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Subscription costs versus open access costs, & Dissolving journals' boundaries
- 1. Alex.Holcombe@sydney.edu.au @ceptional http://www.slideshare.net/holcombea Subscription costs versus openaccess costs, & Dissolving journals' boundaries 26 August, 2015 Reclaiming the Knowledge Commons
- 2.
- 3. Profit Company Industry 10%BMW automobiles 23% Rio Tinto mining 25% Google search 29% Apple premium computing 35% Springer scholarly publishing 37% Elsevier scholarly publishing http://wp.me/ph4jF-kmCC-BYAlexHolcombe
- 4. + Monopoly = Profit maximisation B US$11,000per year; $300 for a single issue $
- 5. $1,350USD / articlefor PLoS ONE ~$6,000USD / article for Elsevier http://poynder.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/open- access-brick-by-brick.html#comments Profit Company Industry 10% BMW automobiles 21% (not profit) PLoS.org non-profit scholarly publishing 23% Rio Tinto mining 25% Google search 29% Apple premium computing 35% Springer scholarly publishing 37% Elsevier scholarly publishing http://wp.me/ph4jF-kmCC-BYAlexHolcombe $ $ $ ~
- 6. $10,780 per article (notincluding charges for color figures) $1850 $800 $1350 JOURNAL / PUBLISHER COST per article (USD) ACCESS Subscription Gold OA Gold OA Gold OA $99, per author Gold OA Free OA $0
- 7. • ~5,000 journalsuse Open Journal Systems (http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/24/41 • Most free for both authors and readers • Journal of Eye Movement Research, 24 articles/year one day of work per week for the chief editor no-Gold, free OA Green, free OA
- 8. Open access to1,066,153 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, … any publication arising from NHMRC supported research must be deposited into an open access institutional repository and/or made available in another open access format within a twelve month period from the date of publication. Green, free OA https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/grants-funding/policy/nhmrc-open-access-policy
- 9. Article borders dissolve: Data,commentary, replication, re-analyses
Editor's Notes
- #3 -How much a few example unis in the UK are paying to journal publishers for subscriptions. We only have this -For the 2-3 million pounds they’re giving to these big publishers, each of these universities could employ another 20 researchers. -But it’s not quite that simple is it? If we aren’t paying subscriptions anymore, what’s going to pay for the cost of publication? -Bottom line for me is, all reasonable systems are going to be a lot cheaper than this. So maybe we can’t employ 20 researchers as a result, but perhaps 15 more researchers plus 5 librarians to help manage the alternative system, or spend that money on another publishing entity You’ll start to see the potential for savings with the next slide: —————————————— Because under any reasonable system, these universities wouldn’t be paying millions of pounds to get access to research for which the overwhelming majority was taxpayer-funded.
- #4 -Here I put the companies’ profits in perspective by comparing them to other industries. -BMW create advanced technology and constant innovation and precise engineering. They make something real, rather than just reformatting manuscripts they’re sent. However due to the competitiveness of the automotive industry their profit is just 10%. -Apple invented the iPhone, an expensive piece of hardware bought by many, many millions of people a year buy. Plus all the computers in my lab. Apple is the most highly-valued company in the world today. And have an operating profit of 29%. -And then there’s our academic STM publishers, receiving manuscripts, sending them out for review, checking what the reviewers say, formatting the manuscripts, putting them on websites. -Springer comes in at 35%, Elsevier at 37%. Some of the others are very similar at 40%. -They’re not adding hardly any value, they’re not doing anything really innovative. -And their profits are just out of this world- they’re enough to make Gina Rinehart blush -But surely, Alex, they must be doing something great, because otherwise who could they make such big profits in our capitalist efficient market-based society? -You’ve heard the phrase “it’s like owning a gold mine”, well this is even better than owning a gold mine better than owning a gold mine. The mining giant Rio Tinto comes in at only 23%. So this level of profit, 37% would be high enough to make Gina Rinehart blush -These big publishers and a few others today publish the overwhelming majority of scientific articles today. -------------------------------------
- #5 -The first part of the equation is just the standard corporate mandate of profit maximisation, nothing unusual there. -The toxic ingredient it combines with is the kind of monopoly they have. This is not what we normally think of as a monopoly, it’s not that a single company sells all the journals. -What they do have a monopoly on is the individual journal title. -The problem is once Elsevier owns these journals, like these 3 it owns in my field, people never unsubscribe and go to an equivalent product. -Because even though there’s other publishers out there providing better products, researchers submit to a particular journal because of the prestige it’s built up over the years. And it’s an impact factor, which you can only accrue after a number of years. So, essentially the name of the journal itself is critical, and the publisher has a monopoly on that. -Of course, the only reason the journals have the prestige and impact factor is because of the work not of the publisher, but rather of the academics that write and edit the manuscripts. -The unusual part is the monopoly that the journal owners have on journal titles. I call it a monopoly because individual journals are not the kind of good that can be substituted for by simply creating an equivalent product at a lower price. Instead, journals have this prestige associated with the actual name of the product and also its impact factor. Here are a few prestigious journals in my own field, all owned by Elsevier -If you create a new, better journal, it won’t start out with any prestige and it won’t have any impact factor. -Of course, the only reason the journals have the prestige and impact factor is because of the work not of the