Open-access journal publishing has been criticized on a whole range of grounds as being unsustainable, unfair, or ineffective.  Perhaps the starkest criticism is that open-access journals amount to a vanity publishing industry, and will exhibit a “race to the bottom” in which journals compete to lower editorial standards to capture the revenue for publishing articles.  Is open-access journal publishing prone to the problems of a vanity press?

There are both theoretical and empirical arguments that the concern is unfounded. From a theoretical point of view, the prerequisites for vanity press are not found in scholarly publishing.  From an empirical point of view, current open-access journals display a pricing structure that does not indicate a vanity press industry, as we demonstrate below in a new analysis of OA publication fee data.

What is a vanity press?

In traditional publishing, such as trade book publishing, authors want to be able to sell their writings to the public as an income source. Publishers provide services to authors to make this possible. Publishers have editorial and production expertise and marketing ability, and most importantly can provide authors entry to distribution mechanisms that make trade publishing scalable, and that are otherwise difficult or impossible to access.  There is thus a natural trade that can go on, authors contracting publishers to provide these services.

How much should the publisher be paid for this transaction?  Since high-quality books sell better than low-quality books, publishers have an incentive to use their efforts on the best books they can acquire. The better the book, the less the author will have to pay the publisher to take on the project.  Indeed, if the book is good enough, the author may arrange to pay the publisher negative fees.  These are called royalties.

In such a system, where publishers are attempting to maximize revenues, you would expect that different publishers might establish different quality standards, some pursuing high-quality books likely to sell well but requiring high royalties to acquire rights, others providing lax standards in return for high author fees.  This is in fact what occurs.  The latter type are just the vanity publishers.

In summary, the higher the publisher’s quality standards, the lower the fee the author must pay for services.  Conversely, if an author is willing to pay enough, some publisher will be willing to take on the publication.  This is the genesis of vanity publishing, and its hallmark is the inverse correlation between publishers’ quality standards and the fees they charge.

Since subscription journals are paid for by or on behalf of their readers, not their authors, there is no useful notion of correlation between a journal’s quality standards and publication fees, as publication fees are constant (and zero).^[1]

Open-access journal publishing, however, is likely to have to rely on article-processing fees for the bulk of its revenue.  (In fact, article-processing fees have a lot going for them as a funding model. In particular, they scale extremely well with the cost basis of open-access publishing, since the vast bulk of non-fixed OA publishing costs are first-copy costs.)  This raises the issue of whether open-access publishing might have the negative properties of a vanity press.

Why vanity journals might be a problem

The existence of vanity open-access journals would not in and of itself be a problematic state of affairs, just as the existence of vanity book publishers does not infect the entire trade book industry with suspicion.  The trade book industry offers a wide range of publishers along a spectrum from highly selective publishers who limit their catalog to books meeting only the highest standards to vanity presses that will publish anything for a fee.  In fact, it is well known that closed-access journals already exhibit a huge variation in quality standards, with some accepting most all submissions and others a tiny fraction; it is conventional wisdom that any article can be published some place. (Some journals, such as Elsevier’s Applied Mathematics and Computation, have even been willing to accept computer-generated nonsense articles.)

Rather, the worry is not about vanity journal existence but vanity journal domination: A profit-maximizing open-access journal can only increase revenues by increasing the number of articles published or raising the fee per article, both of which will require lowering its quality standards.  Other journals, seeing lower-standard competitors steal articles from them, will have to lower their standards in response to maintain their article flow.  A spiral of lowering standards will result. This race to the bottom could lead to a situation in which there is no longer a wide range of quality standards among journals, but only the low-standard vanity journals will be left standing.

You see this worry expressed in various forms.  Here is a typical example (via Open-Access Journals Flourish):

But if the researchers pay, doesn’t it turn journals into servants to authors, like the vanity-press publishers who publish anything for the right price? “In our capitalist society, one of our basic tenets is who pays the fiddler calls the tune,” said Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, editor in chief of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, at the national meeting of the Association of Health Care Journalists in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on April 1.

It’s possible, Drazen said, that an open-access journal would find itself in deep financial trouble and loosen its standards about the papers it accepts.

