Open access controversies

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Open access controversies

Quite apart from Open access myths, there are legitimate controversies surrounding open access. This article notes a few of them, with references as appropriate. The dividing line between controversies and Open access issues is fuzzy at best; you should read both articles.

Two abbreviations show up a lot here: OA for open access and TA for toll access, that is, traditional subscription journals and pay-per-article access.

Contents

How much value do publishers add to scholarly articles?

Peer review, editing and copy editing, markup, distribution: We know about those functions--and we know that most of them are already either free (most peer review, most editing) or can be made extremely inexpensive (markup, electronic distribution, flow control for peer review).

What else do publishers bring to the table? The simplest answer is "It depends"--that different publishers in different fields add different amounts and kinds of value.

T. Scott Plutchak's "The invisible parts of publishing" (T. Scott, June 12, 2008) asserts what may or may not be a straw man--and if it isn't, people who believe this need to pay attention:

We often have a tendency to glibly think (in the world of scholarly publishing, at least) that nothing of significance happens between the completion of peer review and the appearance of the published version (whether that be in print or digital form).

Plutchak notes some of the other value-adds from at least some publishers:

At the New England Journal of Medicine (along with most other publishers), there is an army of copy-editors and illustrators and fact-checkers who come into play after the article has been accepted, all of whose skills are needed to put that article into final form and make sure that the authors' intent is conveyed in the very best way possible. You can't do that kind of work with volunteers.
And then there's the matter of getting somebody's attention. Take any article from the latest issue of NEJM, Nature, or JAMA. Do you really think that if you posted it on a website and invited comments (even in some mediated way so that it approximated serious peer review), and used those comments to modify and further develop the piece, it would get anywhere near the attention that it would get from having been published in one of the high-profile journals? We have a tendency to ignore the critical importance of brand in helping people make their way through the morass of content that is available...

What does digital scholarly article publishing actually cost?

Excerpted from Walt Crawford's "Library Access to Scholarship" article in Cites & Insights 8:8, August 2008.

What's all this actually cost? “All this” meaning the actual costs of publishing papers—which may not be in the same league as costs claimed by commercial publishers. As Richard Poynder notes, some high-profile gold OA journals have substantially increased their article-processing charges: Biomed Central has gone from $525 in 2001 to $1,700-$1,900; PLoS went from $1,500 to $2,100-$2.750. [Indented material taken from Poynder's article.]

One claim from the UK seems improbable on its face—that somehow moving from subscription-based publishing to OA publishing would increase the total cost of the system, which can only be true if existing profits and corporate overhead not only stay in the system but actually increase.

Poynder does provide one apparently-real number, from the American Physical Society. Joe Serene, APS’ treasurer/publisher, says it costs $1,500 to publish the electronic version of a paper, split roughly equally in five parts:

  • Editorial costs (including peer review)
  • Electronic composition and production
  • Journal information systems, "which support everything from manuscript receipt through electronic posting, mirroring, and archiving of the published papers"
  • Central publication management
  • Essential overhead expenses

One could poke at those figures, to be sure—but it would be much more worthwhile to have some other sets of numbers from other publishers (including university publishers and smaller societies).

So the question remains: Can OA reduce the costs associated with scholarly communication? If so, how, and when? If not, what are the implications of this for the "scholarly communication crisis?" These are important questions. But without accurate numbers to crunch we really cannot answer them adequately. Wouldn't it be great therefore if other publishers decided to be as "open" as APS in discussing their costs?
One thing is for sure: If OA ends up simply shifting the cost of scholarly communication from journal subscriptions to APCs without any reduction in overall expenditure, and inflation continues unabated, many OA advocates will be sorely disappointed. And if that were to happen, then we can surely expect to see calls for a more radical reengineering of the scholarly communication system.

Poynder gets that last paragraph right. In the comments, Julian Fisher says the true costs of e-publishing are “frighteningly low”—he says “two orders of magnitude less than many publishers are charging.” Fisher’s article making that case appears in the Spring 2008 Journal of Electronic Publishing. The article comes up with estimates of $64 to $76 per article—but you need to read the article carefully and consider the assumptions.

