From: "Jean-Claude Guédon" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2015 10:23:11 -0400

How about non-APC-OA journals?  It seems that these are regularly
forgotten by many people. Could it be that they are too intent on
maintaining a revenue stream for publishers rather than thinking about
researchers first.

The point of scientific publishing is not about publishers; it is
about researchers.

Research is very heavily subsidized everywhere. Publishing research
results is part of the research process. So, why not design the right
kinds of subsidies that would create the true even playing field that
Velterop claims to look for, and, at the same time, get rid of the
enormous cost generated by profit seeking.

And let us forget about impact factor as a way to organize scientific
publishing: it was designed  to organize journal (commercial)
competition, not to evaluate researchers.
--

Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal



Le lundi 20 juillet 2015 à 20:50 -0400, LIBLICENSE a écrit :
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)