The argument implictly relies on the inverse correlation noted above. With a positive correlation, a journal would need to raise its quality standards to raise its fee per article.

Peter Suber has recapitulated a broad range of counterarguments against the worry that OA journals have intrinsic quality problems. I concentrate here on a particular set of questionable economic assumptions that underly the worry about vanity journal domination.

Counterarguments

There are multiple assumptions at work in the argument that OA journals would lead to vanity journal domination.

First is the assumption that journal publishers are purely profit maximizing.  This is true for large parts of the journal market published by commercial firms, but non-profit publishers, including scholarly societies and independent journals, are set up not to maximize profit but to serve their scholarly constituency.

Second, even if a publisher is profit-maximizing, processing fees need not be publication fees.  Journals are free to charge for other aspects of their services.  In particular, it has been shown that the use of submission fees can eliminate any incentive to lower standards to improve revenue, even for profit-maximizing publishers.

Third, and most important, is the assumption that authors are willing to pay more for journals with lower standards, as they are for trade book publishing.  Whether you accept this assumption depends in large degree on what you think authors are “buying” when they pay a processing fee. To first approximation, scholarly journal publishers provide four kinds of services:

• management of article processing, including peer review
• production (copy-editing, typesetting, etc.)
• branding and imprimatur
• distribution

An author’s willingness to pay should correlate with the quality of these services, and all of these services (with the exception of the last in the case of open-access journals) should correlate with the standards of the journal.  Primary among the services is branding, which by definition correlates with standards.  Journals have a good brand exactly because they are selective in publishing only the best articles.

If you think that authors choose journals to publish in based on the brand of the journal (as a signaling mechanism to demonstrate the quality of their research), then authors should be willing to pay more for higher standards, not less.  In other words, journals should show a positive correlation between processing fee and standards, and the worry about vanity journal domination is ill-founded.

Now any academic will tell you that imprimatur is exactly the reason that authors select journals.  Academics must publish or perish, but not all publishing is equal.  Publications in high-quality selective journals weigh a lot more than publications in bottom-feeding journals.  Any journal that lowered its standards to raise short-term revenue would soon find its pool of submissions getting thinner and of even lower quality.  It seems obvious to many academics that journals ought to be able to charge more for higher standards, not less.

Still, it’s an empirical question. Which force is predominant in the journal publishing industry — the short-term profit-maximizing force that generates a negative correlation and vanity journal domination or a brand-payment force that generates a positive correlation and a range of journal qualities?  We answer this question shortly, but first a digression.

The importance of editorial independence

You hear less of this kind of charge that publication fees lead to vanity press behavior now that major scholarly publishers all have instituted “hybrid open access” charges, where if an author pays a substantial fee (typically $3000 to $3500), the publisher makes the article freely available.  Elsevier, Springer-Kluwer, Wiley-Blackwell, Sage, Taylor and Francis, and dozens of other publishers now offer this option.

One might worry that the availability of this option would lead to a journal willing to sell lower standards for authors willing to pay the hybrid fee.  The worry is unfounded for exactly the same reasons that OA journal fees need not lead to a vanity press downward spiral: any lowering of standards would reduce the brand value of the journal that it depends on for its market position.

The ability to keep considerations of short-term financial gain from affecting quality standards depends on independence of the editorial process.  Hybrid charges don’t lead to vanity press worries because the editorial decisions can be systemically separated from the financial decisions, with no knowledge of whether a person will be paying the fee leaking into the editorial process.  Publishers take pains to point out this separation in their descriptions of their hybrid OA programs.  (Says Springer, “There is no difference in the way that they are treated between Springer Open Choice articles and other articles among the well over 100,000 that Springer publishes annually.”) Similarly, it is crucial that editorial decisions not be affected by page charges, color figure charges, and any other author-side charges that a publisher might institute.  Nor should editorial decisions be affected by advertiser interests.  To the extent that subscription-based journals can maintain editorial and financial independence, open-access processing-fee journals should be able to do so as well, and are motivated to do so for the same reasons. The founding of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association is a sign that OA publishers appreciate the importance of sound practices to their authors and their readers.