Research issues that are likely to be controversial

A few selections from the list of Research questions in the Open Access Directory. More of these questions (but still a fraction of the whole) appear in Open access issues.
  • Can conventional subscription-based journals survive if they provide OA after an embargo period? If so, what is the shortest embargo period compatible with their survival? This will probably differ by field.
  • If the rise of OA archiving starts to harm TA [toll access/subscription] journals, will the journals tend to change their archiving policies (retreating from green), convert to gold OA, fold up, something else? Can we estimate how many journals would take each of these options? Can we break down the estimates by field and country? Can we identify the key variables in their decisions? Can we do better than merely asking editors and publishers for predictions or hypothetical decisions?
  • How can we distinguish cancellations caused by the rise of OA from cancellations due to other causes?
  • How much does good journal management software reduce the cost of facilitating peer review and running a journal?
  • There is a very wide range of claims about the cost of publishing journals (per page or per article) and a very wide range of claims about the prices charged for journals (per page or per article). What are the claims (who said what, when, and with respect to what journal or kind of journal)? Can we explain the differences among them and produce estimates (for certain kinds of journal) that all stakeholders could accept?

Could a subscription journal "flip" to open access?

The idea came from Mark Rowse (at the time, CEO of Ingenta) in an interview in Information Today:

Imagine a publisher that has already licensed content to all the library consortia in the U.S. The publisher could, at a stroke, say that the license will now confer rights for the academics in those institutions to submit content rather than to access content. The publisher would have successfully flipped its business model completely, to being an open access business. So I think it's possible to see a transition from where we are now to a completely open access world without fundamentally destroying the existing scholarly publishing business.

Peter Suber expands on this idea--calling it "his idea in my words"--in the essay "Flipping a journal to open access" (SOAN 114, October 2, 2007). He considers more realistic assumptions and how they might play out.

Would this work? That is, would enough subscribing institutions maintain their subscriptions (now reinterpreted as blanket payment for all authors from those institutions) and enough other authors pay author-side fees to keep the publisher whole? Suber offers a detailed examination and some reasons why this might work...at least for many journals.

How can no-fee open-access journals survive and prosper?

Brief excerpts from Peter Suber's essay "No-fee open-access journals" in SPARC Open Access Newsletter 103, November 2, 2006.

A year ago last month [that is, in October 2005], Cara Kaufman and Alma Wills found that only 47% of surveyed OA journals charged author-side fees (see pp. 1, 44, and Table 30).

To me, this was a little like the first human sighting of the Antarctic land mass in 1820: proof that a huge terra incognita existed just over the horizon, awaiting exploration.

Only a minority of existing OA journals actually used the most-studied and most-discussed business model for OA journals--charging author-side fees...

Some no-fee OA journals have direct or indirect subsidies from institutions like universities, laboratories, research centers, libraries, hospitals, museums, learned societies, foundations or government agencies. Some have revenue from a separate line of non-OA publications. Some have revenue from advertising, auxiliary services, membership dues, endowments, reprints or a print or premium edition. Some rely, more than other journals, on volunteerism. Some undoubtedly use a combination of these means. But we don't know how many other sources of revenue might be missing from this short list. We don't know how many no-fee journals use which method, and we don't know how the methods compare with one another for financial sustainability.

We have a lot to learn from the no-fee journals. Whatever their business models, and whatever their adequacy, they have found ways to generate revenue or subsidies that other journals (both OA and non-OA) could use or try. Exposing their models to scholarly attention and community-wide discussion might even uncover ways to refine and enhance them...

For about five years, the discussion of OA journals has been harmed by a family of false assumptions: that all OA journals are fee-based; that all good OA journals must be fee-based; that author-side fees are "author fees" to be paid by authors out of pocket. Learning about no-fee OA journals will correct at least the first two of these...

This is only an introduction. The essay considers ways that alternative funding models could support open access in general, and lists a sampling of fairly high-profile no-fee journals.

Are OA journals inferior to TA journals?

