So it seems double-dipping unless it's honest? Perhaps it's honest
unless it's clearly double-dipping.
A very wide-spread misconception, on this list and elsewhere, is that
subscriptions somehow are priced linearly. That if 10% of the papers
are OA, and paid for on behalf or by the author, the subscription
price should be reduced by 10% as well. To think that is not to
understand the fundamental nature of subscriptions. Subscriptions are
never ever going to be priced linearly with the amount of papers
published. Simply because they can't. In any event not as long as the
number of subscriptions is not a guaranteed and immutable element in
the equation.
Another characteristic of subscriptions is that, in science in any
case (due to the monopoloid nature of journals and the uniqueness of
articles), they are utterly inelastic in economic terms. Or rather,
somewhat elastic in one direction, but inelastic in the opposite one.
When prices go up, there is a chance of cancellation. When prices go
down, there is essentially no chance of selling more subscriptions.
These characteristics 'conspire' to make a sensible publishing
strategy one where the highest possible subscription price is
charged, and the highest level of selectivity of articles to publish,
in order to justify that high price. The defense cannot be lower
prices, as that doesn't result in more subscriptions. Stricter
selection of papers (sometimes called 'quality') is a much better bet
for a publisher.
Neither of these effects is there in an author-paid publishing
system. But if the charges only apply to published (i.e. accepted)
papers, the remaining problem is the one of loading the economics
solely on those published articles, introducing an incentive to have
a lenient acceptance policy. A few OA journals have been able to
square that circle and avoid low acceptance thresholds by
cross-subsidies or substantial grants. Once a journal's reputation is
built, sustaining it with a high degree of selectivity is easier.
Vide PLoS.
For most unsubsidized OA journals, however, the ones that need to
keep up their own trousers, a submission fee -- not a publication fee
-- would be the most rational. That is not to say, of course, that
the most rational system is the one that eventually prevails. We've
had this discussion for a decade now, and it may still be a while.
But there is a precedent. To say it is impossible for a publisher to
go that route, because others don't do it, belies the fact that the
very same thing happened with OA. Charging authors was considered
impossible as long as other publishers didn't. And yet it happened.
And it's growing. And although the pace is slow, it's steady.
For any publisher who needs to hold up his own trousers, a belts and
braces approach is sensible. That doesn't imply double dipping.
Innocent until proven guilty. That applies to publishers as well.
Jan Velterop
On 4 Jul 2009, at 11:21, Stevan Harnad wrote:
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 Sun Jul 05 2009 - 18:36:33 BST