Temptations to short-circuit editorial independence for financial reasons exist for subscription-based journals just as for open-access journals. Elsevier was discovered to have published several faux journals on behalf of and paid for by pharmaceutical companies, and many journals generate substantial revenue from advertising that might skew editorial decisions if not for strong editorial independence.

Gavin Yamey, an editor at PLoS, is quoted in Wired on just this point: “As for the vanity-press charge, Yamey said his company makes exceptions for authors who can’t pay. Editors aren’t in the loop on those decisions, however, ’so that cannot influence our decisions on which papers to publish.’”

An empirical study

I conducted a study to answer the empirical question that I raised before — whether open-access journals present the positive correlation between standards and publication fees indicative of a quality press or the negative correlation indicative of a vanity press.  As a proxy for quality, I used the Eigenfactor-based Article Influence metric, as the Eigenfactor methodology is likely to lead to metrics that are more comparable across fields.  Of the Eigenfactor-based metrics, Article Influence is appropriate to use as it, like publication fee against which it will be correlated, is a per-article metric.

Eigenfactors are calculated using citation data from Thomson ISI.  We therefore extracted from the Directory of Open Access Journals all journals that had a Thomson ISI Impact Factor, and extracted Article Influence scores for each one.

We also tracked down the fee structure for these journals by examining the journals’ web sites or contacting the journals by email or phone if necessary. We were able to acquire data for most, but not all, of the journals. (I am indebted to Tim Credo, Elmer Soriano, and Thomas Dodson for aid in acquiring this data.)

This data was used to calculate the correlation between publication fees and Article Influence.  For simplicity, we excluded in the analysis those journals that charge a submission fee, as that would require modeling the effect of submission fee as well.  As many have noted, submission fees in theory mitigate the vanity-press motive in any case, so the exclusion of these cases is a conservative step in the analysis.

A scatter plot of the data is shown in the following figure. In the figure I also show best fit lines for all of the journals (the green dotted line) and for those charging a non-zero publication fee (the blue dotted line). (The point in the upper right-hand corner is PLoS Biology.)

Graph of Article Influence as a function of publication fee for all open-access journals in DOAJ with publication fees and impact factors. (Click to enlarge.)

The correlation coefficient between standards and publication fees for those journals that charge them as calculated in the study was .70, a quite high positive correlation.  Even if we include the journals that don’t charge publication fees, the correlation is .47, which is typically thought of as a medium to large positive correlation.  The study clearly demonstrates that OA journals show a positive correlation between fees and standards indicative of a quality press industry, not the negative correlation characteristic of vanity publishing.

For those interested in the details, I provide (as previously) the data that we compiled, as well as the computer program that calculated the correlations and generated the plot. All journal, pricing, and currency exchange data were acquired in January 2009.

Vanity journal existence is not a problem in the OA world

The positive correlation that the study demonstrates implies that a publisher of an OA journal will be disinclined to reduce standards merely to acquire more fees, since a journal with lower standards will only command lower fees. As it turns out, there is a way for an OA publisher to solve this quandary. Rather than lowering standards for a high-tier journal, it can set up a new journal with lower standards and lower fees to publish the type of articles that the higher-tier journal will not, thereby obtaining the revenues without diluting the brand of the higher-tier journal. In fact, this is the approach that subscription journals have taken for years: increase revenues by founding more journals. The availability of this aproach is again consistent with having a healthy range of selectivity in OA journals; it provides a further argument against a race to the bottom.

Based on this study, then, one should expect that open-access journals will have a broad range of quality standards, from the most selective and expensive to bottom-feeding journals that will publish anything for a low fee. And this is exactly what we find.  The premier PLoS journals are as high quality as journals come.  On the other hand, Bentham Science Publishers journals are apparently willing to publish most anything, including the occasional computer-generated article.  Scientific Journals International, at a $99.95 processing fee per author per article, shows signs of similar questionable standards.

Does the existence of bottom-feeding journals pose a problem?  Ironically, such journals are far more problematic when they are subscription-based than when they are open-access. Though different journals have different average qualities, even journals that tend to publish lower quality articles trip over a decent one every once in a while.  And when they do, if they use a subscription-fee business model you’ll need to be a subscriber to read it.  At least if they use an OA business model, you can read it without having had to subscribe all along “just in case”. The existence of bottom-feeding open-access journals costs no one except for the authors gullible enough to submit their articles to them. Not so for the low-standards closed-access journals that bulk up bundles and place the very occasional read-worthy article behind a paywall.