Brief excerpts from Peter Suber's essay "Open access and quality" in SPARC Open Access Newsletter 102, October 2, 2006.
  • The main factors that affect the quality of journal literature are price- and medium-independent: the quality of authors, the quality of editors, and the quality of referees. e know that these key players can be just as good at OA journals as at TA journals because they can be the very same people...
  • We have to acknowledge from the start that there are strong and weak OA journals, just as there are strong and weak TA journals. Hence, any analysis focusing on weak OA journals and strong TA journals (as if to show the superiority of TA journals) would be as arbitrary as one focusing on weak TA journals and strong OA journals (as if to show the superiority of OA journals). Without some additional argument showing that the journals on which they focus are typical of their breeds, they would be guilty of cherry-picking and generalizing from an unrepresentative sample.
  • TA publishers have often charged that OA journals compromise on peer review. The allegation is that if a journal accepts a fee for every paper it publishes, then it has an incentive to lower its standards in order to accept more papers. It sounds plausible but it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Editor's note: also see "Will open access undermine peer review"?. September 2007. I categorize this controversy as a myth.
  • Is peer review at OA journals less rigorous than at TA journals? In October 2005 the Kaufman-Wills report (The Facts About Open Access) concluded that it was, based on a finding that TA journals used external reviewers, or reviewers outside the journal's editorial staff, more often than OA journals. However, a subsequent addendum retracted most of that conclusion as based on an erroneous interpretation of peer review practices at BioMed Central.
  • On the other side, there are reasons to think that TA journals face stronger incentives to lower standards than OA journals.
    • First, the Kaufman-Wills report showed that more subscription journals charge author-side fees than OA journals. Author-side fees needn't cause a lowering of standards at either kind of journal. But insofar as they have that tendency, TA journals are afflicted more often than OA journals. (Not only do a greater number of TA journals charge author-side fees, but a greater percentage of them do so as well. Of course, at a TA journal, author-side fees are laid on top of reader-side subscription fees.)
    • Second, TA journals often justify price increases by pointing to the growing volume of published articles. This is the incentive that critics saw in fee-based OA journals: the incentive to increase quantity in order to increase revenue. As with OA journals, this needn't result in a decrease in quality; but insofar as it has that tendency, the problem exists at both kinds of journals...
    • Third, subscription fees at TA journals include substantial profits or surpluses, often more than 35%. An EPS report from July 2006 showed that the *average* profit margin at STM publishers in 2005 was 25%... At fee-based OA journals, the incentive to accept more papers to generate revenue is small, because the fees barely cover their costs. At TA journals, the incentive to accept more papers to justify price increases is much larger, because subscriptions often contain significant profits or surpluses...
    • Fourth, if TA journals have a shortage of excellent submissions, they cannot publish a short issue without shortchanging subscribers. Hence, to fill an issue they must lower their standards. Because OA journals don't have subscribers, they are free to publish short issues limited to their first-rate submissions...

[Suber's essay then quotes a director and an editor, both saying that conversion to OA or near-OA has resulted in more manuscript submissions and no negative consequences.]

  • Journal prices don't correlate with impact or quality. In fact, Theodore and Carl Bergstrom have shown that journal prices are either unrelated to quality or inversely related to it. ..
  • By hugely enlarging the audience, OA makes authors more careful. If you like, consider this another effect of author pride.
  • Here's a variation on the same theme: OA keeps authors honest...
  • Here's another variation on the theme: OA deters plagiarism...
  • Now and then someone will suggest that OA is fine for second-rate work but not for first-rate work. This claim is more sniffed than elaborated, so it's hard to tell what the argument is.

If it's saying that high-quality, high-prestige journals will never or rarely be OA, or vice versa, then it's a prediction, not a datum. Moreover, it seems to be a false prediction. There are already high-quality, high-prestige OA journals, for example, the Beilstein Journal of Chemistry, Nucleic Acids Research and PLoS Biology... here are more than this list of three, of course. But one reason there aren't already more than there are is that most OA journals are new. Even when new journals are excellent from birth, it takes time for their prestige to catch up with their quality. ..

Will open access cost universities more, rather than saving money?

This controversy was particularly lively in 2004-2006. A few slightly-modified excerpts from SPARC Open Access Newsletter 98, June 2, 2006, set forth the claims that a total conversion to gold OA (that is, all journals converting to free access) would cost some universities more than their current subscription costs--and some reasons to doubt those claims.

[In June 2005], two new calculations (by Walters and Dominguez) appeared purporting to show that high-output research universities would pay more in author-side fees for OA journals than they pay now in subscriptions for non-OA journals... Before these two studies, Phil Davis and his colleagues did a similar calculation for Cornell University, August 2004. When the Walters study came out, Phil Davis started a discussion thread on it at LibLicense, April 24, 2006.

All three studies calculate the difference between present university costs for subscriptions and the costs for author-side fees in a hypothetical world in which all journals converted to OA. In doing the calculation, all three assume that 100% of OA journals charge author-side fees. That is, none takes into account the Kaufman-Wills finding that only a minority of OA journals do so. (The Davis study came out in August 2004 and could not have taken this into account.)

Moreover, all three assume that 100% of the fees would be paid by universities, none by funding agencies. Yet today, I don't know of a single university that has started to pay these fees, but I know more than a dozen funding agencies willing to do so (some overtly, some quietly). The assumption in the calculation not only reverses the current reality, and has universities pay more fees than funding agencies, it utterly zeroes out the contribution from funding agencies.

It's not surprising that under these unrealistic assumptions, high-output research universities would pay more in author-side fees than in subscriptions. But there are two ways to regard that conclusion. We can take it as a glimpse of our likely future under OA journals, or we can take it merely as the unfolding of the consequences of certain assumptions, likely or not...

