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