May 2014 survey of DOAJ journals charging APCs

Just published in MDPI's Publications!

For further background on this suite of research projects see the Sustaining the Knowledge Commons project page.

Abstract: As of May 2014, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed close to ten thousand fully open access, peer reviewed, scholarly journals. Most of these journals do not charge article processing charges (APCs). This article reports the results of a survey of the 2567 journals, or 26% of journals listed in DOAJ, that do have APCs based on a sample of 1432 of these journals. Results indicate a volatile sector that would make future APCs difficult to predict for budgeting purposes. DOAJ and publisher title lists often did not closely match. A number of journals were found on examination not to have APCs. A wide range of publication costs was found for every publisher type. The average (mean) APC of $964 contrasts with a mode of $0. At least 61% of publishers using APCs are commercial in nature, while many publishers are of unknown types. The vast majority of journals charging APCs (80%) were found to offer one or more variations on pricing, such as discounts for authors from mid to low income countries, differential pricing based on article type, institutional or society membership, and/or optional charges for extras such as English language editing services or fast track of articles. The complexity and volatility of this publishing landscape is discussed.

Citation: Morrison, H.; Salhab, J.; Calvé-Genest, A.; Horava, T. Open Access Article Processing Charges: DOAJ Survey May 2014. Publications 2015, 3, 1-16.

The dramatic growth of BioMedCentral open access article processing charges

The average article processing charge for BioMedCentral journals requested from the University of Ottawa (uO) Library's author's fund increased 27% from 2010-11 to 2012-13. The 15% increase from 2011-12 to 2012-13 is 10 times the rate of inflation. 

The data indicates that this reflects increases in journal prices rather than changes in which journals uO authors publish in. For example:

Globalization and Health (a BMC journal)

• 2010-11: uO paid an APC of $1,300 US. Assuming this reflects a BMC membership rate in effect at this time (15% discount, that's still less than $1,500 US.
• 2011-12: uO paid APCs at 2 different rates: $1,425 US and $1,715 US
• 2012-13: uO paid APCSs at $1,670 and $1,715 US
• The BMC rate listed on BMC's own website as of Feb. 27, 2014 is $2,155 US from: http://www.globalizationandhealth.com/manuscript

An increase in APC from $1,715 US to $2,155 US in the last year is about a 25% increase in the APC for this particular journal. Currency fluctuations could account for about one-tenth of this increase (see below for calculations), and the modest inflation rate would account for about a 1.5% increase. This still leaves more than a 20% increase in price above and beyond currency variations and inflation.

Currency variations UK pound sterling to USD, based on Bank of Canada daily and 10-year currency converter.

• UK pound sterling to USD conversion rate:
• Jan. 2011: 1.5586
• Jan. 2012: 1.5654 (.0043 increase over 2011)
• Jan. 2013: 1.6254 (.0383 increase over 2012)
• as of Feb. 27, 2014: 1.6691 (.02688 increase over 2013)
• Total increase in value of UK pound sterling in comparison with US dollar 2014 / 2011: 7%

Public Library of Science (PLoS), by contrast, has kept prices for their journals at exactly the same rates during this time frame. PLoS' achievement of a 23% surplus during this time frame indicates that this was done without financial sacrifice. While I continue to call on the not-for-profit PLoS to actually lower their prices to facilitate the transition to open access, the remarkable contrast between PLoS' holding the line on prices and while BMC raises their prices at rates far above inflation is worth noting.

Thanks to Jeanette Hatherill and the University of Ottawa Library for posting the Open Access publication rates in the uO institutional repository. This dataset contains the amounts paid for through the library's author's fund for open access article processing charges from 2010 - 2013. Watch for further calculations and release of my calculations spreadsheet as part of the open access article processing charges series.

This post also illustrates the value of open data. By posting this data for open access in the University of Ottawa's institutional repository, uO is making it possible for me to conduct research like this that could be useful to uO's own decision-making processes in future. Let's hope this post inspires others to follow uO's lead and share their data, too.

This post is part of the Open access article processing charges research series. 

