During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I’m using this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away. This post is from November 7, 2012:
As a strong supporter of any open access initiative over the last almost ten years, there is now a looming threat that the situation may deteriorate beyond the abysmal state scholarly publishing is in right now.
Yes, you read that right: it can get worse than it is today.
What would be worse? Universal gold open access – that is, every publisher charges the authors what they want for making the articles publicly accessible. I’ve been privately warning of this danger for some time, and now an email and a blog post by Ross Mounce reminded me that it is about time to make my lingering fear a little more public. He wrote:
Outrageous press release from Nature Publishing Group today.
They’re explicitly charging more to authors who want CC BY Gold OA, relative to more restrictive licenses such as CC BY-NC-SA. Here’s my quick take on it:https://rossmounce.co.uk/2012/11/07/gold-oa-pricewatch
More money, for absolutely no extra work.
How is that different from what these publishers have been doing all these years and still are doing today?
What is so surprising about charging for nothing? That’s been the modus operandi of publishers since the advent of the internet.
Why should NPG not charge, say, 20k USD for an OA article in Nature, if they chose to do so?
If people are willing to pay more than 230k ($58,600 a year) for a Yale degree or over 250k ($62,772 a year) just to have “Harvard” on their diplomas, why wouldn’t they be willing to shell out a meager 20k for a paper that might give them tenure? That’s just a drop in the bucket, pocket cash.
I’d even be willing to bet that the hard limit for gold OA luxury segment publishing will be closer to 50k or even higher as multiple authors can share the cost. Without regulation, publishers can charge whatever the market is willing and able to pay. If a Nature paper is required, people will pay what it takes.
If libraries let themselves be extorted by publishers out of fear they’ll get yelled at by their faculty, surely scientists will let themselves get extorted by publishers out of fear they won’t be able to put food on the table nor pay the rent without the next grant/position.
Who seriously believes that only because they now make some articles OA, publishers would all of a sudden become non-profit organisations?
I don’t see anything extraordinary in this press release at all, completely normal and very much expected. In fact, the price difference is actually quite small.
I really have no idea what’s supposed to be so outrageous about this?
Obviously, the alternative to gold OA cannot be a subscription model. I’ve written repeatedly that I believe a rational solution would be to have libraries archive and make accessible the fruits of our labor: publications, data and software. There can be a thriving marketplace of services around these academic crown jewels, but the booty stays in-house.
At the very least, if there ever should be universal gold OA, the market needs to be heavily regulated with drastic price caps below current author processing charges, or the situation will be worse than today: today, you have to cozy up with professional editors to get published in ‘luxury segment’ journals. In a universal OA world, you would also have to be rich. This may be better for the public in the short term, a they then would at least be able to access all the research. In the long term, however, if science suffers, so will eventually the public.
Every market I know has a luxury segment. I’ll gladly rest my fears if someone shows me a market without such a segment and how it is similar to a universal OA academic publishing market. Until then, I’ll be working towards getting rid of publishers and journal rank.
THE INEVITABILITY OF UNIVERSAL FAIR-GOLD OPEN ACCESS
BB: “have libraries archive and make accessible the fruits of our labor: publications, data and software”
And whom to quality-control them (peer review)?
For that’s the only thing essential peer-reviewed journals do in the online era: they manage peer review, and certify its outcome with their title and track-record. (Libraries, archives, papers, data and software don’t that.
Plans by universities and research funders to pay the costs of Open Access Publishing (“Gold OA”) are premature. Funds are short. 80% of journals (including virtually all the top journals) are still subscription-based, tying up the potential funds to pay for Gold OA. The asking price for Gold OA is still ridiculously high (“Fools Gold”) (and is paid on top of having to continue to pay for subscriptions). And there is concern that paying to publish may inflate acceptance rates and lower quality standards.
What is needed now is for universities and funders to mandate OA self-archiving (of authors’ final peer-reviewed drafts, immediately upon acceptance for publication) (“Green OA”). That will provide immediate OA. And if and when universal Green OA should go on to make subscriptions unsustainable (because users are satisfied with just the Green OA versions) that will in turn induce journals to cut costs (print edition, online edition, access-provision, archiving), downsize to just providing the service of peer review, and convert to the Fair-Gold OA cost-recovery model.
Meanwhile, the subscription cancellations will have released the funds to pay these residual service costs.