The authors of these studies don't say that their assumptions are true so much as convenient. But OA opponents have seized upon their calculations as if they depicted our likely future under OA journals. This is a mistake...

It's not regrettable that the authors undertook to the show the consequences of an unrealistic what-if scenario. What's regrettable is the way the conclusion is easily misinterpreted--and widely taken--as a picture of our future. It's equally regrettable that we don't yet have an equally careful picture of the consequences of more realistic what-if scenarios.

Let's continue to explore the hypothetical world in which all journals convert to OA. But instead of the very unlikely scenario in which 100% of OA journals charge fees, let's explore the scenario in which about half do and half don't--the scenario closest to a clean extrapolation from present patterns. Since present patterns may not hold, let's also explore the scenarios in which 0%, 10%, 20% ... 100% of OA journals charge fees. Let's use a wider range of assumptions, including some that are true today, and debate later about which are more likely or realistic for our future.

Let's also explore the scenario in which some considerable percentage of fees is paid by funding agencies. I've never seen a good estimate of what that percentage is today, so we can't extrapolate from the present. To be fair to all possibilities, then, let's explore the scenarios in which 0%, 10%, 20% ... 100% of author-side fees are paid by funders. Again, let's use a range of assumptions and debate later about which are more likely.

The results could be reported in a matrix showing when universities would pay more than they do now and when they wouldn't, and (for example) whether they'd pay more if 60% of OA journals charged fees and 30% of those fees were paid by funders.

Seeing the range of assumptions and their outcomes will not only help us discuss intelligently which scenarios are most likely, but also which are most desirable...

It's somewhere between absurd and dishonest to assume that the one scenario already studied is the most likely, especially when it's so far from the present reality and when nobody is arguing that it's a likely evolution from the present reality. Let's stop citing the result as a picture of our future and start citing it as a picture of convenient but implausible assumptions that ought be refined and replaced by more accurate assumptions in follow-on calculations...

Are there or could there be OA scams?

What would an OA scam be?

Simple: A new author-fee OA publisher, promising many (dozens, hundreds) of new gold OA journals and inviting submissions--but not performing acceptable peer review on those papers before publishing them.

Less simple: A new OA agency or society (or publisher) inviting memberships or other underwriting for a promised program of OA publishing and failing to provide appropriate (and appropriately vetted) results to match the money received.

Naturally, the two could be combined--and there could be other examples.

Are there such scams at present? Possibly, or maybe some new OA entrants simply lack transparency. You might consider these as starting points--not necessarily pointing to scams but to troublesome practices.

But then, what about subscription-journal publishers who announce new journals (particularly ones filling ever-narrower niches), collect subscription fees from libraries and others, then take a very long time to actually publish the journals, collecting interest on the advance subscriptions all the while--or, when they do publish journals, combining issues in a way that suggests a very thin flow of publishable manuscripts? Are these TA scams?

Controversies not yet populated with discussion

What does it actually take to make an institutional repository effective and sustainable?

For now, this is left as an open question, in the secure knowledge that different OA advocates have very different answers.

Is greeen OA all we need?

That is, if all authors of scholarly articles were able to, and did, deposit the articles in OAI-compliant digital repositories (whether institutional or otherwise), would that be good enough?

Would 100% green OA result in serials cancellations, and to what extent?

Two extremes, just to set the stage:

  • Is it even plausible that Science or Nature would be in serious difficulty if every one of their refereed scholarly articles was available in an institutional repository?
  • Is it likely that a wildly overpriced (say, $10,000+ per year) second-tier niche publication (say in library management) with a few dozen articles each year would survive as a subscription journal if all its content was available via repositories or other means?

I'll assert (Walt Crawford, in this case) that the answer to both questions is probably "No"--which leaves that vast space in the middle to discuss.

Does advocacy for gold OA distract from green OA?

Open for discussion

Do the tone and content of some OA advocacy distract from improving access to scholarship?

T. Scott Plutchak thinks they do--to the extent that he's said he's disgusted with the open access movement.

Walt Crawford thinks they do, in a different way: That repeated, strident calls to focus all attention on one aspect of OA and personal attacks on those who feel differently have the net result of alienating people who would otherwise support forward movement.

Dorothea Salo thinks so--at least if robust, long-lived OAI repositories are part of the equation.

Peter Suber has commented on "supposed gold OA advocate(s) who oppose any form of OA that doesn't keep big publishers whole."

Related articles

Your turn: Talk about it

As always, you're welcome to add material directly here or on the talk page (subject to editing), or to email it--noting which PLN article you think it should go in--to me (waltcrawford@gmail.com or crawford@palinet.org), if you'd rather not do the wiki markup and you'd like an early editing pass.

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