Open Access Publishing Is Not Perfect, Yet
No-one would disagree with the goals of open access publishing: free access to scientific literature for all. If you work in an institution or small company that can’t afford to pay journal subscription fees you’ll know the problems that lack of access can cause.
But publishing costs money, and someone has to pay those costs. Administration of the peer review process, copyediting, typesetting and graphics work and, of course, printing all require costly manpower.
The traditional business model has been to load the cost onto institutions and individuals who pay subscription fees to the publishers. But since the advent of the internet wiped out the requirement for one of those major costs (printing), some publishers, new and old, have moved to different business models that allow open access to their articles.
The most common open access models are:
- Gold Open Access: All articles in the journal are free access. This is most commonly funded by author fees (e.g. PLoS) or advertising (e.g. Biotechniques).
- Hybrid Open Access: Traditional subscription journals where individual articles can be made free either upon payment of a fee by the author or unilaterally by the journal editor (to help market the journal).
- Delayed Open Acess: Traditional subscription journals where all articles become open access after a specified period
- Green Open Access: Personal self-archiving of either the final copy or, to avoid copyright restrictions, the final peer-reviewed pre-print draft of a manuscript you have published elsewhere (click here fore more details on self-archiving).
Open Access is Not Free
All of these models (apart from green open access, which is actually not really a model) have one thing in common with the traditional subscription model: they cost. They are just different ways to obtain the money required to fund the publication process. In the case of PLoS, for example, the burden of cost is placed on the author (it costs between $1350 and $2900 per author) and in many cases this money has to come from funds that would otherwise have been allocated to fund research. And in the hybrid open access journals the old journal elitism still reigns – the higher the impact factor, the higher the Open Access fee.
So while Open Access might eliminate subscription fees, instead it makes publishing expensive for the author. In a purely Open Access world it is easy to imagine a situation where researchers in a cash-strapped institution or small company are prevented from publishing their latest work in most journals because of the cost.
Is PLoS the way forward?
Now that articles are published on the internet, do we really need journals anyway? Perhaps all we need is a central body that acts as a repository for all literature and organiser and arbiter in the peer review process. This is what PLoS aims to be.
Having one huge, non-profit publisher like PLoS could make things a lot simpler, and less expensive, for authors and readers alike. An all-encompassing PLoS could presumably work hard to reduce author costs to a minimum through cost saving and negotiating grants from governments and others. And PLoS already waives author charges without question to those who say they can’t afford it, so publishing, as well as reading, would be Open Access. Funding bodies too would have to catch up and realise that Open Access costs must be factored in and a centralised, uniform publication process could make this simpler.
Open Access is not perfect yet, but if we could reduce the burden on the author and streamline the publishing process, it could be pretty close.
Do you think PLoS is the way forward? Are there any disadvantages in having one, central publishing body? Let us know in the comments.
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Nick Oswald
Nick is a molecular biologist-turned-publisher. After a PhD in Developmental Biology and an eclectic seven years in biotech he is now Editorial Manager of Neuroendocrinology and the founder and Editor-In-Chief of Bitesize Bio. You are welcome to connect with Nick on LinkedIn
Brief correction: the author fees at PLoS are per article, not per author. As to your question, I think PLoS are among those few publishers who move forward most visibly towards a modernization of the scientific journal, but ultimately, “there is but one journal” — the scientific literature as a whole, and what we need foremostly is open standards to store, access and cite scientific information.
Thanks Daniel – I have fixed that slip-of-the-keyboard! Thanks also for your input/
The issue with PLoS, and OA in general is that it has yet to show that it can be sustainable without massive amounts of donated funding from third parties. Actually, there are exceptions, journals like PLoS-One, where the focus is on publishing large quantities of papers with little editorial oversight have proven they can pay the bills. OA simply doesn’t work for a high quality journal that rejects the vast majority of papers that are submitted. If you only charge authors whose papers are accepted, that drives you to accept more and more papers to pay the bills, and that lowers the quality of the journal. A few years ago, a Cell editor suggested they’d have to charge at least $15,000 per paper if they went full OA.
