Economics of Publishing Category

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Access to Legal Scholarship

By
Karen Fischer
– May 29, 2008Posted in: Economics of Publishing, Open Access

For a variety of reasons, legal scholarship is an excellent laboratory for experiments in changing the traditional structures and economics of scholarship. Both open access and informal forms of scholarship have been more readily adopted and more quickly influential in law than in other fields. The unusual structure of most legal scholarship is a partial explanation for these facts, but many of the experiences and observations made in the legal arena offer substantive lessons for scholarship in other fields.

Nowhere are these experiences and observations better synthesized than in a recent article by Richard Danner, Ruffy Research Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Information Services at Duke University Law School. In “Applying the Access Principle in Law: the Responsibilities of the Legal Scholar,” Danner does a superb job of explaining what is unusual about legal scholarship, what the experiences of changing the publication models have been and what needs and responsibilities for individual scholars remain.

One of Danner’s observations particularly struck me when I read this article, and that impression was confirmed by a conversation I had this week with several librarians. Contrary to the oft-repeated claim that open access will inevitably lead to loss of subscription income for publishers, Danner documents the experience of Duke Law School when it moved all of its journals to open access web accessibility. As Danner tells the story, the school had concluded that the expected loss of subscription income would be offset by the values gained from greater exposure to its 6 print journals. But in fact, there was almost no such decline in print subscriptions, even after 10 years of free access. Only one journal showed an overall decline (of about 2%) over that time period, while four showed significant increases in subscriptions. The sixth journal experienced a small increase. Clearly better access leads to subscriptions from readers who otherwise would not have known about the journals, especially the specialized ones, which exhibited the largest increases. This week a librarian I was speaking with confirmed that she had also experienced this unusual form of marketing, when faculty have asked her to subscribe to journals they have discovered through open Web accessibility.

Overall, Danner’s article is a masterful analysis of the structure of publishing in a particular field and how the “access principle,” a concept taken from John Willinsky’s book of the same name, could transform a field of scholarship. In spite of the oddities of legal scholarship, Danner is very successful at offering both an analysis and a call to action that deserve to be translated and applied in other fields.

Kevin Smith, Scholarly Communication @ Duke, May 5, 2008

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Campaign against Open Access and Public Access to Federally Funded Research

By
Karen Fischer
– September 6, 2007Posted in: Economics of Publishing, Open Access, Publicly Funded Research

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) this week issued a statement criticizing a new initiative in what it called an “ongoing PR campaign” against public access legislation, supported by the Association of American Publishers (AAP). ARL officials said the latest effort, dubbed PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine), “frequently distorts the nature of ongoing and substantive discussions about open access and public access to federally funded research.”

The PRISM web site argues that public access efforts will undermine peer review and harm journal publishers; will open the door to “scientific censorship in the form of selective additions to or omissions from the scientific record”; subject the scientific record to “the uncertainty that comes with changing federal budget priorities and bureaucratic meddling”; and will introduce “duplication and inefficiencies that will divert resources that would otherwise be dedicated to research.”

ARL officials noted that the PRISM arguments closely follow the advice of PR “pit bull” Eric Dezenhall, whom publishers consulted in the last year to develop a strategy for fighting public access legislation. Nature first reported publishers’ plans to launch their PR campaign in January of 2007. ARL officials said the PR campaign offers libraries and researchers an opportunity to engage the campus community “concerning the changes to the scholarly communication” and provides a memo with talking points it hopes will help guide that discussion.

OA public access supporters have already hit the blogs, both dissecting PRISM’s arguments and expressing their displeasure over the coalition’s tactics. Alma Swan, a researcher and consultant specializing in scholarly communication wrote that the PRISM initiative made her feel sad and disappointed. Swan wrote on her blog that “the level of dishonesty and distortion in PRISM’s language,” suggested that “the partners in this ‘coalition’ are just not doing what I had hoped they would eventually do, which is to see clearly and act well.

