Re: universities experiment with paying OA fees

[Ahmed Hindawi <ahmed.hindawi@hindawi.com>]

Anthony:

In my opinion, the best option for creating a true efficient 
market economy for Gold OA publishing is to allow/encourage 
authors to write the cost of publication in their grant 
application and to let them handle the payment just like any 
other item they spend the money on. This will completely 
decentralize the process and individual researchers will try to 
optimize the cost of their publishing activities just like any 
other cost. Of course this does not mean researchers will publish 
in the least expensive journals. Rather, they will take the cost 
in their consideration, something that is completely absent in 
the current subscription market, among other factors.

This is of course not the institutional central funding model. 
For that, let me ask you the question about conference 
attendance. Researchers very frequently ask for the cost of 
attending their conferences from central funding places in their 
institutions. These might be their departments or some higher 
organizational level units. Whatever system is used for 
allocating these funds, why cannot a similar one used for 
allocating the funds for Gold OA publishing? I certainly don't 
see the cost of attending conferences escalating without limits, 
which means that there are some market forces at work, which 
prevents conference organizers from charging any amount they 
want, right? And I don't see researchers complaining about the 
system either.

Let me make one more comment on a different model here: 
institutional memberships. Even with that model, the market 
efficiency will be better than the current subscription world. 
Your institute might take a big deal subscription with, for 
example, Springer. This affects smaller publishers since it will 
be difficult to a smaller publisher to get the same institute to 
subscribe to its own journals even if these journals were priced 
at a signification lower level. This simply because the institute 
will have to pay the smaller publisher in addition to paying 
Springer. Switch to the Gold OA market, your institute might have 
a deal with Springer. However, no matter how the contract is 
written, it must take into account the number of articles 
published with Springer. It can be a step like scale, or it can 
be fixed for the next couple of years, but at the end, you will 
have to pay Springer more for publishing more articles from your 
institute. When another OA publisher approaches you, let us say a 
smaller publisher like Hindawi, with a lower per article cost, 
you should be willing to take an institutional membership with 
that publisher, because every article you publish with the lower 
cost OA publisher, is an article that you don't publish with the 
higher cost OA publisher. Your weighted average, the average cost 
you pay per article, will certainly be lowered by adding a new 
lower cost publisher. Your authors will be making their choices 
of course of where to publish, but at least smaller and lower 
cost publishers, will have a better chance of getting into the 
game.

There are many ways of creating an efficient market for Gold OA 
and yes, some of them are more efficient than others. But most 
(not all) of them are certainly more efficient than the current 
completely dysfunctional market of subscription based journals.

Your last question about the cost of major OA publishers does not 
have much to do with the issue of how to create an an inefficient 
Gold OA market. I am not sure what you want OA publishers to 
explain more than what they already do. PLoS financial statements 
are available on GuideStar.org if you want to look at them. BMC 
financial statements are available from Companies House in the 
UK. Hindawi does not publish its financial statements but we are 
reasonably open about our cost and the fact that we are 
profitable. I have given a talk last year at the STM conference 
in Frankfurt with detailed information about Hindawi's structure 
and revenues. The presentation of this talk is available on the 
STM website.

You are asking the OA publishers to reveal more information about 
their costs, which by the way are not that much different than a 
subscription publisher cost anyway, let me ask you about the 
openness and transparency of subscription publishers about their 
revenues. Can you tell me who of the major subscription 
publishers (commercial or not-for-profit) are willing to release 
the information of how much they generate per article on a 
journal by journal bases? If you are concerned about how much the 
scientific community will be paying for Gold OA publishing per 
article, and you should be, the numbers would not tell the whole 
story without knowing how much the community is currently paying 
per article. I know some industry-wide averages are estimated in 
several places. However, can you tell me if any subscription 
based publisher is willing to tell us for every journal how much 
they make revenue per article?

Let close by saying that any market efficiency, and consequently 
the lowest possible cost for consumers, is not achieved by the 
sellers' willingness to generate lower profits, but by their 
inability to generate higher profits. Gold OA publishing will 
indeed lower the total cost of the scholarly journal 
communication system, not because Gold OA publishers will not try 
to be as profitable as their subscription counterparts, but 
because they will not be able to do that due to market forces. 
The pressure on them to increase their cost efficiency and to 
lower their end user prices will be huge. The efficient market 
will drive less cost effective publishers out of business and 
will reward more cost effective publishers by larger market 
shares, something that we take for granted in almost any other 
market around us.

Best regards,

Ahmed Hindawi

Anthony Watkinson wrote:

> I am glad that David Prosser does some hedging. It is not the 
> author who is going to pay. It is the funder or university. Any 
> university administered fee will surely result in some 
> discrimination unless funding is unlimited. Unlimited funding 
> -- the Wellcome situation as I see it is not going to be 
> common, is it? Who will discriminate and how? I would love to 
> hear David's ideal model because certainly it has yet to emerge 
> in practice. I mean this seriously. Many OA evangelists reject 
> the need for any explanations of how the totally OA future is 
> going work as far as scholars are concerned -- though they aim 
> for a totally OA future.
>
> Not all scholars would like their heads of department or 
> (horror) the provost's office deciding where they are able to 
> publish. Is this what David means by "discussions on campus".
>
> I am not aware that the major OA publishers explain their costs 
> in detail and give explanations of why fees have gone up so 
> much.
>
> Anthony
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "David Prosser" <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk>
> To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
> Sent: Friday, May 30, 2008 12:48 PM
> Subject: RE: universities experiment with paying OA fees
>
> > Sandy
> >
> > As you know, in the subscription business model users of 
> > journals (both authors and readers) are insulated from the 
> > cost of the journals they use. This has led to the disconnect 
> > between price and quality or service.
> >
> > A shift to publication charges makes it possible that the 
> > users (while acting as authors) will see the costs and be able 
> > to make decisions on whether they are getting value for money. 
> > This could have an effect on prices as users will have an 
> > incentive 'shop around' based on the level of service they 
> > want from the journal.  I hedge with 'possible' and 'could' 
> > because it is clear that if there is no transparency in the 
> > way the funds are set-up we could have the situation you 
> > describe.  If the university pays the publisher without the 
> > author knowing the costs involved then we have the potential 
> > for a continuation of the current dysfunctional market (albeit 
> > with wider access).
> >
> > One of the alleged disadvantages of such funds is that they 
> > will led to discussions on campus about what can be published, 
> > where, and at what cost. If we want the market to function 
> > then this is actually a good thing!
> >
> > Best wishes
> >
> > David