From: <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2012 12:32:08 +0000

Tiny fields present publishers with problems. Small publishers are
necessarily expert in this area. First, 'tiny field' can be
re-interpreted as 'tiny market', no-one out there much to buy the
content whether its in journal or per-article form. Existing tiny
markets may not be so problematical, the 'problem' having resolved
itself: perhaps in the publisher acknowledging that publishing a
particular title redounds to his credit, offsetting the annual
financial loss, perhaps in sufficient libraries recognising it as
content they 'ought' to have in their libraries regardless of the fact
its barely used. The challenge becomes greater when dealing with
emerging topics which may become mainstream over (a long) time, the
kind of areas we tend to publish in. For example we started a journal
on hypersonics a couple of years ago. It may emerge as a well
resourced area of research but at present, in a few institutions
around the world, deep in the aerospace department is an occasional
individual enthused by this topic. Is the library going to buy the
journal just for him? I assure you, very few have. Might his needs be
better served by a low-cost PPV arrangement? Possibly. And, as you
imply, the risk-averseness of most academic publishers is such that,
if the proposal is, "lets start this new journal for a new field,
which will certainly lose money for its first few years, and anyway
the field itself might founder in a few years" then the answer is
'no'. Which is a sensible answer, but doesn't recognise the
possibility of the field thriving.

So, I am not suggesting my PPV proposal is any kind of comprehensive
answer but there are spaces where it would, it seems to me, be a
useful option, for researchers, librarians and publishers. It does
help open up publishing possibilities, making it possible to publish
as a journal (even if the content is also sold on a PPV basis)
without, from the publisher perspective, the requirement that to be
viable, it must turn over $xxxxxx; or, from the library side, that it
must have a certain usage level in terms of xxx downloads to justify
being subscribed to. The fact that only a handful of people around the
world are studying some particular thing strikes me as wonderful, and
my job is to facilitate what they're doing however I can, not as a
reason to dismiss them/their work as unimportant. What I'm thinking
about here, among other things, is finding ways for libraries to play
their part within the financial constraints they have..

Bill Hughes
Multi-Science Publishing


----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, January 21, 2012 4:03 AM
Subject: Re: Moving towards paying only for usage?
From: Lloyd Davidson <[log in to unmask]>

Applying a pay-per-use system to highly specialized fields, e.g.
taxonomy, where only very small numbers of people might be interested
in an article on a particular species, and where such articles would
predictably have very few readers, and fewer yet willing to pay for
access to them, would result in a system where publishers would no
longer have any incentive to publish such specialized papers at all.
Consequently, small fields of study would likely cease to exist, to
the great detriment of science as a whole. Such fields are already in
jeopardy and who can honestly know what article will be important now
or in the future? If I happen to be one of the two or three
researchers in the world working on that particular species or genus,
that taxonomic paper could well be vitally important to me but I
might not need it for 100 years after it was published.

In the humanities, where citations are less used than in the sciences,
this system would be particularly devastating, to say nothing of how
authors would feel when the inevitable annual reports to authors were
issued by the publishers that showed that nobody was willing to pay
for (i.e. read) your last publication, or, for that matter, perhaps
any other of your publications. Such a system would make many authors
feel like failures and would provide wonderfully specific hard data
for denying tenure and promotion, as well as to politicians looking to
cut funding for education.

Who would be willing to pay to read an article that was found
serendipitously, perhaps by browsing, and looked somewhat interesting
but was peripheral to your interests of the moment? If libraries paid
for such pay-per-use access, would they have to limit the number of
papers that each user might be allowed to read? If individuals
without grants, e.g. students, had to pay, where would the money come
from?

It's hard to see how a pay-per-use system could operate equally well
for authors, readers (especially casual ones) and publishers.

Lloyd


On Jan 19, 2012, at 5:29 PM, LIBLICENSE wrote:

> From: Rich Dodenhoff <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 22:23:58 +0000
> Subject: RE: Moving towards paying only for usage?
>
> The pay-per-use system described below seems to require more work on
> the part of publishers, which would drive up costs rather than reduce
> them. If articles are sold on a pay-per-view basis instead of by
> subscription for an entire journal, publishers might have to charge
> more to cover the cost of producing the content that gets used less.
> A publisher has no way of knowing how much use an article might
> receive when it is published. Editors and editorial boards already
> try to select manuscripts that will get the most use and citations to
> generate higher impact factors, but not every manuscript does. Some
> get no citations at all, despite the best efforts to weed out those
> papers.
>
> Richard Dodenhoff
> Journals Director
>
> American Society for Pharmacology
> & Experimental Therapeutics