From: <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2019 16:38:48 +0200

Dear Jean-Claude (good to be in touch again), Dmitri and Danny,



Your highly appreciated responses confirmed once more the complicated
situation we are in when it comes to OA publishing. It makes me realize
that I have to rephrase my problem.



QOAM aims at informing authors about the OA publication fees (and about the
service quality of OA journals, but that is another issue). It is not an
option to tell them everything about Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Bronze, free,
gratis, libre etc. So, we decided to use only three options:



   1. No-fee journals. These journals charge no publication fee to nobody.
   Publishing venues are institutions, universities, charities etc. In OA and
   Plan S jargonese it concerns ‘Diamond Open Access’ journals.
   2. For fee-based journals QOAM make a distinction between:

a.      Discounted journals. These journals are included in deals
(membership, offsetting, RaP, PaR) where libraries pay in part or wholly
the publication fees so that authors have to pay less or nothing at all.
The Elsevier and Springer journals I mentioned in my previous post are
examples of this. Jean-Claude raised his eyebrows at the term ‘discounted’.
May be ‘subsidized’ would cover this situation better. Jean-Claude?

b.      Fully charged journals. Here authors, their research funder that
is, pay the full list price.

So far, this seemed to work well. At least, at QOAM we were never asked for
clarifications. Recently, DOAJ started to apply the term no-fee to some
journals of category 2a as well. For us, at QOAM, this was confusing.
Should we follow them? But wouldn’t that mean that, with the growing number
of deals, sooner or later all OA journals would be ‘no-fee’, making the
term meaningless? And making authors totally unaware of any costs.



This was the background for my question. Apologies for my conciseness.
Hopefully, this leads to some further reactions.



Leo





From: Danny Kingsley <[log in to unmask]>

Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2019 17:29:34 +1000

Thanks Jean-Claude,



We actually need a further delineation of the actors:

1a. Researcher as reader

1b. Researcher as author

1c. Researcher as editor



The move from subscriptions shifts payment - if there is a fee: *FROM* 1a
(through their library subscription) *TO* 1b (mostly through a funder or
the institutional, but occasionally personally)



But 1c is also very important because as editors of journals it is crucial
researchers actually understand all of these issues and can make sensible
decisions for their circumstances. The problem with 1c is that as far as I
can see the bulk of researchers remain pretty unaware of all of this.



At Cambridge University Press there are multiple Learned Societies (who
publish their journals through CUP) that won’t discuss hybrid or moving to
open access models because they consider this to be ‘vanity’ publishing.
Sigh.



Danny





Dr Danny Kingsley
Scholarly Communication Consultant
17 Eureka St
Kelvin Grove QLD 4059
e: [log in to unmask]
m: +61 (0)480 115 937
t:@dannykay68
o: 0000-0002-3636-5939



On 18 Jun 2019, at 07:29, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:



From: "Guédon Jean-Claude" <[log in to unmask]>

Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2019 20:12:53 +0000

The question obviously rests on "no fee for whom?"

Let us remember that the main actors in the research context are:

   1. the researchers,
   2. publishers and, more generally, those responsible for the four
   publishing functions (registration, certification, dissemination and
   preservation),
   3. the funding agencies,
   4. the general public in all its diverse communities,
   5. the research sites (universities, national labs, etc.) and their
   libraries


Leo - hello, in passing - puts forth a distinction between a no-fee or a
discounted journal.

Clearly, a SCOAP3-style of financial support for journals is

   1. A no-fee solution for researchers
   2. A fee-garnering solution for publishers
   3. Maybe a fee solution for funding agencies
   4. A no-fee solution for the general public
   5. Certainly a fee solution for the research sites that decide to
   contribute and a no-fee solution for the sites that do not contribute (free
   riders)

This said, I do not understand what a "discounted journal" is. What is
discounted? From what base-line?

It is clear that a SCOAP3-style approach to open access, or various forms
of flipping arrangements, all start from the premise that, once researchers
have free access to submitting and free access to reading, all that is
needed is to find a kind of money flow designed to keep publishers happy,
and research sites and their libraries not too unhappy. Of course, open
access was never imagined to solve the financial equilibrium between hapy
publishers and unhappy librarians; it was imagined to make scholarly
communication optimal to improve the research process and the impact of
research results in society. Fitting the latter objectives within a
financial plan may appear "realistic" to some, but it really amounts to
putting the cart before the horse. The right way to go is:

   1. See how to make the scholarly communication system optimal
   2. Scope where the money comes from (libraries, research sites, funding
   agencies)
   3. See how to coordinate the sources of money to achieve 1.


In conclusion, the question that should really be broached is whether the
goal of open access must be constrained by the publishers and their
"happiness requirements" (so to speak). Given that the four publishing
functions can be distributed between various actors (for example libraries
alone can register and preserve, and can probably disseminate; research
sites can certainly certify), and given that the money flows from only two
sources - libraries and funding agencies - the only reason why, presently,
the money flows keep on going to legacy publishers is the fact that their
products - journals (not articles, journals) are used to evaluate research
(impact factor and journal rankings). Beside the fact that evaluating
research in this manner is highly problematic (to say the least), the
moneys held by libraries, research sites, and funding agencies might be
better employed if they were pooled to develop new kinds of public
publishing platforms with appropriate tools to carry out evaluations of
research that are sensible.

Redalyc does so in Latin America.
The issue is also alive within the European Commission.

Jean-Claude Guédon

On 2019-06-15 2:27 p.m., LIBLICENSE wrote:

From: <[log in to unmask]>

Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2019 13:37:44 +0200

What is a no-fee journal?



Spontaneously, I would have answered: an OA journal which does not charge
publication fees. Further consideration might be needed, however, as DOAJ
and QOAM come to different conclusions with respect to a number of
journals. For example, the Elsevier journals 1873-2445 and 1873-1562 or the
Springer journals 1029-8479 and 1434-6052 do not charge authors because
libraries have paid the bill as members of the SCOAP3 project. But does
that make these journals ‘no-fee’ as DOAJ seems to conclude, or are they
just ‘discounted journals’ as QOAM claims? The outcome may have relevance
to the wider Plan S debate as well.



I would appreciate if the community could shed some light on this.



Leo Waaijers