So it’s really not clear that pure author-pays OA is the way forward. If someone comes up with a way to make it economically feasible, I think a lot of journals would be very happy with it, but so far, you can’t do it without the Moore Foundation giving you millions and millions of dollars. I do think OA is a great business model for some types of publication, as PLoS-One and the forthcoming Nature Communications show. But it doesn’t work for all types of journals, particularly smaller niche journals and high end top quality journals. The way forward is going to be a variety of business models and a variety of journal types (and means of communication beyond the journal).
Thank you. Very nice.
First, as in all of publishing, science publishing is undergoing a massive change. See yesterday’s posts by Clay Shirky and Michael Nielsen – there is now and will be in the future a plurality of models (as David Crotty correctly states in his last sentence above).
Second, as Peter Suber and Bill Hooker have found out when they looked closely, only a very small subset of OA journals is working on the “author-pays” model. Most are financed by a combination of advertising, societies, sponsorhips etc. Just like all the New Media – just look at newspapers dying left and right and nifty new online news organizations that are coming in to fill the void with a whole variety of ‘business models’. The days of charging for the physical paper are over.
Third, many high-tiered TA journals also charge authors – page charges, color-image charges, reprint charges, etc. Those monies come out of the grants, out of the particular subset of the money in the grant called “publication costs”.
Fourth, another part of the grant, the overhead, pays for the university library for journal subscriptions so the author, when and while employed by that university, with a password, can access his/her own paper. Thus, the author pays twice: to publish and to read. It all comes out of the grant. With OA, in cases of “author-pays” journals only, the author pays only once, from those same “publication costs” portion of the grant. With most OA journals, author pays zero.
Fifth, whenever I hear a statement like the one parroted by David Crotty above, that PLoS ONE is “publishing large quantities of papers with little editorial oversight” steam comes out of my ears. This lie was invented by Declan Butler when PLoS ONE first stated and it turned into mythology that is spread around the Web by enemies of Open Access and/or PLoS. Nothing is further from the truth. Read the Editor interviews on everyONE blog – every single one of them describes the peer-review process at PLoS ONE in detail and every one of them notes how rigorous it is. Furthermore, many of them state that peer-review at PLoS ONE is actually better than in most other places PRECISELY because the reviewers, relieved from the need to evaluate the ’sexiness’ of the manuscript can instead focus on the correctness of the science.
Sixth, a statement “a high quality journal that rejects the vast majority of papers that are submitted” reveals the underlying and anachronistic idea that sexy=good in science, the prevalent by noxious idea that a media-worthy study (what media – it’s almost dead!?) is better than a better done but less exciting-to-the-masses study. PLoS ONE is already helping to kill this nasty and counter-productive way of thinking. Science is not (or should not be) a popularity contest and ‘highly-selective” journals have made it so. For far too long.
Bora, do you know of any OA journals that publish financial statements? I would think that evidence of viability would go a long way in helping other publishers adopt OA.
As for the “publishing large quantities of papers with little editorial oversight” statement, PLoS-One published 378 papers in August of this year, so I think “large quantities” is justified.
PLoS-One’s own “about” page states the following:
“Too often a journal’s decision to publish a paper is dominated by what the Editor/s think is interesting and will gain greater readership — both of which are subjective judgments and lead to decisions which are frustrating and delay the publication of your work. PLoS ONE will rigorously peer-review your submissions and publish all papers that are judged to be technically sound. Judgments about the importance of any particular paper are then made after publication by the readership (who are the most qualified to determine what is of interest to them).”
Is that, or is that not less “editorial oversight” than seen in journals whose editors heavily vet papers before sending them out for peer review?
I stand by the statement as completely accurate. It was not meant to be denigrating, but instead to demonstrate how the business model is able to succeed where others have failed.
Now, a statement that the top journals only select papers because they’re “sexy” is certainly less defensible and more insulting to the editors of those journals than anything I said. I think there’s room in the market for all kinds of journals and all kinds of business models.
Very good article on open access journals! Having just one huge publisher as you suggest is interesting. Would you also advocate one huge supermarket chain, one airline, one newspaper … ?
Hi Hugh
Thanks for your comment. Of course I would not advocate one huge supermarket etc. But the main reason for that is that competition is needed to drive down the price and maintain quality in these industries.