Commenting is now open on this post. Please note that this is a scholarly blog and comments are expected to be of scholarly quality, e.g. anonymous comments will not be posted and any potential conflicts of interest should be evident to the reader (for example, if you are involved with a journal or publisher that relies on the open access article processing fee model, please say so).

Scholarly journal article publishing: profits at below 30% of current revenues

Thanks to Mark Ware, Michael Mabe and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) for releasing the 2012 STM report as open access.

Based on data from the Executive Summary, we can calculate that the current average revenue per scholarly journal article published globally is approximately $5,000 US. BMC is making a profit charging an average APC that is 37% of this amount, and PLoS is bringing in a 23% surplus at less than 30% of this amount.

This is based on Ware and Mabe's report of:

9.4 billion in revenue for english-language STM journal publishing
1.8 - 1.9 million articles published per year in 28,100 actively scholarly journals
=  approximately $5,000 in average revenue

BioMedCentral average of $1,874 is based on data downloaded from the BMC website as part of the open access article processing fee research project. 

The average article processing fee for an article in the profitable BioMedCentral journals is $1,874 US - that's profit-making at an average of 37% of the current average revenue. PLoS is now enjoying a 23% profit rate, charging $1,350 per article for PLoS ONE - that's a high profit rate at 27% of the revenue of the current average.

It should be noted that PLoS was not originally designed to be a model of publishing efficiency, but rather a combined advocacy and publishing organization meant to compete primarily at the high end of the scholarly publishing market. PLoS' costs reflect this original mission: well-paid professional staff and headquarters in one of the world's costliest real estate markets, San Francisco. 

This is yet an another indication, as I have argued elsewhere, that high quality scholarly publishing can be accomplished for a small fraction of existing spend - something that every faculty member and university administrator in today's tough economic times ought to know.

Forthcoming research: tracking open access article processing fees

In the interests of open research, here is a project that I'm considering for the near future. To avoid any confusion, please remember that the vast majority of open access journals do not charge article processing fees. The purpose of this research is to track the fees themselves for those journals that do, to note evidence of competition (e.g. new low-cost approaches), reactions of publishers to substantive surpluses (such as PLoS' apparent comfort with retaining current prices in spite of a 23% surplus, and to establish a benchmark for existing article processing fees and to track these over time, similar to the Library Journals Serials Price Survey, to keep an eye out for unwarranted price increases. 

 At this point in this process, it would be most helpful to know:

• is anyone else already doing this?
• is anyone considering doing this (if so, are they interested in collaborating?)
• tips to make this work of obtaining lists of article processing fees easier
• links to information about article processing fee levels

Comments welcome. Please note the IJPE commenting policy: this is a scholarly blog. Comments must be attributed (get in touch with me off-blog if you have a substantial comment and a good reason to request confidentiality), and any potential conflicts of interest must be noted. For example, if you are involved with a publisher / journal that charges OA article processing fees, this should be stated in your comment.

Update October 3 - on the open research approach - so far, in less than 24 hours, I have substantive comments via e-mail from 4 experts in the field, including one with an interest in collaborating. I will limit acknowledgements at this point to comments posted to public lists or at the request of the contributor in the case of personal e-mails, but wanted to note that from my perspective the open approach on this project is already succeeding - but please keep the comments and suggestions coming!

Thanks to Andrew Adams on the GOAL Open Access List:

Heather,

The ACM, a major scholarly society publisher in computer science, set it APCs 
for hybrid gold journals (and hybrid gold for its fully-refereed conference 
proceedings, an unusual element of computer science research whereby full 
papers are reviewed for conference which produce proceedings which are of 
equivalent status to journals, in some cases being the premiere publication 
locus in a field) by reference explicitly not to the costs it incurs for 
articles but at the "low end of commercial publishing rates". They are 
looking at their entire business model (which currently has publishing as a 
major income line but which they admit is an uncertain basis on which to 
proceed) over the next few months but any changes to this will not be quick. 
There are groups within ACM pushing for cost-receovery only on APCs including 
breaks for under-resourced authors (including but not limited to those from 
developing economies).