Conclusion

Vanity journal domination is not occurring, nor is it likely to occur, among OA journals.  Vanity journal existence will and does happen among both OA and subscription-fee journals, but at least for OA journals is a benign phenomenon.  As subscription-fee journals more and more charge author-side fees, including hybrid open-access fees, one can only hope that the baseless vanity press recrimination against open-access journals will fade away.

We the undersigned universities recognize the crucial value of the services provided by scholarly publishers, the desirability of open access to the scholarly literature, and the need for a stable source of funding for publishers who choose to provide open access to their journals’ contents. Those universities and funding agencies receiving the benefits of publisher services should recognize their collective and individual responsibility for that funding, and this recognition should be ongoing and public so that publishers can rely on it as a condition for their continuing operation.

Therefore, each of the undersigned universities commits to the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds. We encourage other universities and research funding agencies to join us in this commitment, to provide a sufficient and sustainable funding basis for open-access publication of the scholarly literature.

MIT provost Rafael Reif says “The dissemination of research findings to the public is not merely the right of research universities: it is their obligation. Open-access publishing promises to put more research in more hands and in more places around the world. This is a good enough reason for universities to embrace the guiding principles of this compact.”

These universities realize that in the long run, underwriting processing fees for open-access journals is “an investment in a superior system of scholarly communication”, as Peter Suber says and as I have argued previously. As more universities sign on to the compact, joined by funding agencies as well, fee-based open-access journals may become an increasingly viable alternative to subscription-based journals.

Full details about COPE are available at http://www.oacompact.org/.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has apologized on behalf of the British government for the appalling treatment of Alan Turing, who was obliged to undergo chemical castration for the crime of being gay. Prime Minister Brown’s statement in the Telegraph follows an online petition drive that enlisted over 30,000 British citizens and residents, and a follow-on global petition with over 10,000 signatories worldwide.

Much has been made in the discussions surrounding the petition efforts and in the Prime Minister’s statement of Turing’s code-breaking efforts at Bletchley Park, which directly contributed to the allied victory in World War II. Less mentioned, but also central to his legacy, are Turing’s seminal contributions to computer science. It is no exaggeration to say that Alan Turing was the progenitor of computer science, in his brief career providing building the foundation of theory, hardware, systems, artificial intelligence, even computational biology. His death at 42 as a result of the British government’s misguided “therapy” constitutes one of the great intellectual tragedies of the twentieth century. I commend Prime Minister Brown for his prompt and complete apology.

August 24th, 2009 at 2:04 pm

I think you missed Phil’s point, Stuart.

What Phil was saying is that libraries can’t control the disbursement of open access fees precisely because of academic freedom, which makes these fees more susceptible to unchecked growth and possible abuse. If they establish an OA fund, librarians will be on the horns of a dilemma — allow unchecked spending or violate academic freedom. Since they won’t violate academic freedom, their only option will be to allow unchecked spending.

I think you’re responding to a misinterpretation of Phil’s post.

via » Three good things: open-access funds, fiscal responsibility, and academic freedom The Occasional Pamphlet.

Yes, that’s exactly how I understood the argument, so perhaps I didn’t make my own view clear. Let me try to clarify it. (The issue is important enough and my response long enough that it makes more sense to devote a post to it than to place it in the comments thread.) Just so that my conclusion doesn’t get lost below, here is what I am saying: What libraries will do is check spending but without violating academic freedom. The dilemma as stated is a false one.

Kent says “libraries can’t control the disbursement of open access fees precisely because of academic freedom”.  The premise here is that any method an OA fund uses to control disbursement must if effective necessarily cause a change in behavior of authors, for instance encouraging them to publish in less expensive journals over more expensive ones ceteris paribus. This much is true. Furthermore, there is an implicit assumption that any such policy that causes behavioral changes in where authors publish is coercive and a violation of academic freedom. They are not “free” to publish in any location because some are financially more attractive to them than others.

But no. Academic freedom means that faculty can study what they want, and publish the results where they want.  It doesn’t mean that the university must cover all costs for doing so, nor does it mean the university cannot cover some costs and not others in ways that redound to what the university sees as the benefit of its constituencies.