With a single scientific publishing body the quality would maintained by the peer review process and the response of the research community to each article. In my opinion there is no absolute need for “editorial oversight”. This judgement could be made by the community itself, or perhaps by peer groups like faculty of 1000.
And as for price, I can’t see how not-for-profit organisation would/could charge more than individual publishing houses that must make a profit to survive.
There is, of course, always a danger with monolithic organisations because the individuals at the top have too much power and that is a downside of this idea.
However, as I see it, the huge downside with the current setup is the ridiculous fragmentation of what is essentially a body of knowledge into hierarchical brands. This, unfortunately, means that impact factor equals power, which in turn means that the focus of journals will always tend to be toward the hot, highly cited topics instead of just plain, sound science.
What do you think are the advantages of having many different journals are?
David,
Do you really think that a figure of $15,000 per article could be justified? Any idea where those figures come from?
Nick–I think it was a rough estimate, based on the what they’d have to charge given the number of articles they publish a month, to cover their costs if there was no subscription revenue. Remember that for a journal like Cell, they’re rejecting at least 90% of submissions, so that’s a huge amount of work that brings in no revenue at all if you’re only bringing in money when a paper is accepted. So the accepted papers have to pay for all the rejected ones, and there’s pressure to start accepting more and more papers each month to pay the bills. I’ll try to dig out the original quote, but here’s a JCB article where they explain their costs (which certainly have increased since 2004)
http://jcb.rupress.org/cgi/content/full/165/1/19
At the JCB, which runs a comparatively modest operation (only two senior, in-house editors), it costs ~$8,000 per published paper given a 15–20% acceptance rate. (Please note that the $8,000 figure includes only the cost of producing an article on-line, and excludes any costs associated with maintaining subscriptions or printing and mailing hard copy journals.) The per-article cost at journals such as Nature, which have even lower acceptance rates and more costly production values, appears to be considerably higher than $8,000. The per-article amount charged for publication in PLoS, currently $1,500 per article, would not appear even to begin to cover the actual costs of publication.
Hi Nick,
I add the following thought for discussion:
Full open access journals are funded predominantly by contributions from authors. Most open access journals waive charges for authors with limited funds, often those from poorer countries. This means that the authors that pay subsidize the ones that can’t. Scientists funded by the NIH in the USA for example are expected to pay, usually from their research funds. I wonder does the NIH realize that it could in effect be subsidizing the publication of science from Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Libya etc Is this a good thing or not? Any comments …
[...] Open Access Publishing Is Not Perfect, Yet [...]
How much do manuscript reviewers get paid for Cell anyway? Sounds like it must be a lucrative gig if it costs that much to reject manuscripts.
Regarding coalescing into one giant journal, sure, that will work just as soon as people stop caring about impact factors. I work in a university biomedical library and we try to promote other factors to consider when choosing a journal to publish in, but it’s still alllll about the impact factor. People will sign away all their rights so long as it’s a top ranked journal.
David
I would say the key factor here is the low acceptance rates from the journals you mentioned. A large chunk of the articles rejected will be scientifically sound (i.e. publishable) but not the “sexiest” of the bunch. So if all scientifically sound articles were published, the PLoS figures would start to become more realistic.
I see nothing wrong with publishing large numbers of articles, as long as they are scientifically sound. How “sexy” the topic is could be decided socially by the user community (through scoring articles etc.) as I mentioned before.
To be able to publish all scientifically sound articles, the publication would have to be purely online – no print editions. Something I would advocate anyway as it does not seem necessary to me. I wonder if there are any arguments against this.
Hugh,
What is wrong with publishing research from Cuba, North Korea, Iran or Libya?
If scientists from these countries genuinely can’t pay their OA fees then I think it is right for the community to subsidise them.
Are you implying that by supporting publications from these countries, the NIH (and equivalents from the rest of the paying countries) would be supporting some sort of “Axis-of-evil” science?
If so, I can’t see how that holds up — what harm, specifically, would that do?