References / Bibliography

Solomon, D. J. and Björk, B.-C. (2012), A study of open access journals using article processing charges. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci., 63: 1485–1495. doi: 10.1002/asi.22673

Peterson, AT, Emmett, A, Greenberg, ML. (2013). Open Access and the Author-Pays Problem: Assuring Access for Readers and Authors in a Global Community of Scholars. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 1(3):eP1064. http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1064

Second update October 4 - thanks to Leslie Chan on the GOAL Open Access List:

Heather,
You probably came across this already, but just in case:

Marcin Kozak and James Hartley, Publication fees for open access journals:
Different disciplinesfor Information Science and Technology
Article first published online: 18 SEP 2013 | DOI: 10.1002/asi.22972

Not OA!

Leslie

 

This post is part of the essential efficiences series.

Should we protect high cost subscription scholarly journals? Why not support scholars instead?

Dana Roth on the GOAL open access list has raised a question about whether subscription journals like the 'Journal of Comparative Neurology', with a subscription price of $30,860, would be sustainable with green open access. The subject line is Disruption vs. Protection. Following is my response:

A journal publishing 234 articles per year charging $30,860 for a subscription SHOULD be disrupted, on the basis of price. At this rate it would cost 7 times more to provide access to only the medical schools in North America than to provide open access to everyone, everywhere with an internet connection, even at the rates of a for-profit professional commercial publisher's very high impact journal. At the rates of The Journal of Machine Learning, aptly described by Shieber as an efficient journal, all of the articles published in this journal could be made open access for a total cost that is less than 10% of a single subscription.

Details: 

The Association of American Medical Colleges accredits 141 medical schools in the U.S. and Canada alone. If each one of these schools purchased a subscription at $30,860, that would add up to revenue of $4.3 million per year.

$4.3 million would be sufficient to pay open access article processing fees for 1,657 articles at the rates of the professional for-profit BioMedCentral's very-high-impact journal Genome Biology (U.S. $2,265).

Shieber describes the approach and costs (average $10 per article) of the Journal of Machine Learning on his blog The Occasional Pamphlet:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-journal/

The question should be how we can protect and sustain high-quality scholarly publishing in an open access environment - not how to protect such mind-boggling inefficiency as journals that charge over $30,000 for a subscription!

Those who think that it is important to sustain scholarly journals so that a surplus can assist with things like education might want to consider whether medical schools should immediately cancel this journal and offer a medical student a $30,000 scholarship instead.

Comparing OA article processing fees with academic salaries

Update September 12: data added from Ayalew's (2012) research indicating that gross annual salary for an associate professor in Ethiopia is 56,400 Ethiopian birr, or approximately $3,400 US (ETB 16.6 = U.S. $1.00). Assuming that at least the equivalent of $400 is paid in tax, that means that a scholarly publisher charging $3,000 for an open access article processing fee is paying a sufficient amount to cover a full-time salary for an Associate Professor in a country like Ethiopia. My recommendation is that research funders supporting work in the developing world should consider carefully before supporting gold open access article processing fees. Do the math. Instead of paying publishers like Elsevier and Springer $3,000 to make a single article open access, why not require green open access archiving and use the funds to support a full-time academic in the developing world instead? 

My advocacy interests include both open access and sustainable scholarly publishing. One area in need of further attention is the impact of publisher costs (whether subscription or open access) on resources to support academics (salaries and research funding).

One concern that I have with the push for payment of gold open access article processing fees (the RCUK approach) is that publishers are likely to set standards based on the UK approach which then impact scholars around the world, because scholarly publishing is global in nature.

One area of research in need of attention is comparison of open access article processing fees with academic salaries. This is particularly needed in the developing world, but even in the developed world it is worth noting that the $3,000 OA fee charged by some scholarly publishers is more than many adjuncts in the US are paid to teach a course (see for example this table by the American Psychological Association): http://www.apa.org/workforce/publications/12-fac-sal/table-32.aspx

Considering the high percentage of voluntary labour involved in scholarly publishing (unpaid writing for research articles, peer review and much of the editing), it is possible to publish using models that involve extremely low dollar costs. See, for example, Shieber's post An efficient journal detailing how the Journal of Machine Learning publishes at an average of $10 per article. Valuable as open access is, the research and writing needs to be done and we academics should be asking ourselves whether we want universities and research funders to be paying a $3,000 article processing fee, or whether we would prefer DIY at $10 or so per article and directing the funds to support academic salaries and research grants instead.