Let me provide some examples in the area of “studying what they want”. Harvard has policies about what kinds of grants its faculty are allowed to take.  They can study what they want, but they can’t take money to do so if the grants violate university rules. For instance, university rules disallow grants that must be kept secret. (See Principle 2 of the Principles Governing Research at Harvard.) Nor can grants restrict investigators from publishing their results (Principle 4). And so forth. The fact that the university disallows investigators from taking certain grants is not a violation of academic freedom, even though it affects the financial support of certain research activities.

As a second example, the university itself provides funds to some researchers (but not others) to pursue research projects. (See examples here, here, and here.) It is itself, in a sense, a research funder. By playing favorites, and choosing among the applicants for these funds, is it violating academic freedom? No. No one brings up the horns of a dilemma between the university  funding every single application for research funds or violating academic freedom.

Faculty must be allowed to publish where they want, but it is not a violation of academic freedom to monetarily support some venues over others. As a third example, universities have been systematically supporting subscription fees over processing fees for decades by paying the subscription fees, but not processing fees (page charges, figure charges, etc.), through their library budgets. Universities could have provided funds for these additional charges and have generally chosen not to.Some journals charge only subscription fees; others charge both kinds of fees. It has not constituted a violation of academic freedom that authors are out of pocket $0 for the solely subscription-fee journals but must pay the additional processing fees to publish in those journals that charge them.

A final example: My colleagues in the History of Art and Architecture department publish articles that typically contain large numbers of figures reproducing the artworks that they are studying, the reproduction rights for which can come to many thousands of dollars per article. These charges are not reimbursed by the university, and grants to cover them are hard to come by. The fees typically come out of the author’s pocket. Some topics of research end up, by happenstance, to require very low rights clearance fees, others quite high fees. The differences in fees among these research topics may, for all I know, cause researchers to vary their research topics. But the fact that the university does not pay these fees does not constitute a violation of academic freedom. Scholars are free to study what they want, and to pursue funding to cover expenses to do so as available, and the university is free to support that research how it sees fit.

The fact that funds are differentially available for this or that purpose around a university may seem wrong, or unfair to one or another constituency, or well-balanced, or whatever, depending on where you sit. But the current apportionment is not fairer just because it’s been around a while. And raising the specter of violation of academic freedom in these cases belittles the importance of this crucial concept. If you want to see violations of academic freedom, read the AAUP’s Committee A annual reports.

Of course, if a university capriciously forbid publishing in this or that journal, that would be another matter, but no one is suggesting that. The suggestions, rather, are for support for certain kinds of charges for certain journals. Authors can avail themselves of these funds or not as they see fit, freely and without prejudice.

Just to make the OA fund proposals more concrete, let me list a few methods that allow for controlled distribution of OA fund fees without restricting academic freedom. (I’ll couch them in terms of the amount of reimbursement an author receives from a fund to cover processing fees for an article in an open-access journal, but funds may choose to disburse funds in other ways than reimbursement of authors.)

1. Cap the total reimbursement per paper.
2. Pay all but a fixed amount of the fee, that is, institute a “co-payment”.
3. Cap the total reimbursement provided to a single author per year. This method, discussed in my PLoS Biology paper, has the advantage that it forces authors to trade off the services that they receive from the publisher (including journal imprimatur) for the fee that they charge, providing exactly the economic market signal that the current system lacks.
4. Pay all but a fixed percentage of the fee, a percentage-based co-payment. This similarly provides an economic motivation to the author at the cost of placing them out of pocket for some costs for every article.
5. Steve Shavell, an economist at the Harvard Law School, proposed to me the following clever scheme: For each article, reimburse up to x dollars. If the fee f is less than x, some percentage p of the excess will be paid to the author (that is, p(x—f)), perhaps as an augmentation of a research fund. This provides a direct motivation for an author to search out high-value journals for each and every article, at the cost of increasing the total cost of running the fund.

