Re: Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration

From: Sandy Thatcher <sgt3_at_psu.edu>
Date: Sun, 24 Dec 2006 09:53:36 EST

Stevan, you seem averse to speculation, but I'd like to propose
that speculation-at least, informed speculation-has an important
role to play in planning. "Worst case scenario" planning is
frequently used in business, in the military, etc., and for good
reason, especially for those who are risk-averse. It appears that
the Bush administration didn't do enough of this kind of
speculating when it ordered the invasion of Iraq, confident that
its assumption of controlled change to an orderly democratic
society was correct. We all know what happened as a result! What
I am hypothesizing for the transition to OA is more the kind of
short-term chaos that has transpired in Iraq than the smooth
transition to a functioning new system that you are counting on.
I'm urging university administrators not to make the same mistake
that the Bush administration did!

As for the conflation of costs for supporting OA journals and
costs for supporting editorial offices on university campuses, I
admit that I wasn't thinking so much of BMC, PLoS, etc., as being
the model for the future as you evidently are. Given the steep
increases in fees that those two OA publishers have recently
instituted, it isn't clear to me that they are viable models for
the long run, or will be around for many more years. (Foundation
funding is usually short term, and PLoS has survived largely on
that kind of funding so far.) I also suspect-though I do not
know- that the vast majority of 2,500 OA journals listed in the
directory are "mom and pop" operations run out of editorial
offices based on campuses, rather than parts of larger BMC-type
operations. It was these journals I was thinking about, and
supposing that the migration would mainly be handled by
individual editors of journals abandoned by commercial
publishers, who most likely would turn to their own universities
first for support before seeking out a BMC (if any still exists
at that point in time).

Many of the large commercial publishers now provide substantial
funding for the operation of editorial offices on campus. This is
the funding that will disappear and need to be replaced. It is
not just for administrative support. Editors are also paid for
their work. Will all of them be willing to continue dedicating
their time when they are not being paid? And what about
copyediting? You nowhere mention this as a cost, and it can be
significant. In my experience, very few academic editors are able
to do line editing very well (nor should they spend their
valuable time doing so anyway), and very little of academic
writing is not in need of editing. (I understand that the British
have a different attitude about copyediting, but in the U.S. it
is generally valued a lot, and expected, by most authors.) I
speak from experience here, as I did copyediting full-time for
the first three years of my publishing career and continued it
part-time for another twenty years. If you abandon copyediting,
you will have a significantly degraded product. Good copyediting
comes at a cost, though, at about $25 an hour.

Yes, author fees can cover this cost, too, but your model for
transferring costs from libraries to on-campus editorial offices
or BMC-type publishers assumes a smooth transfer. Have you had
any experience in university administration? Nothing works that
smoothly in universities, I assure you. A one-to-one transfer of
library serials expenditures to faculty publishing fees is no
simple matter, nor is there any guarantee that the funds freed up
by cancelled subscriptions would migrate directly to author fees
anyway. There are plenty of other uses to which such funds might
be put. Libraries have multiple needs, and supporting faculty
publication may not immediately be at the top of their lists.
Even today, when costs might be seemingly passed on easily to
faculty who avail themselves of library e-reserve operations, it
doesn't happen because the administrative costs of such transfers
are perceived by some libraries as steeper than the costs of
paying for all e-reserve permission fees themselves.

Your model also assumes that subscription savings will balance
out author fees at any given university. That is a very big
assumption to make. Yes, the most active authors are probably at
the most research-intensive universities, but I doubt there is
any one-to-one correspondence. Some universities may find that
they have to spend much more in author fees than they save in
subscriptions, whereas others may find the reverse. Also, I
suspect that, to the extent this correspondence exists in
science, it exists much less so in the humanities and social
sciences. Over time we have found in university press publishing
that there has been a very significant dispersion of talent to
non-ARL campuses, such that we are publishing many more authors
from second- and third-tier universities and colleges than we
did, say, twenty or thirty years ago. The savings from
subscription cancellations on those campuses may well not come
close to covering author fees for their faculty, who will thereby
be disadvantaged in getting their writing published unless their
universities can tap some other source of revenue for that
purpose.

Now, you might say, OA journals will take these inequities into
account and charge lower fees to such authors, or waive them
altogether. But then you introduce a whole new level of
administrative cost into the system because there has to be some
way to verify "hardship" cases, especially if you are dealing
with authors in this country and not from some very poor
developing countries. If all this is done on the "honor" system,
you open the system to a significant level of corruption and
free-riding. Moreover, the costs still have to be paid, and this
scenario would mean that the wealthier universities would again
be supporting the cost of the whole system that benefits
everyone, as they do now for university presses.

