From: Jan Velterop <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2011 19:38:11 +0000

Joe,

It is of course very difficult to see ahead even five years.
Personally I think that author-side payment OA publishing will be much
wider spread, but then again, ten years ago I thought that the
majority of primary journal articles would be open access by now.

There is no doubt that author-side payment OA publishing will face
economic challenges. We all do. It's the nature of the economic system
in which we live. There will be competition, but I doubt that there
will be more commoditisation than there already is in the traditional
subscription-based publishing model. (I read 'commodities' as services
or goods without qualitative differentiation). Competition doesn't
necessarily lead to lower quality. The level and quality of the
services that OA journals offer won't always be the same, and
accordingly, fees won't always be the same. Brands, i.e. publishers'
and editors' reputations, will still matter in the 'ego-system' that
is science. It's even likely that a small number of high-end journals
will survive in the subscription model. There will always be people
who need the (perception of) public approbation that having their
articles accepted by such journals entails. It will be the new 'vanity
publishing'.

It may well be that OA publishing services move to areas with less
expensive labour. A lot of publishing already has. Much of the
marking-up (xml-coding) and back office operations of the largest
publishers takes place in India nowadays. And they do a sterling job
in India, on the whole. Their brain power is no less than in the US or
Europe and their education levels have been increasing fast. Besides,
global academic communication is not tasked with keeping jobs in the
US or Europe.

As for the rigour of peer review (much of it a myth anyway), that may
well be reduced in the process. Rigour made sense in an era when the
sums invested in the whole publishing system – typesetting, paper,
printing, warehousing, distribution, library storage, lending,
redundancy (many copies), etc. – were high, per article. Generation
(beyond what the author delivers), distribution and storage have
become relatively cheap, and there is no need for much redundancy any
longer, either. Add to that the 'overwhelm' of the amount of articles
published, and the quality of individual articles in the ocean of
material becomes less important. Computer-aided analysis of the
literature will become the norm (is already in some areas). We all
know how to deal with outliers in graphs, and outliers in the
literature will be dealt with in a similar way. They are either of
extreme interest (rare), or noise (common). Besides, the emphasis will
shift to data, away from narrative, making the outlier analogy even
more pertinent.

As far as I'm concerned, the case for low cost and less qualitative
hangup is not a negative one. The positive side of the ledger is
global and open access, easy re-use of findings, and with all that,
increased speed of scientific discovery.

Jan Velterop


On 18 Nov 2011, at 04:22, LIBLICENSE wrote:

From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>

Jan,

The author-pays model is indeed a splendid one and has succeeded
beyond the expectations of all but a few visionaries.  What do you
think it will look like in 5 years?  The number of services for
author-pays continues to grow.   Perhaps they will all survive;
perhaps there will be even more.  But they have certain economic
challenges ahead, namely, that they are in a commodity business where
it will be very hard to make money when this market gets more crowded.
 Will the $1,200 author fee drop to $1,000 under market pressure?  Why
not to $800?  Why not $600?  Some people working in this field believe
that $600 is breakeven.  I don't know about that, but suppose it's
true.  Doesn't this mean that all these competitors move out of the
First World to get less expensive labor? And if prices still have
downward pressure, what kind of temptation will there be for reducing
some of the services?  Will there be even less rigorous peer review?

Because of the monopoly nature of copyright (subject to exceptions
under fair use), publishing is inherently not a commodity business.
But author-pays moves in the direction of a commodity business.  We
really don't know what it will look like when it matures, but there is
a case to be made that it will be low cost and low quality.

Joe Esposito

On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 7:09 PM, Jan Velterop <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Rick describes it extremely clearly. There is no, and cannot be,
> competition between publishers on price, because their journals
> (the primary research ones - the vast majority) are monopoloid.
> Where publishers compete is where there is choice. They compete
> for authors and their papers, and authors are the only ones in
> the system with a realistic choice (albeit that even that choice
> is heavily influenced by peer-pressure).
>
> That is why, in spite of possible practical issues, the principle
> of author-side payment of the 'service' of publishing is so
> attractive, from a functional market point of view. And
> author-side payment of the service of publishing also makes open
> access possible without any financial repercussions for the
> publisher. And open access has so many advantages for academic
> research, that it can be seen as very research-unfriendly to
> stick to subscription models for the sake of tradition or of
> cold-water-fear of change, or simply because of inertia.
> Wholesale change cannot be effected overnight, of course, but
> companies like Springer, for example, demonstrate that moving
> into open access publishing makes business sense as well as
> academic sense.
>
> Jan Velterop