None of these methods violates academic freedom (nor does removing all restrictions, as we’ve essentially done for subscription journals, but this could lead to hyperinflation of processing fees mimicking the subscription case). Several of them have the potential to introduce a self-correcting market signal into the payment scheme, thereby leading to controlled costs, rather than the runaway costs we see in the subscription model. I am not suggesting that all of these methods are equally good or effective or will solve the problem of sustainability of OA processing fee costs. They do not exhaust the possibilities; I am sure there are many other mechanisms that could be explored for setting up a properly functioning funding market for scholarly articles.  The only limitation is our creativity.

Here is a dilemma for you: Do we continue the status quo, which involves only supporting a business model known to be subject to uncontrolled inflationary spirals, or do we experiment with new mechanisms that have the potential to be economically sound and far more open to boot? To me, this seems like an easy choice to make. Academic freedom, thankfully, doesn’t enter the picture.

This new post, however, is so transparently spurious that it makes one wonder what Davis’s agenda is. Nonetheless, at the risk of giving the post more credence than it deserves, I’ll succinctly respond to the argument such as it is.^[1]

In summary, the claim is that open-access funds will either require vast amounts of additional funds, making them fiscally irresponsible, or will require aggressive filtering of claims on the fund, violating academic freedom. In fact, open-access funds are neither fiscally irresponsible nor contrary to academic freedom.

Open-access funds are not fiscally irresponsible

Open-access funds consistent with the “open-access compact” will require tiny amounts of funds in the short term (on the order of tens of dollars per faculty member per year based on extrapolations of current experience). My article on the compact discusses the issue at some length and I won’t reiterate it here.

Once open-access funds require large amounts of money (if ever), it will be because many journals have switched to a fee-based open-access business model, thereby freeing up subscription fees. We know that in aggregate there have been in the past sufficient funds in library budgets to pay journals for the services they provide. Moving the funds from subscription payments to publication-fee payments doesn’t change the macro situation for the worse.^[2] To the extent that the publication-fee model doesn’t have the manifest market dysfunctionalities that the subscription model has, it is in fact likely to improve the situation.

Open access funds don’t violate academic freedom

Davis argues that “Authors will view these [open-access] funds as a free lunch, and certainly much more appetizing than spending one’s own money paying those pesky page charges to non-profit society journals.” He assumes libraries will respond by filtering requests based on publication venue, and that will constitute an arbitrary imposition on where scholars can publish that violates their academic freedom.

Academic freedom requires that faculty be allowed to publish what they want, where they want. It does not require that universities pay arbitrary moneys to make that possible. That’s why it’s not a violation of academic freedom that universities don’t pay the thousands of dollars per article of page and figure charges that some journals charge. To the extent that universities add subsidies for some costs, that may change the incentives as to where to publish, but certainly doesn’t decrease anyone’s freedom. Thus, even if funds restricted disbursements, this would not constitute a violation of academic freedom.

Further, there is a variety of ways to set up an open-access fund that does not have the moral hazard that Davis imputes. The key is to make sure that funds for open-access charges are not fungible, as I’ve discussed elsewhere. It simply is false that open-access funds inherently can’t be set up in such a way that a reasonable market for publication charges ensues. On the other hand, we know that the existing market structure for the subscription-based model is broken for just the moral hazard reasons that Davis worries about.

Summary

It beggars belief that providing funds to make open-access journals more accessible to authors decreases their academic freedom, and only a lack of creativity limits setting up funds for that purpose in economically sustainable ways. If you want to worry about problems of open access, these are not the ones to worry about.

^[2]This macro argument has to do with costs in aggregate. Micro estimates based on extrapolating costs per article over the set of published articles are more problematic. The best known estimate, reported in a Cornell study, makes specific assumptions that indict the conclusions. But more generally, this type of analysis makes a range of assumptions about how contingent economic facts will be maintained despite the hypothesized wholesale shift in business model, for which there is no basis. (See for instance, this discussion about how moving from the subscription-fee business model to the publication-fee model turns complementary goods into substitutable goods, for just one example of how the markets completely differ.) For that reason alone, the sketched macro argument, which makes no such assumptions, is considerably more robust.

Scholars write articles to be read—the more access to their articles the better—so one might think that the open-access approach to publishing, in which articles are freely available online to all without interposition of an access fee, would be an attractive competitor to traditional subscription-based journal publishing.