The natural way to charge for the service of peer review then will be on a “no-fault basis,” with the author’s institution or funder paying for each round of refereeing, regardless of outcome (acceptance, revision/re-refereeing, or rejection). This will minimize cost while protecting against inflated acceptance rates and decline in quality standards.
https://www.dlib.org/dlib/july10/harnad/07harnad.html
The same we’ve always done it: peer-review. Just without publishers – why use them?
Why would corporate publishers be the only ones who are able to do this? PLoS does it just fine and they’re not commercial. SciELO publishes 900 open access journals and they’re not publishers. So there is plenty of precedent that peer-review does not require corporate publishers.
They’re not plans any more. It’s already a reality for countries who cannot afford to waste US$ 4k on a subscription article. SciELO (for example) is funded by governments, libraries funders, etc. and publishes fully OA at less then 10% of the average cost of current subscription publishing.
And what would keep Nature from charging 50k for the Rolls Royce version of peer-review, especially when PLoS ONE only charges 1300 for their “peer-review light”? Name a market without a luxury segment and explain to me why it is like academic publishing and I’ll change my mind. Until then, it’s straightforward to predict that universal gold will likely be even worse than the status quo (and that’s hard to achieve).
1. Whoever manages the peer review is the publisher (in the online era).
2. Publisher means publisher, not just commercial publisher.
3. Yes pre-Green Gold is over-priced, double-paid, and sometimes double-dipped Fools Gold. That’s why Green OA has to be universally mandated and provided first.
4. No-Fault peer-review, as I described, will be a service, not a product, and will be independent of acceptance/rejection. That is what will keep its price fair (post-Geen Fair Gold).
5. But universal Green has to come first…
1. Ok, libraries become publishers then, yes.
2. Libraries (then publishers) will manage the peer-review, not a problem then.
3. This appears to be the only point of contention (as we have previously identified): of course mandates will work the way you described. I’m still naive enough to project that the transition can also happen without mandates (I may well be wrong). Moreover, I find the implementation of effective, enforced mandates practically and politically very difficult (it may well be that libraries taking over publishing may be politically even more difficult).
4. Ah, that’s what you meant! That is an excellent solution, but it remains to be seen if it is a viable business model for a ‘publisher’ in the traditional sense, or if service providers unaffiliated with any publishing service will outcompete traditional publishers. Libraries (then publishers) could then chose to use this service.
5. What I propose as alternative solution is – in essence – universal green, but without mandates, without the additional publication in a ‘journal’, but with peer-review..
I would very much like to read a paper —or blog post— titled THE INEVITABILITY OF “UNIVERSAL GREEN OA WITHOUT MANDATES AND WITHOUT OBLIGATORY ADDITIONAL PUBLICATION IN A JOURNAL, BUT WITH OPEN PEER REVIEW” — slightly modified point 5 by Bjorn
Publish means to “make public”. I don’t understand why publish should mean “manage peer review”. How can the evaluation of global science, and consequently the selection of ideas and technologies that shape society, depend on opaque procedures that support journal hierarchies leading to extortionate subscription or publication fees that only hinder knowledge dissemination?
What Bjorn proposes is absolutely feasible and VERY CHEAP! University libraries and other preprint servers with state of the art infrastructure and qualified personnel are already there. The service we are about to launch for journal-independent open peer review —there already exist other similar options— was built with lots of volunteer work and minimum funding for technical support. It can be sustained with a tiny fraction of what a single University library spends for journal subscriptions. What is more important, however, is to cultivate a new culture of self-publishing preferably not through mandates, but offering intrinsic motivation to researchers —the increased effectiveness of intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation is well studied in psychology. Most researchers publish (in journals) for the prestige=IF, which leads to grants and promotion. Building bottom-up pressure by creating and trusting a more fair and efficient evaluation system will inevitably lead to a change in assessment policies by University committees and funding agencies.
“Inevitability” – Now that would be fantastic! Unfortunately, (almost) nothing is inevitable in this world, with varying degrees of (un-)certainty for all kinds of events. Given the incapability of legacy publishers to adapt to the new environment and the know-how and infrastructure already present at institutions (due, in part, to green mandates!), I would think that an institution-driven infrastructure reform may be indeed in the offing. I’m pushing in that direction and the positive feedback I receiver wherever I go to promote this reform, encourages slight optimism.