Open access will levy uneven tolls on institutions, study contends
Scholars say 'gold' model will cost research elites dear while others hitch a ride. Andy Wright reports
Open access is seen by many as the publishing model that is most in keeping with the egalitarian ethos of academia.
But a paper by two economists suggests that "gold" open access, under which the author pays for publication and the article is made freely available, could be costly for research-intensive institutions, while benefiting those that do little research.
Richard Watt, associate professor of economics at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and Frank Muller-Langer, senior research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property and Competition Law in Germany, claim in their paper "Copyright and Open Access for Academic Works" that under the current system, many institutions pay for access to a similar set of journals, and so have similar costs.
If this was replaced with a gold open-access model, the costs incurred would be in proportion to the number of papers published, so the most research-active institutions would pay a lot, while the less productive would pay little.
Despite this disparity, all would have equal, free access to the papers.
Analysing the costs for a set of economic journals, the authors estimate that the break-even point at which costs under both models are equal would be a fee of $72 (£44) per paper for Harvard University, but $246 for the London School of Economics and $2,523 for the University of South Carolina.
So, for example, an average fee of $1,250 per paper would be very expensive for Harvard and the LSE compared with the current system, but much cheaper for South Carolina.
The authors, who presented their findings at a conference in Germany last week, illustrate the point with a graph showing the break-even publication fees for 186 universities whose academics published at least six articles between 1991 and 2005 (a subset is reproduced above).
"The fact that active research institutions would cross-subsidise less-productive institutions under an author-pays model suggests the need to consider alternative pricing schemes for open-access publishing besides publication fees," the paper says.
The authors suggest several solutions, such as the option of a fixed fee so institutions could "insure" themselves against the risk of paying over the odds in publication fees.
A spokeswoman for the Million+ group of new universities in the UK argued against varying publication fees according to the number of papers published.
She added that since most research-intensive universities benefit from "huge" research grant income, publication costs could be factored in to funding bids, as is done with conference costs.
The European Commission has said that it sees open access to research findings as a key factor in supporting economic growth.
Other proponents argue for open access on the grounds that it reduces corporate profits made from the unpaid labour of academics, and promotes freedom of information.
Most higher education institutions and research institutes now have electronic repositories of their academics' papers (sometimes called "green" open access) freely available online.
However, the repositories are generally viewed not as a replacement for the current model but as a concession by publishers keen to maintain the status quo.
Partial solution: Open-access levels near 10 per cent
There are currently about 7,000 open-access journals, and the number is growing by several hundred a year, according to the Directory of Open Access Journals.
However, scholarly articles available via open access presently account for less than 10 per cent of the 1.5 million published each year, according to the Publishers Association in the UK.
Publication fees charged to authors by major open-access journals range from $1,250 to $3,000 (£763 to £1,832) per article, although lower fees apply to some journals with lower circulation.
The rising discontent with the status quo in the UK was underscored by the recent news that Research Libraries UK has told Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell that it will not renew current "big deals", which give its members access to the publishers' entire portfolios, unless the member institutions receive price reductions.
Graham Taylor, director of educational, academic and professional publishing at the Publishers Association, told Times Higher Education last month that all publishers "aspire to universal access" but that it would take time to implement a "sustainable, scalable, funded solution" to achieve it.
The cost of gold: different prices for parity
Readers' comments (4)
01 Sep 2011 2:40pm
The paper referred to by Andy Wright is: Frank Müller-Langer and Richard Watt. "Copyright and Open Access for Academic Works", Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues 2010 Jun; 7(1): 45-65. Openly accessible via: http://works.bepress.com/frank_mueller_langer/4 Abstract: In a recent paper, Prof. Steven Shavell (see Shavell, 2009) has argued strongly in favor of eliminating copyright from academic works. Based upon solid economic arguments, Shavell analyses the pros and cons of removal of copyright and in its place to have a pure open access system, in which authors (or more likely their employers) would provide the funds that keep journals in business. In this paper we explore some of the arguments in Shavell’s paper, above all the way in which the distribution of the sources of journal revenue would be altered, and the feasible effects upon the quality of journal content. We propose a slight modification to a pure open access system which may provide for the best of both the copyright and open access worlds. Their empirical analysis was limited to a set of eight top-tier journals and one academic discipline (economics).
