Reed Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons (including Blackwell), Springer Science + Business Media, Wolters Kluwer, Holtzbrinck and Informa (including Routledge and Taylor and Francis) are the biggest professional journal publishers with a market share of 36% in 2009[2].
The profit levels in academic
publishing range between 30-40%, which is a margin unheard of in almost any
other commercial sector[3].
These levels of income are based on the confluence of costless labour
(editorial work, proof-reading, copy-editing, marketing and promotion, original
copy creation, etc.), with the subsidy provided by public higher education
funding for the authors living costs, the cost of journal subscriptions,
individual and/or institutions paying for scholarly association membership.
This means that public funding is paying multiple times, at a number of
different points along the production process, for the cost of producing any
given article.
The shift to open access
publishing is a rationalisation of the current model of multiple payments
across the publishing process to a single payment at the beginning. For
scholarly associations, this shift in income stream can appear as a dire threat
to their existence. In order to explain that open access does not threaten the
scholarly association as such, I will now examine some of the economic
implications for these bodies.
The summary of the Economic Implications of Alternative
Scholarly Publishing Models report, by John Houghton, Charles Oppenheim et
al., outlines where the costs fall in the subscription based, open access and
self-archived repository models for scholarly communication.
They open with the statement that
“advances in information and communication technologies are disrupting
traditional models of scholarly publishing, radically changing our capacity to
reproduce, distribute, control and publish information”[4]. By examining the costs and
benefits of alternative models for research publications this report advocates
that the long-term reduction in cost for accessing research will offset any
transitional costs in implementing open access.
The authors of the report argue
that any given scholarly communication follows 5 key moments in its life cycle:
i.
Fund
research and research communication;
ii.
Perform
research and communicate the results;
iii.
Publish
scientific and scholarly works;
iv.
Facilitate
dissemination, retrieval and preservation; and
For the authors of the report
This extended scholarly communication process model provides a foundation for a detailed identification of the actors, activities, objects, and functions of involved in the entire scholarly communication process[6].
The mapping of the process of
scholarly communication enables a thorough understanding of how to account for
the costs and benefits of certain models of production. The report concludes by
stating that
It seems likely that more open access would have substantial net benefits in the longer term and, while net benefits may be lower during a transitional period they are likely to be positive for both open access publishing and self-archiving alternatives (i.e. Gold OA) and for parallel subscription publishing and self-archiving (i.e. Green OA).[7]
The report outlined the following
about the current publishing ecology:
- The estimated average cost of producing a scholarly article (this includes costing the author's time spent writing, the cost of managing peer-reviewing processes, as well as publisher related costs, etc.) is said to be £9600.
- The same calculation applied to monographs produces the amount of £88,600 per publication.
The economic benefits of moving
to open access manifest in the following ways[8]:
- The cost of being active in the field of scholarly publishing is equivalent to around £5.4 billion in the UK in 2007.
- The cost of having had all of the research output of 2007 published via an open access route would have been £1.2 billion.
- Therefore, moving to a totally open access model would potentially save £4.2 billion per year (based on 2007 figures).
The shift to open access, whilst
incurring transitional costs as well as shifting towards an author pays model, will result in a longer term reduction in the costs of subscription payments.
This will free substantial amounts of money for financing research itself. The
burden will shift away from the current pressure on institutions to pay for
expensive subscription costs.
John Willinsky outlines the
stakes at play for the scholarly association, with regard to the emergence of
the trend towards open access
The scholarly association has been at the heart of academic journal publishing and it now faces a critical decision around which path to take. Although many journals operate independently of these associations, these organisations represent the vast majority of researchers, reviewers, and editors, in their efforts to advance the state of scholarship and research. While many scholarly associations have turned their journals over to commercial publishers, a small, but still significant, number of associations are offering complete or partial open access to their publications.[9]
Due to the rising prevalence of
electronic journals and their use in delivering open access content, Willinsky
states that
The scholarly associations need to rethink their role and services, rather than holding on as long as possible to a publishing model whose time may well be passing. This is the time to bring the scholarly and economic, the ethical and intellectual, aspects before the membership, as the change in publishing mediums could well alter the nature of the scholarly association.[10]
Wallinsky offers up an example of
what a shift to open access would mean for the financial or economic realities
for the scholarly association;
If a $100 is lost in subscription revenues with open access publishing and as much is cut from publication costs or made from a different source, the net effect is no change to the association’s resources. As it turns out, the average publication cost is $874,897 (including newsletters, brochures, etc., as well as the journal), while the average publishing revenue recouped by the associations is $659,159.[11]
The overall costs of running the
publishing for a scholarly association is not fully recouped by the pay for
access output of the association. With the introduction of open access, and the
reduction in costs of production it will cause, the association has the
possibility to offset the losses from the ending of journal subscriptions. In
his article, Willinsky produces a table outlining the costs involved in scholarly society publications.
The economic changes that the
introduction of open access may have upon small, scholarly press will not only
alter the business model for scholarly societies, but can also result in the
transformation of these bodies into something new.
For Beverungen et al., the
transformation of scholarly communication in general creates opportunities to
mutate the model for delivery of scholarly research. They outline 4 possible
avenues where new models of communication may emerge:
- Open access repositories
- Fair trade publishing
- University presses
- Self-organised open publishing
These 4 models are equivalent to
the following 4 styles of delivery:
- The depositing of original research into open access repositories.
- The making of payments to authors for their works by the academic publishers.
- Reducing costs of production by moving publishing ‘in-house’ to the universities themselves.
- Harnessing the ‘free labour’ of academics already required under the current system, but side-stepping the publishing industry by implementing an independent publishing culture with completely cost independence access at its heart.[13]
There is, as such, no
hard-and-fast reason to follow any assumption that the 4 styles of delivery are
mutually exclusive. Rather, understanding them as part of an ecology of
processes that reinforce, or wax and wane, in relationship to each other allows
us to conceive of a strategic direction for the creation of innovative forms of
scholarly communication.
For example, the current Research
Councils UK mandate requires all publicly funded research to be published as
open access and under a creative commons licence. Under this new regime, once
an article has been published it can be republished in another format.
Universities could harness their own institutional repositories by encouraging
academics and students to self-organise the creation of publications drawing
upon the open access output held within. It could also be possible to divert small
amounts of funding in order to give access to early career academics and
research students to important paid career development opportunities.
By doing this, the researchers
would be able to use the prestige and/or recognition of institutions and/or
departments to generate interest in the works outside of the traditional
publishing structures. This would, over time, shift the balance towards the
self-organisation of publishing by researchers, thus making academics determine
the distribution and recognition of ‘impact’ without cost presenting itself as
a barrier for either authors or readers.
[1]
(Beverungen et al., 2012: 931)
[2]
(Beverungen et al., 2012: 931)
[3]
(Beverungen et al., 2012: 931)
[4]
(Houghton and Oppenheim et al, 2009: 1)
[5]
(Houghton and Oppenheim et al, 2009: 2)
[6]
(Houghton and Oppenheim et al, 2009: 2)
[7]
(Houghton and Oppenheim et al, 2009: 14)
[8]
(Houghton and Oppenheim et al, 2009)
[9]
(Willinsky, 2005: 5)
[10]
(Willinsky, 2005: 21)
[11]
(Wllinsky, 2005: 14)
[12]
(Willinsky, 2005: 7)
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