Results of a research collaboration by the "Laboratory for Institutional Analysis (LIA) from the Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow, Russia, and the Boston College Center for International Higher Education (CIHE) in the United States in collaboration with experts from 28 countries around the world" links here finds that even after adjusting for differences in currency using the purchasing power parity (PPP) method, the local equivalent of $3,000 is more than a month's salary for an academic at the top rank for 7 of the 28 countries studies (25%), and more than a month's salary at 11 of the 28 countries studied (more than a third). Even the PLoS ONE fee of $1,350 is more than month's salary at the PPP equivalent at the top academic rank in 3 countries (China, Russia Federation, and Armenia). Method: go to Quantitative Data, download the data for academic salaries (only PPP provided), sort by rank (I used top rank and rank 3).

This is very preliminary data, shared in the spirit of open research and also as an illustration of the kind of research that is needed before global approaches to paying for open access are even considered. This data would appear to suggest that at some countries, not necessarily even the world's poorest countries, even local equivalents of open access using article processing fees at the rates of PLoS ONE or Springer would cost more than a month's salary for a top ranked academic.

As a next phase, I'm thinking of looking into the actual data not adjusted for currency differences to compare the actual academic salaries with open access article processing fees.

Reference

Ayalew, E. (2012). Salary and incentive structure in Ethiopian Higher Education. In: Altbach, P. ; Reisberg, L.; Yudkevich, Ml; Androushchak, G., and Pacheco, I. , eds. Paying the professiorate: a global comparison of compensation and contracts.  Routledge: New York and London, 2012. [Note: I have access to a copy of this book through the excellent collection at the University of Ottawa's library. How many academics in less affluent areas would have ready access to a work like this?]

Academically appropriate comments are welcome.

Elsevier numbers illustrate - once again - just how much more sense open access makes!

Elsevier today wrote a letter to the mathematics community, hoping to woo scholars away from the still-growing boycott, The Cost of Knowledge, now that Elsevier has publicly disavowed its support for the Research Works Act which would have forbidden the U.S. government from requiring public access to the results of research it pays for. In its letter, Elsevier commits to lowering the costs of articles in its mathematics journals to at or below $11 US per article. This sounds like a pretty reasonable step when you consider that this is just over a quarter of what Elsevier currently charges. However, when you compare this with the potential of open access, you can see how ludicrous this model really is today. If every research library in North America were to purchase a copy of an Elsevier article at $11, this would add up to $1,386 - more than it would cost to pay the PLoS ONE article processing fee for full open access to everyone, everywhere. Or, if an undergrad class of 150 students were required to purchase this article to read for class on a pay-per-use basis, the total would come to $1,650 - that's $300 more than what is needed to pay for the article to be fully open access through PLoS ONE - for access to just one class. In summary, this move by Elsevier just shows how ludicrous the current model is. Plus - why just math, Elsevier? There are many of us who signed the boycott who are not mathematicians!

Details

In the section on pricing, Elsevier commits to lowering the costs of articles in its mathematical journals to at or below $11 US per article or 50-60 cents per page. 

As a for-profit corporation reporting to shareholders, I think it is reasonable to assume that Elsevier would not make such a commitment unless this cost was sufficient to not only cover costs, but return a profit. Does this mean that the current $37.95 charged for one article in Elsevier's Advances in Applied Mathematics is close to 4 times more than what Elsevier itself feels is necessary to recoup costs and make a profit? This does seem consistent with Elsevier's high profit rates.