But open-access journal publishing is currently at a systematic disadvantage relative to the traditional model.

I propose a simple, cost-effective remedy to this inequity that would put open-access publishing on a path to become a sustainable, efficient system, allowing the two journal publishing systems to compete on a more level playing field. The issue is important, first, because academic institutions shouldn’t perpetuate barriers to an open-access business model on principle and, second, because the subscription-fee business model has manifested systemic dysfunctionalities in practice. After describing the problem with the subscription-fee model, I turn to the proposal for providing equity for open-access journal publishing—the open-access compact.

We first took advantage of this possibility with an agreement with the American Physical Society. The APS wanted clarity on some issues regarding how the Harvard open-access policies would be used in providing access to APS-published articles before they could see themselves clear to fully supporting the open-access policies. The university was happy to provide that clarity in that our plans were wholly consonant with what APS wanted. The result was an agreement that was a win-win for both APS and the university. APS agreed to acknowledge the policy and not require addenda to their publication agreements (much less waivers of the OA policy). In return, Harvard made clear that for articles covered by the OA policy it would

1. Refrain from using facsimiles of the publisher’s version of the articles unless the publisher permits;
2. Not charge for the display or distribution of articles;
3. Cite to the publisher’s definitive version of the articles and link to them where possible;
4. Authorize others to use the articles only subject to these same restrictions.^[1]

The formal agreement and announcement are available at the web site of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication.

We’ve now concluded a large handful of such arrangements and have started listing the publishers and journals that have been supportive in this way in a listing of publishers who are “easiest to publish with”. The listing provides a resource for our faculty to let them know which journals they can publish in without waivers or addenda.  Already, we have affirmations from scholarly societies (APS, American Mathematical Society, American Economic Association), non-profit publishers (Public Library of Science, Berkeley Electronic Press), commercial publishers (BioMed Central, Hindawi Publishing), and university presses (Duke, Rockefeller, and University of California Presses). We expect more to be added soon.

Publishers interested in being added to the list of “easiest to publish with” should contact the OSC. We’re happy to work with publishers to simplify compliance with the open-access policies.

By focusing on the author-pays and the reader-pays teams, we ignore a third team: publishers who rely on page charges from authors. This group of mostly non-profit learned society and association publishers relies on this source of author payments to keep subscription costs down for libraries and their readers.

Cover all open-access publication charges and, all of a sudden, we put these publishers at a distinct disadvantage.

In creating a level playing field between subscription-access and open-access journals, we will create a playing field that pits commercial publishers against non-profit publishers and gives the commercial publishes a great advantage over their non-profit rivals. When the game is over, we will be left with just the commercial players standing.

Is that the future we wish to create for ourselves?

If libraries are willing to cover open-access publishing charges, they should be willing to support page charges.  Only then can we maintain a fair and level playing field.

(via Open Access on a “Level Playing Field” « The Scholarly Kitchen)

Who is this “third team” that Davis is concerned about? The first two teams are “the author-pays and the reader-pays teams”, that is publishers who use business models with charges at the author or reader sides. In the first sentence, he describes the “third team” as “publishers who rely on page charges”. But page charges are author-side charges. Why aren’t such publisher’s part of the “author-pays team”? Presumably because Davis has in mind that they also charge reader-side fees. So the “third team” is publishers who use a mixed business model charging fees at both ends, and in particular charging author-side fees “to keep subscription costs down for libraries and their readers”.

In fact, the study by the Kaufman-Wills Group concluded that well more than half of subscription-based journals charge author-side fees of one sort or another, placing them in the “third team”. In the second sentence, however, Davis seems to be concerned about “non-profit learned society and association publishers” as the “third team”. He is not clear as to why commercial publishers should be excluded from the third team. He seems to imply that there are good guys and bad guys among the publishers, that the commercial publishers are somehow the bad guys, and that a future where only the commercial publishers are left standing is somehow worse: “When the game is over, we will be left with just the commercial players standing.” He thinks this would be a bad thing, though he doesn’t explain why commercial publishers should be demonized in this way.

Davis thinks that this “third team” (non-profit publishers who use a mixed business model) would be at a disadvantage “all of a sudden” if universities started underwriting open-access processing fees but not page charges. Why? Because they rely on page charges. So do many of the commercial publishers, but Davis is not concerned about them.

