Sally
Sally Morris
South House, The
Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK BN13 3UU
Tel: +44 (0)1903
871286
Publisher
Wheeling and Dealing: Open Access Via National and
Global McNopoly?
Excerpted from more extensive comments on the
Poynder/Velterop Interview
here
and
here.
Jan Velterop:
“a shift to an author-side payment for the service
of arranging peer review and publication is a
logical one”
The service of arranging peer review I understand.
But what’s the rest? What’s “Arranging publication”?
Once a paper has been peer-reviewed, revised and
accepted, what’s left for publishers to do (for a fee)
that authors can’t do for free (by depositing the
peer-reviewed, revised, accepted paper in their
institutional repository)?
And how to get there, from here -- and
at a fair price for just peer review alone? Publishers
won’t unbundle, downsize and renounce revenue until
there’s no more market for the extras and their costs –
and Green OA is what will put paid to that market.
Pre-emptive Gold payment, while subscriptions are still
being paid, will not – and especially not hybrid Gold.
JV:
“‘Hybrid OA’ doesn’t exist. It is just “gold” OA. OA
in a hybrid journal is the same as OA in a fully OA
journal for any given article.”
Gold OA is indeed Gold OA whether the journal is hybrid
or pure (and whether the Gold is Gratis or CC-BY)
But “hybrid” does not refer to a kind of OA, it refers
to a kind of journal: the kind that charges both
subscriptions and (optionally) Gold OA fees.
That kind of journal certainly exists; and they
certainly can and do double-dip. And that’s certainly an
expensive way to get (Gratis) Gold OA.
And the Finch/RCUK policy will certainly encourage many
if not all journals to go hybrid Gold, and publishers,
to maximize their chances of making an extra 6% revenue
from the UK, will in turn jack up their Green embargoes
past RCUK’s permissible limits.
JV:
“The “double-dipping” argument is a red herring.
There's… a notion that subscription prices should be
proportional to the number of articles in a journal.
How would that work? There are journals with 100
subscribers… and… with thousands of subscribers
[and] & 25 articles a year & 25 or more
articles a week.”
Double-dipping is not about the number articles or
subscribers a journal has, but about charging
subscriptions and, in addition, charging, per article,
for Gold OA. That has nothing to do with number of
articles, journals or subscribers: It’s simply
double-charging.
JV:
“The cost, and… revenue, of an individual article
can only usefully… be expressed as an average, and
then probably company-wide. What would otherwise be
the situation for a loss-making hybrid journal that
receives in one year 10% of its articles as gold,
and the next year only 2%? Impossible to work out. A
subscription system is inherently lacking in
transparency”
Nothing of the sort, and extremely simple, for a
publisher who really does not want to double-dip, but to
give all excess back as a rebate:
Count the total number of articles, N, and the total
subscription revenue, S.
From that you get the revenue per article: S/N.
Hybrid Gold OA income is than added to that total
revenue (say, at a fee of S/N per article).
That means that for k Gold OA articles, total hybrid
journal revenue is S + kS/N.
And if the journal really wants to reduce subscriptions
proportionately, at the end of the year, it simply sends
a rebate to each subscribing institution:
Suppose there are U subscribing institutions. Each one
gets a year-end rebate of kS/UN (regardless of the
yearly value of k, S, U or N).
(Alternatively, if the journal wants to give back all of
the rebate only to the institutions that actually paid
for the extra Gold, don’t charge subscribing
institutions for Gold OA at all: But that approach shows
most clearly why and how this pre-emptive morphing
scheme for a transition from subscriptions to hybrid
Gold to pure Gold is unscaleable and unsustainable,
hence incoherent. It is an Escher impossible figure,
either way, because collective
subscriptions/“memberships” – including McNopolies --
only make sense for co-bundled incoming content; for
individual pieces of outgoing content the peer-review
service costs must be paid by the individual piece.
There are at least 20,000 research-active institutions
on the planet and at least 25,000 peer-reviewed
journals, publishing several million individual articles
per year. No basis – or need --for a pre-emptive
cartel/consortium McNopoly.)
JV:
“If journals should reduce their subscription price
when they get a percentage of papers paid for as
gold, what should happen if they lose the same
percentage (for completely different reasons) of
subscriptions?”
Less Gold – the value of the year-end institutional
rebate -- kS/UN – is less that year.
JV:
“What if a journal which decided to go hybrid has
published a steady amount of 50 articles a year for
ages and all of a sudden attracts an extra 10 gold
OA articles? By how much should it reduce its
subscription price?”
By exactly10S/50U per subscribing institution U.
JV:
“If an article is worth £2,000 to have published
with OA in a full-OA journal, why is it not worth
the same £2,000 if published in a hybrid journal?”
Simple answer: it’s not worth the price either way. Both
prices are grotesquely inflated. No-fault peer review
should cost about $100-200 per round…
Stevan Harnad
Excerpted from more extensive comments on the
Poynder/Velterop Interview here
and here.
On 2012-10-02, at 5:00 AM, Richard Poynder wrote:
Love
it or loathe it, the recently announced Open
Access policy from Research Councils UK has
certainly divided the OA movement. Despite
considerable criticism, however, RCUK has
refused to amend its policy.
So
what will be its long-term impact?
Critics
fear that RCUK has opened the door to the
reinvention of the Big Deal. Pioneered by
Academic Press in 1996, the Big Deal involves
publishers selling large bundles of electronic
journals on multi-year contracts. Initially
embraced with enthusiasm, the Big Deal is widely
loathed today.
However,
currently drowned out by the hubbub of
criticism, there are voices that support the
RCUK policy. Jan Velterop, for instance,
believes it will be good for Open Access.
Velterop
also believes that the time is ripe for the
creation of a New Big Deal (NBD). The NBD would
consist of “a national licensing agreement” that
provided researchers with
free-at-the-point-of-use access to all the
papers sitting behind subscription paywalls,
*plus* a “national procurement service” that
provided free-at-the-point-of-use OA publishing
services for researchers, allowing them to
publish in OA journals without having to foot
the bill themselves.
Velterop’s
views are not to be dismissed lightly. Former
employee of Elsevier, Springer and Nature,
Velterop was one of the small group of people
who attended the 2001 Budapest meeting that saw
the birth of the Open Access movement, and he
was instrumental in the early success of OA
publisher BioMed Central.
Moreover,
during his time at Academic Press, Velterop was
a co-architect of the original Big Deal.
More
on this, and a Q&A with Velterop, can be
read here: