Sally
Sally Morris
South House, The Street, Clapham,
Worthing, West Sussex, UK BN13 3UU
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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
HarnadExcerpted 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: