Open access will bankrupt us, publishers’ report claims
Publishers of humanities and social science journals could go bankrupt if all academic papers became freely available after six months, a report commissioned by publishers has warned.
The report, The Potential Effect of Making Journal Articles Freely Available in Repositories after a Six-Month Embargo, found that 65 per cent of the 210 libraries that responded to a survey would cancel at least some arts, humanities and social science (AHSS) journals if a universal open-access mandate were introduced with an embargo period of six months. Nearly a quarter of libraries would cancel their humanities and social science subscriptions entirely.
Six months is the standard embargo period suggested by advocates of “green” open access, after which authors would be expected to submit their papers to institutional or subject repositories. Research Councils UK’s draft new open-access policy also proposes that period, although it will accept a 12-month embargo for humanities and social science papers as a “transitionary arrangement”.
Only 10 per cent of libraries would cancel all their subscriptions to scientific journals if a universal six-month open access embargo were introduced, while 56 per cent would cancel no subscriptions.
UK libraries would be less likely than the global average to cancel subscriptions, with the libraries of Russell Group universities the least likely of all, according to the report, commissioned by the Publishers Association and the Association of Learned, Professional and Society Publishers.
The report concludes that the impact of a universal six-month open-access mandate on publishers’ revenues would be “considerable”.
“Libraries would be impacted by the collapse or scaling down of academic publishing houses…Most publishers would be obliged to review their portfolios; and a substantial body of journals, especially in AHSS subjects, would cease or be financially imperilled,” it says.
By contrast, the landmark Publishing and the Ecology of European Research (PEER) project announced last week it had found no evidence that the self-archiving of academic papers threatened journal viability.
The project, co-funded by the European Commission and overseen by a group of publishers, librarians and funders, found that self-archiving actually increased the number of times that papers, particularly those in the life sciences, were downloaded from publishers’ websites – although the reasons were unclear.
The PEER findings, announced at an end-of-project conference in Brussels on May 29, also indicated that the vast majority of academics did not self-archive their work even when asked to do so.
Meanwhile, a petition launched last month asking the Obama administration to impose an open-access mandate for all publicly funded research in the US has garnered nearly 23,000 signatures to date. If 25,000 people sign it by 19 June, the White House will be obliged to give an official response.
The full publishers' report is available here.
paul.jump@tsleducation.com
Readers' comments (6)
01 Jun 2012 4:06pm
The report is at http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/ALPSPPApotentialresultsofsixmonthembargofv.pdf
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01 Jun 2012 4:42pm
The full URL is shortened at http://bit.ly/M7wxNL (PDF).
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01 Jun 2012 8:38pm
Surprising as it is that a report commissioned by publishers would find trouble if any changes were made to the current system enabling their 30% margins, a separate more comprehensive study found no threat: http://www.peerproject.eu/reports/ It's clear that access is a globally important issue, so I encourage everyone to sign the petition at http://wh.gov/6TH to show your support for open access policies.
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02 Jun 2012 3:42am
SIZING UP DOWNSIZING Research is not publicly funded, conducted and published in order to subsidize the revenue streams of the research publishing industry. Research publishing is a service-provider for research, researchers, their institutions and the funders for whose benefit the research is being done: the tax-paying public. And the "culprit" in the downsizing of research publishing -- who is at the same time the benefactor of which research productivity and progress are the beneficiary -- is the online medium and the economies and efficiencies it has made possible. In other words, Bell Labs, DARPA, Google and Tim Berners-Lee Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Open Letter to Research Councils UK: Rebuttal of ALPSP Critique. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11159/
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02 Jun 2012 11:17am
By the way, I would like to correct an error in David Gerard's comment above: "I do understand it takes money and effort to publish a journal, but it sure doesn't take 30% profits". In fact none of the Big Four academic publishers makes such a feeble profit margin as 32%. The figures vary between 32.4% (for Informa) and 42% (for Wiley). See http://svpow.com/2012/01/13/the-obscene-profits-of-commercial-scholarly-publishers/ Of course, it's possible that when open-access mandates are enacted, scholarly publishing profits might fall to only 30%. But that would still leave them comfortably better off the Apple's 24% profit-margin in their record year of 2011.
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04 Jun 2012 2:01am
1:57 GMT: US GREEN OA PETITION ONLY 37 SHY OF 25,000 http://t.co/JAuVHYNU
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