You're also assuming that library fees would be readily
transferred outside the university to publishers like BMC or
society OA publishers through author fees. That would introduce
yet another level of complexity into the system, as I do not
share your assumption that universities would as readily allow
transfer of funds to such an entity as they would to another
university-based publisher. Procedures would no doubt be
instituted for evaluating such "external" publishers, similar to
procedures that already exist to vet bids from faculty who need
publication subventions for their monographs. I should also point
out that the subvention system for monograph publishing, despite
a clearly understood and documented need, is very fragmented and
scattershot. Many large and wealthy universities will not provide
such subventions at all, whereas some small colleges do. And at
some universities that have no centralized funds, some individual
departments will subsidize their faculty whereas others will not.
There is no rhyme or reason to the "system" as it exists today,
and I wouldn't expect it to be any different with respect to
supporting faculty who need to pay for journal articles to be
published. If you want "evidence" of what exists today in order
to predict the future, here it is, and it doesn't lend any
credence to your scenario!

So, my message boils down to this: assumptions matter, and they
need to be examined carefully, and planning done accordingly to
avoid the worst possibilities that could ensue. My observation of
efforts by universities to change the tenure-and-promotion system
over four decades in the face of obvious dysfunction doesn't make
me optimistic that universities can bring about even gradual
change very easily, let alone swift and comprehensive change!

--Sandy Thatcher
Penn State Press


>On Mon, 18 Dec 2006, Sandy Thatcher wrote:
>
>> I'm afraid I don't share your "serene confidence that there are
>> plenty of available OA hosts, big and small, ready to take on
>> the implementation of peer review for migrating established
>> journal titles and ed-boards, scaled down to OA publishing."
>
>That's fine. It's all speculation anyway, on both of our sides:
>speculation that self-archiving will or won't lead to
>cancellations, and if so, speculation about when, and how much;
>and speculation that, if much and sudden, current publishers will
>or won't jettison their titles rather than downsize; and
>speculation that, if jettisoned, there will or won't be OA
>publishers happy to take over the titles.
>
>What's sure, because already tested and demonstrated, is that
>self-archiving is highly beneficial to research and readily
>feasible, right now, through mandated self-archiving. Hence
>self-archiving can and should and will be mandated at this time.
>The data-free speculation and counterspeculation about its
>possible eventual effects on publishing has been going on for
>over 10 years now, so the data-based practical step is already
>well overdue.
>
>One point, though, is a point of logic rather than of
>hypothetical conjecture: In your reasoning about your
>hypothetical scenario that you consider the most probable one
>(catastrophic cancellations, abandonment of journals by their
>non-OA publishers, and failure of the abandoned journals to
>migrate to OA publishers because OA costs could not be met and
>there were not enough would-be OA publishers able or willing to
>meet the demand) you have inadvertently conflated two very
>different factors: One is the current cost to universities of
>hosting their journals' editors' offices, and the other is the OA
>publication cost to universities for their own research article
>output.
>
>These are two entirely different things. Journal hosting costs
>have nothing to do with OA, or OA publishing. Whatever journal
>hosting universities are doing today, in the non-OA era, for
>non-OA journals, while paying journal subscriptions for whatever
>journals they subscribe to, the only change in the OA era, if
>subscriptions were indeed all cancelled suddenly, as you
>hypothesize, would be (1) sudden, substantial windfall savings
>for universities, and (2) sudden, substantially lower publishing
>costs for journals (because, ex hypothesi, they no longer sell
>texts, paper or online, but only perform peer review).
>
>Those lower publishing costs would (again, ex hypothesi) be paid
>in the form of OA publishing charges, for each university's
>article output, out of each university's subscription savings.
>This has nothing at all to do with a university's journal hosting
>costs!
>
>(Perhaps what you were doing was conflating the university as a
>journal subscriber, the university as a research article-provider
>[with its associated OA publishing costs] and the university as a
>potential OA publisher itself! None of this, except possibly the
>last, has anything to do with the free resources many
>universities currently provide for hosting the journals -- OA or
>[mostly] non-OA -- of publishers other than themselves!)

[SNIP]
Received on Sun Dec 24 2006 - 20:04:04 GMT