomium by you on its "comments
> from users" page (your comment is about its copyright policy rather
> than its use of APCs): http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/usercomments
>
> Richard
>
>
> On 25 September 2015 at 00:04, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>
> From: "Guédon Jean-Claude" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2015 10:20:42 +0000
>
> I am not so sure that Vitek Tracz is such a "hero" of the open access
> movement by inventing (or is it Jan Velterop?) APC's..
>
> APCs have proved to be very problematic indeed::
>
> 1. They create inequalities at the author level that never existed
> before (including between disciplines, between rich and poor
> countries, between rich and poor institutions);
>
> 2. They have given rise to a horror story called hybrid journals;
>
> 3. The have opened the door to an even worse story called deceptive
> (or predatory, as some say) journals.
>
> Hard to be a hero after that.
>
> jcg