In fact, the sentence “When the game is over, we will be left with just the commercial players standing” implies that he’s specifically worried about competition with commercial publishers. But if he’s referring to subscription-fee-model commercial publishers, the issue of OA processing fees is irrelevant. If the non-profits would be at a disadvantage when OA processing fees are covered because non-OA processing fees (page charges) are not, then they’re presumably at a disadvantage right now. The OA fee underwriting is a red herring. Committing to underwrite OA fees would only change that comparative disadvantage if commercial publishers were somehow more able to take advantage of the OA processing-fee business model.

All subsidizing OA processing fees does is provide a new subsidized business model that such journals are free to take advantage of if they choose (but without compulsion). Frankly, this would seem to be a boon to a “third team” publisher. If Davis is right that some non-profit publishers at least rely predominantly on page charges, then a widespread policy of underwriting OA fees would be especially attrative to them. They could switch business model to an OA processing-fee model and be guaranteed payment of their processing fees. Given that non-profits seem to be able to provide publishing services far more efficiently than commercial publishers, making the switch seems all the more likely to be successful. The more a journal relies on page charges relative to subscription charges, the easier it is to switch to an open-access processing-fee business model in a world in which such fees are subsidized.

When I talk about a “level playing field” for journal business models, I don’t necessarily mean that we commit to underwriting every possible way publishers might make money. Rather, I mean that if publishers are subsidized when using a closed-access business model (which both second and third team publishers are), there should be some kind of subsidy for some kind of open-access business model as well. We want to remove the disincentives to publish in OA journals not because we believe that all business models are equally good but because an OA model based on processing fees in particular is one we would like to see succeed, so it should not be kept at a systematic disadvantage.

Although a publisher’s business model should be a factor in these discussions, certain factors should be irrelevant. Whether a publisher is commercial or non-profit, a learned society or a multi-national corporation, a large institution or a small one, is entirely beside the point. There is no need to demonize commercial publishers who choose to respond in perfectly reasonable ways to the market systems they are confronted with, nor is it appropriate to artificially support a scientific society merely because it has a feel-good mission statement. Rather, we should make sure that the business of providing publishing services can be done in an efficient sustainable way in the best interest of the scholarly enterprise. Where that is not happening, and it certainly is not happening, we need to remake the market system to support the goals of the scholarly community.

Some might think that commercial publishers are appropriate to demonize because they charge too much for their subscriptions relative to the value they provide. (Maybe that’s why Davis is worried about only commercial publishers surviving.) To the extent that is true, the appropriate response is to examine why such inefficiency could come about, and to adjust the market mechanisms to repair the manifest dysfunctionality. Supporting page charges doesn’t provide any help with this at all. Supporting open-access processing fees may.

If you need any more incentive to publish a paper in an Open Access manner if you have a choice – here is one. If you publish in a closed access journal of some kind, it is likely fewer and fewer colleagues will be able to get your paper as libraries are hurting big time and will be canceling a lot of subscriptions.

He’s absolutely right.^[1] Eisen refers to a statement from his own university’s library (UC Davis), describing a major review and cancellation process. Charles Bailey has compiled public statements from seven ARL libraries (Cornell, Emory, MIT, UCLA, UTennessee, UWashington, Yale) about substantial cuts to their budgets. My own university will be experiencing substantial collections budget cuts in addition to major layoffs following on from the Harvard endowment drop of 30%. The Harvard libraries are not being spared.

The ARL has issued an open statement to publishers about the situation on behalf of their membership, 123 premier academic libraries in North America. They note that in addition to 2009 cancellations, “Most member libraries are preparing cancellations of ongoing commitments for 2010.”

Now more than ever, academic authors need to take responsibility for making sure that people can read what they write. Here’s a simple two-step process.

1. Retain distribution rights for your articles by choosing a journal that provides for this or amending your copyright agreement with the journal (but don’t fall into the “don’t ask, don’t tell” trap).
2. Place your articles in an open access repository.

As budgets get cut and cancellations mount, fewer and fewer people will be able to read (and benefit from and appreciate and cite) your articles unless you make them accessible.