If every one of the 126 members of the Association of Research Libraries were to pay $11 for an article in mathematics, the total would be $1,386. That's higher than the article processing fee for a fully open access article at PLoS ONE at $1,350 per article. In other words, a high quality, U.S.-based publisher working out of San Francisco (not a cheap place to live or work, I hear), can provide full open access for everyone in the world at less than it would cost to have one copy of an article at every large North American research library, at Elsevier's proposed reduced rate which is just over a quarter of what they currently charge. This is yet more proof that this old school business model of Elsevier's just doesn't make any sense any more, not even with this little modicum of tweaking after significant pressure from mathematicians like Timothy Gowers.

Another scenario: if an undergrad class of 150 students were required to buy a $11 mathematics article to read for class on a pay-to-read basis, the cost would be $1,650. In other words, the pay-per-view costs for just one class to read an article would exceed the PLoS ONE article processing fee by $300. Multiply that by all the millions of students in the world, and it's easy to see how the Elsevier model means either outrageous costs or needless barriers to mathematical knowledge, or, more likely (as things stand now) some of both.

The section from the Elsevier letter on pricing:

Pricing
Mathematics journals published by Elsevier tend to be larger than those of other publishers. On a price-per-article, or price-per-page level, our prices are typically, but not always, lower than those of other mathematics publishers.
 
Our target is for all of our core mathematics titles to be priced at or below US$11 per article (equivalent to 50-60 cents per normal typeset page) by next year, placing us below most University presses, some societies and other commercial competitors. Where journals are more expensive than this, we will lower our prices, as we already have in recent years for journals such as the Journal of Algebra and Topology and its Applications, among others.

We realize that this is just part of the concerns about pricing -and we will seek to address concerns about the nature and composition of the large discounted agreements, through which most Universities now access journals - but addressing the base line pricing is a necessary first step.

Could the University of Iowa Libraries save over $2 million from their subscriptions budget with a flip to open access?

Thanks to Wendy Robertson at the University of Iowa Libraries for posting some very useful information about their library's expenditures on journals.

This post is an informal research collaboration designed to build on Robertson's work, explore the cost of a full flip to open access for this particular university and some of other not yet quantified possibilities that may be of interest along with a flip to open access.

By my calculations, the University of Iowa Libraries could save over $2 million dollars or 60% of the expenditures for journals listed on this web page with a full flip to open access, paid for entirely out of the library budget, assuming a mixed model composed of half of the articles published in the scholar-led publishing sector as illustrated by OJS (Edgar & Willinsky), with an average per-article cost of $188; and the other half published using an article processing fee with the PLoS ONE fee of $1,350 as an average. It is assumed that 1,960 articles were published by the University of Iowa Libraries in 2010, based on a Google Scholar Advanced Search.

More information would be most helpful to refine my calculations. In particular, it would be really helpful to have a better estimate of the number of journal articles published by the University of Iowa faculty in a given year.  If anyone has data to help with this project, please share! In order to facilitate this sharing, I plan to turn on the comment feature on my blog. For calculations, download the data. Method note: the reason I used the 2008 google scholar article numbers is because this was the highest count in recent, i.e. to obtain a conservative figure.

Food for thought

I argue that we need to look for savings in the process of transition to open access, because libraries have many new areas where funding is needed, such as services to support research data, preserving electronic information, research commons type services and embedded librarianship.

One of the reasons why the scholar-led publishers that are the primary users of Open Journal Systems have such a low per-average article cost is that many are built on efficient, not-for-profit library publishing services. Perhaps the transition to full open access will open up opportunities for our librarian colleagues? For example, I hear that there are (understandably) many concerns about potential layoffs at Harvard's libraries. Getting into publishing could be a great freelance opportunity for some of these highly qualified people - after all, who better to help libraries make the transition to OA than our own professional colleagues? Or, I wonder if Harvard has considered that this might be a good time to grow their own publishing services? Then they could simply transition acquisitions budgets into funding for new opportunities to retain their own great staff.

Speaking of job opportunities, growth in the not-for-profit publishing sector could open up many a part-time or full-time opportunity for some of our faculty members, too - no doubt this would be very welcome considering the impact of the financial crisis on university professors. I wonder if even those who have secure jobs themselves might like the idea of transitioning high profits for commercial publishers into more and/or better job opportunities for their colleagues and graduating students? We could spend a lot more than that average $188 per article and still save a bundle, too!

