A subscription journal charging submission fees (or acceptance fees
or both) seems like a bit of double- (or triple-) dipping , unless it
is honestly faithfully and fully translated into lower subscription
fees.
It is very likely that if and when universal Green Open Access (as a
result of universal mandates to self-archive the author's final
refereed drafts of all peer-reviewed journal articles immediately
upon acceptance for publication) causes subscriptions to become
unsustainable -- and hence causes journals to cut expenses, phase out
the print edition as well as access-provision and archiving, provide
only the service of peer review, and convert to the
publication-fee-based Gold OA model, paid for out of a portion of the
institutional windfall savings from the subscription cancellation --
then the Gold OA fee will be a conditional one, with an initial,
lower, submission fee, credited toward part of the acceptance fee, if
accepted.
But this is all premature and unnecessary now, when most journals are
still subscription-based, institutional funds to pay Gold fees are
still tied up in subscriptions, Green OA is far from universal, and
hence journals have not yet phased out the print edition,
access-provision and archiving. For all this to happen, universal
Green OA is needed first. Otherwise we are doing voodoo calculations.
All this will be familiar to readers of the AmSci Forum, where it has
been discussed many times before, in years past:
http://bit.ly/4gg7k7
Stevan Harnad
On 3-Jul-09, at 11:38 PM, Zac Rolnik wrote:
The use of submission fees for journals in the area of
business
and economics journal publishing is not unusual. As a
matter of
fact, I cannot think of any top ranked finance journals
that do
not charge a submission fee. Some of these fees can
range
between $250-500 and often they are charged for
resubmission if
the article is given a "revise and resubmit" decision.
And the
more prestigious the journal, the more price inelastic
this
submission fee becomes.
I am not sure if you could create a sustainable business
model on
submission fees, but I never understood why open access
journals
would not implement them. It seems wholly unfair to
charge only
the papers that make it "successfully" through the review
process
to acceptance, while the majority of papers that are
being
rejected (I am assuming this, but it may be a big
assumption) get
a free ride through the process. Maybe the submission
fee could
be applied to the acceptance fee once the article is
accepted --
this would be even fairer to the accepted authors.
I do not think submission fees encourage journals to
accept
papers or increases the potential for abuse as some may
have
claimed. In a certain way, fees charged on acceptance
only would
create a greater incentive for abuse and "acceptance"
decisions
for less worthy papers.
Finally, charging submission fees may make authors think
twice
before submitting a paper that may not be ready for prime
time.
As a publisher, I often see authors submit articles too
early
knowing that the chance of acceptance on the first
submission is
low and hoping the reviewer can provide some constructive
feedback. In talking to some journal editors, they feel
that
submission fees is a rationing mechanism -- you are less
likely
to submit a paper if there is a fee unless you feel it is
ready
for the review process.
Thanks,
Zac Rolnik
now publishers
-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l_at_lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of
Ivy Anderson
Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2009 11:08 PM
To: liblicense-l_at_lists.yale.edu
Subject: Submission Fees (was: RE: "Overlay Journals"
Over Again...)
The idea of submission fees is one that we at the
California
Digital Library have also repeatedly attempted to advance
in
recent years. Publishers frequently cite the steep rise
in
submissions as a factor affecting their cost structure.
It makes
no sense that this activity is entirely subsidized by
other
players in the publication chain. Some recent modeling
that we
have done at CDL - admittedly based on rough and
preliminary
figures from a variety of sources - suggests that even
very
modest submission fees, if implemented by publishes
across the
board, would come close to completely covering the
systemic cost
increases associated with the steady increase in
publishing
output overall (another factor to which annual price
rises for
journals are frequently attributed by some analysts). If
anyone
has studied this - i.e. the potential contribution that
submission fees would make to the cost of the scholarly
publishing system as a whole - with any rigor, I would be
very
interested to see those data.
It's easy to understand how the current incentive system
works
against this: what publisher will voluntarily
disadvantage itself
in attracting submissions by imposing such fees if its
competitors do not? Nonetheless, as library budgets
continue to
contract, the survival of scholarly publishing may just
depend on
finding ways to distribute costs across a wider base.
Submission
fees - even if modest ones - should be on the table.
Ivy Anderson
Director of Collections
California Digital Library
University of California, Office of the President
ivy.anderson_at_ucop.edu
http://cdlib.org
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l_at_lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l_at_lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of
Jan Velterop
Sent: Wednesday, July 01, 2009 9:54 PM
To: liblicense-l_at_lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: "Overlay Journals" Over Again...
The situation is this:
1) researchers HAVE to publish and HAVE to have their
publications peer-reviewed;
2) existing systems (OA-author-paid as well
subscriptions) ONLY
pay for PUBLISHED articles.
So the real problem is this: in neither case is the
organization
of peer review per se paid for. Those who argue that it
is,
place the entire burden of cost exclusively on the
PUBLISHED
papers.
What is needed is a system such as, say, your diving
test. You
pay for the test, whether you pass or not. Translated to
publications, a fee at submission is what we need, for
which
peer-review is organized. And this fee should be
non-refundable,
whether the article is accepted for publication or not.
Where is the courageous and/or visionary 'publisher'
(just using
a familiar term that should probably be changed into
'assessment
organization' or pithier equivalent) who starts a system
like
that?
Jan Velterop
Received on Sat Jul 04 2009 - 11:25:42 BST