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