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01 Sep 2011 3:44pm
Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus, 28 (1). pp. 55-59. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18514/ ABSTRACT: Among the many important implications of Houghton et al’s (2009) timely and illuminating JISC analysis of the costs and benefits of providing free online access (“Open Access,” OA) to peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journal articles one stands out as particularly compelling: It would yield a forty-fold benefit/cost ratio if the world’s peer-reviewed research were all self-archived by its authors so as to make it OA. There are many assumptions and estimates underlying Houghton et al’s modelling and analyses, but they are for the most part very reasonable and even conservative. This makes their best practical implication particularly striking: The 40-fold benefit/cost ratio of providing Green OA is an order of magnitude greater than all the other potential combinations of alternatives to the status quo analyzed and compared by Houghton et al. This outcome is all the more significant in light of the fact that self-archiving already rests entirely in the hands of the research community (researchers, their institutions and their funders), whereas OA publishing depends on the publishing community. Perhaps most remarkable is the fact that this outcome emerged from studies that approached the problem primarily from the standpoint of the economics of publication rather than the economics of research. Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos, 21 (3-4). pp. 86-93. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21818/ ABSTRACT: Universal Open Access (OA) is fully within the reach of the global research community: Research institutions and funders need merely mandate (green) OA self-archiving of the final, refereed drafts of all journal articles immediately upon acceptance for publication. The money to pay for gold OA publishing will only become available if universal green OA eventually makes subscriptions unsustainable. Paying for gold OA pre-emptively today, without first having mandated green OA not only squanders scarce money, but it delays the attainment of universal OA. Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine, 16 (7/8). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july10/harnad/07harnad.html ABSTRACT: 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 high; 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 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.
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01 Sep 2011 4:00pm
PRE-EMPTIVE GOLD (OA) RUSH OVERLOOKS COST-CUTTING POWER OF FIRST MANDATING GREEN OA SELF-ARCHIVING See references cited above as well as below. Universal Green OA must be mandated before converting to Gold OA publishing. Then the cost of post-Green Gold OA will be far lower. Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age, pp. 99-105, L'Harmattan. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15753/ ABSTRACT: What the research community needs, urgently, is free online access (Open Access, OA) to its own peer-reviewed research output. Researchers can provide that in two ways: by publishing their articles in OA journals (Gold OA) or by continuing to publish in non-OA journals and self-archiving their final peer-reviewed drafts in their own OA Institutional Repositories (Green OA). OA self-archiving, once it is mandated by research institutions and funders, can reliably generate 100% Green OA. Gold OA requires journals to convert to OA publishing (which is not in the hands of the research community) and it also requires the funds to cover the Gold OA publication costs. With 100% Green OA, the research community's access and impact problems are already solved. If and when 100% Green OA should cause significant cancellation pressure (no one knows whether or when that will happen, because OA Green grows anarchically, article by article, not journal by journal) then the cancellation pressure will cause cost-cutting, downsizing and eventually a leveraged transition to OA (Gold) publishing on the part of journals. As subscription revenues shrink, institutional windfall savings from cancellations grow. If and when journal subscriptions become unsustainable, per-article publishing costs will be low enough, and institutional savings will be high enough to cover them, because publishing will have downsized to just peer-review service provision alone, offloading text-generation onto authors and access-provision and archiving onto the global network of OA Institutional Repositories. Green OA will have leveraged a transition to Gold OA.
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01 Sep 2011 11:16pm
This scenario assumes that the current costs in the system are necessary ones to be carried forward into the future. As Monbiot pointed out in The Guardian, what we have at present is a situation of an inelastic market with obscene profits by some of the commercial publishers, e.g. Elsevier at 36% (certainly obscene when universities in the UK are facing severe cuts and tripling tuition). By my calculations, the world's scholarly journals publishing system could be funded by author-pays at the reasonable rate of about $1,400 per article (many OA publishers do charge about this amount, and many charge less). References: Monbiot, G. (2011, August 29, 2011). Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist. The Guardian, pp. n.p. Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist Morrison, Heather (2011). Elsevier 2009 $2 billion profits could fund worldwide OA at $1,383 per article. The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2010_04_01_archive.html
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