For more of my writing on the economics of scholarly communication in transition to open access, please see this draft chapter of my open thesis.  

Reference

Edgar, B. D., & Willinsky, J. (2010) (In press). A survey of the scholarly journals using

open journal systems. Scholarly and Research Communication, Retrieved August

 27, 2011 from http://pkp.sfu.ca/node/2773  

Selling out feminism: 100 photocopies for $3,607

Would you like your students to read  Selling (out) Feminism: Sustainability of ideology – viability tensions in a competitive marketplace by Suzy D'Enbeau & Patrice M. Buzzanell? Communication Monographs 2011, 78:1, p. 27-52.

The cost for rights to photocopy 100 copies for library reserve is $3,607, according to the Copyright Clearance Centre. This photocopy right does not get you the article itself to copy.

In contrast, here are three options for full open access that cost more than two thirds less than this publisher wishes to charge for another photocopies for a hundred students:

• OJS journals average cost per article:  $188 (Edgar & Willinsky)

• Hindawi's Education Research International:  $500

• Co-Action Publishing's Vulnerable Groups & Inclusion:  $965

Printing copies for library reserve is likely of limited relevance nowadays, but good luck trying to research the costs for other re-use rights. I have tried a number of Quick Price options from the Copyright Clearance Centre, and here is the typical response that I get:

Pricing for this request requires the approval of Taylor & Francis Permissions Representative. You will be notified of the price before order confirmation. The processing period may take up to fifteen business days.

Communication Monographs is published on behalf of the National Communication Association by multinational conglomerate informa.plc through its traditional-sounding brand Routledge / Taylor & Francis.


Reference

Edgar, B. D., & Willinsky, J. (2010) (In press). A survey of the scholarly journals using open journal systems. Scholarly and Research Communication, Retrieved August  27, 2011 from http://pkp.sfu.ca/node/2773

High profits for commercial publishers - or jobs for academics? Let's #occupyscholcomm

Here are some snippets from some work-in-progress that may be helpful to those working to help academics understand the need to transform scholarly communication, from an economic perspective.
The elevator pitch version, for the academic / university administrator who is having a hard time letting go of those high-profit publishers' products:
Elevator pitch
Okay, Elsevier* does have some pretty snazzy journals** and useful services, and of course they need to make a profit because that's what the company is all about. So, next time we renew our Elsevier contract, how much of YOUR salary and benefits should we redirect to Elsevier profits - all, or just some?
* Replace Elsevier as appropriate with another high-profit commercial or not-for-profit that acts like a corporation.
** Replace journals as appropriate with books, bibliographies, etc., etc.

High profits for commercial publishers – or jobs for academics?

For-profit scholarly publishers are enjoying these gifts of ours [journal articles and peer-reviewing services freely given away]. Commercial publishers are involved in publishing about half of the world’s scholarly peer-reviewed journals. The profits, at least for the largest commercial publishers, are enormous and out of touch with the reality of academia. I am sure that we are all too familiar with the financial realities of academia today. If you look at the website of the American Association of University Professors, you will see prominently posted a list of “Financial Crisis FAQs”, which state that the current challenging financial situation is being used to justify a number of measures that impact on academics, including “hiring and salary freezes, furloughs, salary cuts, layoffs, nonrenewals, reduction and elimination of academic programs and colleges, revision of curricula, changes in academic policy, elimination of tenure, substantial changes in workload, and more”.  In 2010, the UK announced that it would eliminate funding for humanities and social sciences teaching altogether, leaving the entire burden of education in these areas on the shoulders of students. I study at Simon Fraser University in Canada, where a couple of years ago we axed the Canadian Studies department.