Library Journal Academic Newswire, Sep 7, 2007

Issue Brief from the Association of Research Libraries

AAP PR Campaign against Open Access and Public Access to Federally
Funded Research: Update re the PRISM Coalition
September 4, 2007

Excerpt:
A new initiative has been announced in an ongoing public relations campaign sponsored by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) against initiatives concerning access to federally funded research (public access) and open access generally. PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine), a new coalition, is attracting substantial criticism from a broad spectrum of researchers. The PRISM message corresponds directly to plans described in internal publisher documents leaked to reporters to “develop simple messages (e.g., public access equals government censorship)” that are aimed at key decision makers.

As news of this initiative evolves, it presents an opportunity to engage in conversations with members of your campus community concerning the changes to the scholarly communication system and how this may affect scholarly journal publishing. This memo provides talking points to assist you and your staff in working with members of your campus community with regards to the recently disclosed publishers public relations campaign against open/public access initiatives and legislation concerning access to federally funded research….

[N]either public access policies to federally funded research or open access journals alter the traditional practice of peer review.

* Peer review is already built into open access journals and to policies concerning access to federally funded research thus showing the fallacy of the predicted demise of peer review.
* The peer review system, based almost completely on the voluntary free labor of the research community, is independent of a particular mode of publishing, or business model.
* Publishers’ own studies have found that open access journals are peer reviewed as frequently as comparable subscription journals.
* The existing National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy and legislation concerning access to federally funded research called for submissions from only peer-reviewed journals and “includes all modifications from the publishing peer review process.”
* Finally, journal publishers do not create the content they publish, nor do they generally pay authors for that content or compensate reviewers for the time they spend ensuring the quality of published research through their contributions to the peer review process. The academy supports and provides the peer review.
* Public access to federally funded research policies proposed to date have all incorporated embargo periods to protect publishers from any rapid shifts in subscription revenues….

PRISM doesn’t speak for Rockefeller University Press

Mike Rossner, Executive Director of Rockefeller University Press, sent the following letter to the Association of American Publishers (AAP):

To the Association of American Publishers:

I am writing to request that a disclaimer be placed on the PRISM website indicating that the views presented on the site do not necessarily reflect those of all members of the AAP. We at the Rockefeller University Press strongly disagree with the spin that has been placed on the issue of open access by PRISM.

First, the website implies that the NIH (and other funding agencies who mandate release of content after a short delay) are advocating the demise of peer review. Nothing could be further from the truth. These agencies completely understand the need to balance public access to journal content with the necessity for publishers to recoup the costs of peer review. After extended discussions with publishers, these agencies have determined that delayed release of content (none of them are advocating immediate release unless publishers are compensated handsomely for such release) is consistent with the STM subscription business model, in which peer review is a basic tenet.

Second, how can PRISM refer to bias when the government is mandating that ALL papers resulting from research they fund be released to the public after a short delay? The major potential for bias by the government and other funding agencies has already occurred when they decide what research to fund (e.g., stem cell research).

Third, PRISM takes issue with government spending on a repository of papers resulting from government-funded research. The government has been forced into this position by those publishers who refuse to ever release most of their content to the public.

Fourth, PRISM maintains that published papers are private property. Most of the research published by STM publishers only exists because of public funding. No public funding – no research,­ no millions in profit. Publishers thus have an obligation to give some of their private property back to the public, on whose taxes they depend for their very existence.

Finally, we take issue with the title: Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine. The use of the term “research integrity” is inappropriate in this context. The common use of this term refers to whether the data presented are accurate representations of what was actually observed. In other words, has any misconduct occurred? This is not the primary concern of peer reviewers, who ask whether the data presented support the conclusions drawn. It is thus incorrect to link the term research integrity directly with peer review.

I could go on, but I think you will get the point that we strongly disagree with the tack AAP has taken on this issue. We urge you to put a disclaimer on the PRISM site, to make it clear that your assertions do not represent the views of all of your members.

Yours sincerely,
Mike Rossner, Ph.D.
Executive Director
The Rockefeller University Press

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U.S. College Book Price Study

By
Karen Fischer
– September 6, 2007Posted in: Economics of Publishing

This book price compilation, based on books reviewed in Choice during the 2006 calendar year, was prepared under the sponsorship of the Library Materials Price Index Editorial Board of the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services, a division of the American Library Association.