publisher, but rather of the academics that write and edit the manuscripts. -So it’s very much in the power of academia and medicine to get rid of this system --------------------------------------------------------------- -People outside the system think yeah, just start another publisher and undercut the traditional publishers on price. Or do something better than them, “disrupt the paradigm” in Silicon Valley parlance to eliminate the problem -Unfortunately it’s not that simple- you can’t start a competitor and expect to get anywhere. -The reason is that we researchers are evaluated on whether we publish in these prestige old publisher-owned journals. Evaluated for promotions and for grants -And the publishers own the actual journal titles, so they have something like a monopoly on the high-impact journals that it’s really important for academics to publish in. -And of course their mandate for their shareholders is to maximize their profits, so they end up charging outrageous subscription fees, because they can. They know that the academics demand that the library buys these journals that their best colleagues are publishing their work in
- #6 -In addition to those companies, there’s also a lot of non-profit organisations. -Let’s consider one- PLoS, the Public Library Of Science. The world’s first big open-access publisher. -In 2006, I joined the advisory board of a new journal they were planning to create called PLoS ONE. It grew much more rapidly than anyone anticipated. It now publishes 30 THOUSAND articles a year, making it the largest journal in the world. -It doesn’t make profits, but from its annual report I was able to calculate its approximate excess revenue relative to its costs. And that excess is approximately 21% for its publication fee of $1350 -You can come up with a related figure for Elsevier, by taking the total number of articles they publish and dividing by the revenue they get from subscriptions to those journals. -You can see it’s a hell of a lot more than what the community is paying for PLoS, with the bonus that the OpenAccess articles are free to the world forever rather than requiring a subscription. -Moreover, PLoS charges a lot more than do other open access publishers.
- #7 -Nonprofits can do a very good job providing the same service, without the mandate to shareholders that they maximize their profits -To get those profits, they’re charging university libraries an arm and a leg for the scholarly articles written, reviewed, and edited by we researchers -It’s a very different revenue model, so to compare the true cost, I had to do some calculations. -The case of the open access journals is straightforward. You pay once, and it’s then free forever, and available for anyone to re-use any portion of it. -For traditional journals, libraries pay for a subscription of course, and do it every year. And people without subscriptions can’t read them. -Based on the total subscription revenue of Elsevier and the number of articles they publish, Elsevier earns over $10K/article they publish. -Finally, we know it can be much cheaper than even these non-profit publishers are charging -PeerJ is a new for-profit business started by the former publisher of PLoS ONE which
- #8 -So while many people think the alternative to subscription OA is authors paying from a few hundred to a few thousand to support the journal, there are real, really existing viable alternatives for free. -Many universities across the world have installed the free Open Journal Systems software which allows them to create a journal at the push of a button. -There’s about 5,000 of these journals that use Open Journal Systems, including several at the University of Sydney and UTS, probably at your own university. -As an example, there’s the JEMR, which is a well-regarded journal that publishes about 24 articles a year, and the chief editor told me it takes him about 1 day of work per week. -I believe Professor Ashton may talk more about this model in the next talk ———————————————-
- #9 GREEN OA -Finally we come to green openaccess. This is probably the simplest way to achieve openaccess without a big change to our existing publishing habits. -Physics has embraced it the most. In many areas of physics, since the late 1980s, when researchers are done with a manuscript, rather than submitting it to a journal, many researchers have first simply posted it to a community website called arXiv.org. This Green OA has been an enormously successful end-run around journals. Many of the manuscripts involved end up in journals, but months or years before that, they’ve been disseminated via this website and getting feedback from colleagues that way. It’s simply a cultural shift that has sped up science in these areas. -It’s also practiced in a number of other areas through other websites such as the Social Sciences Research Network. -But you don’t need -Strengthening these research council mandates are the most ———————————————-
- #10 It used to be that a journal article was a completely stand-alone entity. If you wanted to know anything about that research, you had to get access to and subscribe to the article. Now we have more and more cases where raw data is posted along with the article, post-publication commentary associated with the article accumulates, and links to reports of replications or partial replications. Also journalism about the research. There is sometimes approximately as much information around the article as there is in the article. Used to be that a journal article was a completely stand-alone entity. If you wanted to know about that research, you had to get access to and subscribe to the article. The article was always just a data summary, with spin. Increasingly, now, in the open web one finds: 1. the data behind the paper 2. post-publication commentary 3. re-analyses There is sometimes approximately as much information in this "grey literature" around the article as there is in the article itself. As these additional information sources grow in importance, the article's relative importance diminishes. And it becomes more obvious that scholars need to link to, re-use, and remix individual figures, individual numbers, and individual claims in the article. Subscription access is, then, increasingly awkward- it hinders each of these, plus 1, 2, and 3 above.