Hi Nick
I fully support the publication of research from anywhere in the world. And I also support the concept of OA. However there are issues that need to be addressed with OA: in particular funding. Money for research often comes ultimately from the tax payer or from charitable donation and is granted to researchers for specific research. Does the “community” really have the right to use this money to subsidize publications from other projects and/or countries? Please note that I am only asking the question … not stating a view. I would love to know the opinion of others on this subject. What is the policy of grant awarding authorities for example the NIH, regarding the use of fund to subsidize other labs/projects/countries?
Congratulation BTW for initiating this debate on OA. There are many important issues regarding the future of academic publishing and they do need careful consideration and much discussion.
One other point regarding funding of OA. If labs “genuinely can’t pay their OA fees” how can they afford to do the research, pay their staff, pay for electricity, etc? Is it not a case that they would rather use their funds to do more research and its nice that other labs are willing to subsidize their publications? Is this attitude OK or not? Again I am only posing the question, and would love to hear other people’s views.
Hugh,
“If labs “genuinely can’t pay their OA fees” how can they afford to do the research, pay their staff, pay for electricity, etc?”
–Good point. I hadn’t thought of this.
This is regarding the ‘fees paid by some labs/people/countries’. I understand/believe/think that one should pay the fees for their own publication if they have the money and should not invest in performing more experiments instead. But, in a broader view, can we not consider the whole world as one single group/people/community/country so that we say its ‘whole humanities science’ not American or European or Indian (me being in India) science? Also consider the fact that many of the labs in the countries which pay those extra fees have people working who are from other countries. These other countries have invested a huge amount in training those people and making them able to do ‘great’ science. I am sure many would not agree with it but we must come with ideas that make doing science (and of course, publishing it) easier for the betterment of society. That should be our main goal.
Another point (for Nick). The idea of this toolbar is great and i liked and installed it. But I do not want to go through it always and rather prefer Google for general searches. How do i make Google as the default search engine.
Thanks
Jumping back in here, sorry for the lag…
@bmljenny–most people refer to “manuscript reviewers” as “editors”. That’s just one part of their responsibilities. Salaries vary, depending on one’s experience, but they’re not all that different a pay scale from that of a PI. The reason Cell’s editorial expenses are more than the JCB is that they employ more editors and they have to review many more papers (remember, they’re rejecting at a higher rate). They may also pay different salaries and spend more on production and design, but I can’t say for sure.
@Nick–this is the proposition that PLoS ONE is making, as apparently will the new Nature Communications (hard to really tell what that new journal is supposed to be from their announcements)–that you can crowdsource the selection of quality of scientific articles. The question is whether this is a valuable service, something worth paying for. Most scientists I speak with are overbooked, they are constantly short on time and look for ways to add efficiency where they can. Having a good editor selecting out the best, highest quality papers can be a real time saver. If it’s up to the readers to do that selection, then you’re going to have to commit to spending a certain amount of time reading bad, or at least uninteresting or insignificant papers. Many feel they’d rather spend that time doing their own research and are willing to pay someone else to weed through the dross. The market will eventually decide if this service is something that readers can do without.
I wrote a blog posting on the idea of stripping down publications (and other products) last week, it can be seen here:
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/09/29/is-good-enough-good-enough-for-you/
Thanks David. I like the way you have put it — that Editors are essentially providing a service. I think this is a good way to think about it.
As you say, the market will decide whether the service is worth paying for or whether a science equivalent of Digg (or something more structured like Faculty of 1000) would suffice to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Nick – you’re right that editors are essentially providing a service. But the new reality that is dawning on people is, “To whom is this service provided” We used to think it was the reader as in the newspaper-subscriber model. But it is clear from these and other discussions that the service is also to the writer (author) and this ought to be reflected in whatever business model emerges. One thing is clear, the business of selling subscriptions (or bundles of articles if you prefer) is inefficient in that most articles in most journals that libraries buy are never read by anyone, much less by a particular library’s patrons.
Of course you could say the same thing about books. Most books are never circulated. However academic librarians can’t predict which books will be used so they have to build collections based on subjects, etc. But articles can be purchased at the point of need with immediate delivery.
I agree that OA publishing is not perfect but I think most people would agree with me that something’s gotta give.