Hardin Scholarly Communication News

In a frank interview with the British INFORMATION WORLD REVIEW (IWR), Springer CEO Derk Haank took aim at open access by citing his company’s own Open Choice program. Under Springer’s Open Choice, authors can pay $3000 to make their work freely available online, though not in print. Authors, however, must also assign copyright to Springer. In the interview, Haank derided the program’s chance for success, and suggested the open access model on which Open Choice is somewhat predicated was not viable or even in demand. "Open Choice was a pragmatic solution that would reveal just how deep the demand for OA publishing is," Haank told IWR. "From the research we’ve done with our authors, 50 percent have never heard of open access, and over half of the remaining are not interested in it." He called open access advocates a "small vocal minority."

Of course that small vocal minority now includes major library organizations, the British Government and the U.S. National Institutes of Health, as well as over 30,000 researchers worldwide who signed the Public Library of Science (PLoS) petition. In contrast to Open Choice, the PLoS charges $1500 per article and does not require the assigning of copyright, a model Haank called "unsustainable."

"Perhaps it is unsustainable for Springer," countered SPARC director Rick Johnson. "But I’m confident there are others who can do it for less. That’s competition." Of course, open access models do face economic challenges. PLoS officials told members of the British Parliament during its STM inquiry that they were still unsure of project costs and open access pioneer BioMed Central, which charges $525 per article, is still searching for an institutional model. But Johnson told the LJ Academic Newswire that costs associated with past models could not simply be transposed to an open access environment. "The fact is, highly profitable publishers have built their cost structures around the non-competitiveness of the market," he said. "When you can charge whatever you want for a journal, what incentive is there to hold down costs?

There is actually a temptation is to spend more to cement your relationship with authors and thus raise the barrier to entry for competitors. High costs are not a reflection of the essential cost or the value that buyers, that is, libraries, ascribe to a journal."

[Library Journal Academic Newswire, September 28, 2004]