For 2006, the overall average price for books in the Humanities, Sciences, and Social & Behavioral Sciences (including reference books) was $62.15, a 3% increase over the average 2005 price of $60.33. Reference books continued to have the highest average price at $136.85 and the highest percentage increase over the previous year, nearly 11%. Without reference books included, the average 2006 book price was $56.24 or a 3.3% increase over the average 2005 price of $54.43.

Highlights of the Price Study:

Avg. Price per Title
Art & Architecture: $55.45
Language & Literature: $62.81
Chemistry: $110.55
Engineering: $108.70
Health Sciences: $57.19
Physics: $67.93
Business, Management & Labor: $48.49
History, Geography & Area Studies: $54.99
Political Science: $48.11
Psychology: $59.00
Reference: $136.85

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Economic Stability of Open Access

By
Karen Fischer
– September 6, 2007Posted in: Economics of Publishing, Open Access

At the American Library Association’s annual conference in June, a SPARC forum addressed the issue of economic stability of open access.

For roughly the past five years, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has devoted the bulk of its energies to open access (OA). So at this year’s SPARC Forum, the organization offered a progress report on OA publishing efforts, specifically, the economic stability of open access. Moderated by scientist Alma Swan, the panel featured speakers from three OA publishers with different backgrounds: Mark Patterson from the Public Library of Science, a non-profit start-up; Bryan Vickery from BioMed Central (BMC), a seven-year-old for-profit open access publisher; and Paul Peters of Hindawi, a relatively new publisher that this year transitioned from a subscription model to OA. While each publisher is at a different point on the economic stability spectrum, each reported steady, somewhat dramatic progress.

A biologist, Swan aptly quoted another biologist, Theodosius Dobzhansky to set the tone for the session: “nothing makes sense except in the light of evolution.” She then detailed the evolution of open access, noting that roughly 2500 journals were now OA, nearly 10 percent of all academic journals according to the Directory of Open Access Journals. While OA can be applied in many models, the $7 billion STM industry is moving from journals to databases, as researchers search for articles rather than publications, and that the momentum behind OA is also visible anecdotally. Swan noted that she sees personnel often move to OA publishers from posts at major publishers like Elsevier. “But how many do you see moving the other way?” she asked.

Patterson gave a brief overview of PLoS’s efforts. PLoS has clearly succeeded in creating a brand, and that submissions were rising sharply, now numbering over 200 a month. PloS journals are peer-reviewed, can publish articles quickly, and increasingly offer a suite of community-enhancing Web 2.0 tools, he noted, which offer authors value for the author charges paid. While PloS is not yet economically sustainable, it’s moving in that direction. The exception: PLoS One, the organization’s general science publication, which is financed by $1250 per article author charges and is currently sustainable. The two flagship journals, PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology, which charge authors $2750 per article, are more specialized and more costly Some 90 percent of authors pay author charges, while the rest are subsidized by the publisher.

BMC’s Vickery said that the seven-year-old publisher now publishes 170 OA journals, with roughly 25,000 articles, and now generates 4500 submissions per quarter. He said BMC was hoping to announce that it was profitable by the year’s end. He put BMC’s costs at around 47 cents per article download, which he said was well below what commercial publishers claim. He also endorsed the idea of institutional repositories as “complementary” to open access publishing.

Peters said that all 80 of Hindawi’s journals are now fully OA. Hindawi, which began in 1997 as a subscription publisher, began the shift in 2004 after facing the challenge in attracting subscribers in a heavily consolidated budget-squeezed market. While panelists mainly discussed the viability of OA publishing, Peters turned the tables bluntly calling the subscription market unworkable. Authors choose where to publish, but libraries buy the bulk of the output, he noted, and that disconnect removes or obscures the authors’ incentive to seek value in any publishing deal.

While challenges remain, panelists were encouraged by the progress reported. Patterson urged librarians to continue to increase awareness of OA journals as well as the need for more funding support for authors. He also hinted that research culture needed to change, citing the “tyranny of the impact factor” which, he said, has become an obstacle to innovation because it focuses on “journals rather than articles.”

Library Journal Academic Newswire, June 28, 2007

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