Open Access and the Economics of Scholarly Communication: The Session Blog

Presenter: Heather Morrison, Project Co-ordinator, BC Electronic Library Network – Session abstract

Heather’s presentation was recorded.  It’s available here.

Session Overview

In this session, Heather Morrison presented an overview of the economic environment in which scholarly publication currently exists, focusing her attention on potential effects of the growth of the Open Access (OA) movement on this environment.

The Macroeconomics of Scholarly Publishing

Heather began by framing her discussion with the modern definition of economics, that is, the study of our behavior and the means by which we achieve certain ends given limited resources.  This was used to raise the following question: “Where is the money to help with the transition to fully OA publishing?”

The current economic situation was then explored with a description of the estimated costs of per-article publishing in the domains of science and technology.  These estimates range widely from one publisher to the next;

• BMC – 1500$/article
• PLoS One – 1300$/article
• Springer Open Choice – 3000$/article
• Hindawi – 800$/article

These costs, among not-for-profit publishers, are broken down in the following way:

In the realm of highly profitable for-profit publishing, the per-article cost is broken down in the following manner (as per Heather Morrison’s research).  Alarmingly, in this economic model, nearly 50% of the per-article revenue goes to profits and taxes.  Perhaps most interestingly, she pointed to a number of examples where for-profit publishers charged from 6 to 7 times more for publications that were actually less cited than similar journals put out by not-for-profit publishers.

Alternative to the current model

Looking at these numbers allows an examination of costs that may be reduced through a transition to fully OA publishing and the introduction of a number of efficiencies.  OA technology such as Open Journal Systems could offer the following benefits;

• reduction in the costs of coordinating the refereeing process
• elimination of typesetting and printing costs
• reduced systems and staffing costs
• elimination of authentication, hosting and troubleshooting costs
• dropping the need for copyright policing

Other less direct efficiencies introduced by the adoption of fully open-access publishing include a rethinking of the rejection process, with a reduction in the need to resubmit rejected articles to additional journals.

With these new efficiencies and cost savings, Heather suggests, libraries would have additional resources to allocate to building collections, rather than buying collections; to funding institutional repositories rather than spending on inter-library loans and to digitizing and preserving electronic collections rather than shelving print journals.

What if the subscription-based scholarly publishing industry were to collapse?

The concern has been raised by a number of publishers that the introduction of fully open access publication may threaten the viability of the current subscription-based model.  Heather contends that although they are unlikely to fail any time soon, if the major publishers collapsed, there is sufficient open-access support available to help journals carry on with their publishing activities.  She argues that this collapse (again, however unlikely) would provide an opportunity to rethink, renew and rebuild our publishing system.

Commentary

Not surprisingly, this presentation gave rise to a healthy amount of discussion.  Questions were directed both to Heather Morrison and Frederick Friend who gave a talk on the future of scholarly publishing.  The following questions were raised;

How would fully open-access publishing be cheaper than the subscription-based system? The savings are thought to come from the wresting of control of costs from the publishers into the hands of academics.  In order for the savings to materialize, however, academics will need to focus on transforming several aspects of the economics of publishing.

If libraries are already struggling to cope with the rising costs of subscriptions, how can they set aside money for open-access initiatives? This will likely require a multi-faceted approach.  Librarians will need to set priorities along with researchers in order to make decisions about which subscriptions are most needed.  If needed, they may also need to consider canceling “one big deal” in order to leave room for OA funding.

Related links

References

Morrison, H. (2009). Open access and the economics of scholarly communication. PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference 2009. Retrieved 2009-07-08, from http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/pkp/index.php/pkp2009/pkp2009/paper/view/136