The for-profit scholarly publishing sector is not at all sharing in this misfortune. The largest companies – Reed Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, informa.plc (also known as Taylor & Francis), all reported profits in the range of 30-40% in their latest financial statements. Wiley reported a 13% growth in profits over last year at this time, for a 42% profit level. To picture just how high this profit level is, compare this with what you are likely seeing in your personal investments. A bank’s interest on your savings account is probably a lot closer to  .0036% than to 36%, the profit rate that Elsevier recently posted. This is an inelastic market. It doesn’t matter if many of the people who are doing the largest share of the work – doing the research, writing up the results, doing the peer review – are losing some of their jobs and bits of their salaries, or if the universities that are, by far, the major part of the customer base for these companies are facing extremely challenging financial times. These things don’t impact the bottom line, at all. Another way to express this is that for these for-profit companies, their CEOs and their shareholders – to whom we give our life’s work – it fundamentally does not matter whether we have work to live. 

References

American Association of University Professors. 2011. Financial Crisis FAQs. Retrieved October 5, 2011 from http://www.aaup.org/aaup/financial/mainpage.htm

Elsevier profits: Economist (2011). Of goats and headaches: One of the best media businesses is also one of the most resented. Retrieved September 25, 2011 from  http://www.economist.com/node/18744177/

Informa plc. (2011). Half year results for the six months ended 30 June 2011.  Retrieved  September 25, 2011 from http://www.informa.com/Investor-relations/

John Wiley & Sons. (2011). John Wiley & Sons reports first quarter fiscal year 2012 results. Retrieved from http://ca.wiley.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/WileyCDA/PressRelease/pressReleaseId-100853.html

Springer Science + Business Media. (2010). Annual report. Retrieved September 25, 2011 from http://www.springer.com/about+springer/company+information/annual+report?SGWID=0-175705-0-0-0

This is a snippet from an early draft of Chapter 2 of my thesis, tentatively called Freedom for scholarship in the internet age, combined with speaking notes from my talk, Information feudalism or knowledge for all, at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference, Seattle, October 2011. I am planning to release more detailed version(s) in the near future.

 This post is part of the Transitioning to open access series.

 For related posts and comments by others, check out the twitter hashtag #occupyscholcomm
 

Growing Canadian membership in DOAJ!

The list of Canadian members of the Directory of Open Access Journals is growing! As of today, there are 7 Canadian individual library members, 1 Canadian library consortium, and at least 1 individual member that I know of.

Here are the Canadian members as of today:

* Bibliothèque de l'Université Laval
* McGill University Library
* Privy Council Office
* Simon Fraser University Library
* University of British Columbia Library
* University of Saskatchewan Library
* University of Toronto Scarborough

Consortial member: OCUL - Ontario Council of University Libraries.

For in-depth reasons on why libraries should become DOAJ members, see my article in the January 2008 Charleston Advisor. Update: since this article was written in 2007, DOAJ has increased by more than one thousand journals; more many journals are searchable at article level, and new features such as journal lists by country have been added.

Another way to calculate the value of DOAJ membership for your library: analyze the costs of dealing with suggestions from faculty, students, and librarians to add these high-quality open access journals to your collection. If you have your own title list, you can figure out how much work it is to do this on your own. If you don't have a way of handling these suggestions, there is still a cost involved. These queries must be addressed; if you have no way of including these journals in your title lists, reference librarians will be looking them up, over and over, one at a time.

DOAJ membership is definitely an Essential Efficiency in these troubled economic times.

Usage-based pricing and open access as a catalyst for change

Bill Hooker on Open Reading Frame is fooling around with numbers, looking at the cost of scholarly journals on a usage basis at the University of California libraries. Usage-based pricing is a harmful model for scholarly communication, a concept I have written about in-depth in this book chapter. One reason is that usage-based pricing inevitably discourages use. Usage-based pricing is a good model for dealing with scarce resources (e.g., per-page charges for photocopying), but a bad model for scholarship in electronic form (think tax on reading after the first copy, there is virtually no cost to further dissemination). Happily, since I wrote this book chapter in 2005, we have witnessed the Dramatic Growth of Open Access. This presents some interesting opportunities for libraries dealing with the current economic crisis. If you have resources where pricing is based on usage, why not promote open access resources? Perhaps this will decrease usage of the paid subscription, so that your library can move to a lower pricing tier the following year.

While researchers need the latest research in their field regardless of where it is published, first and second year students are often just learning how to read scholarly literature. If faculty review these assignments to see whether there are open access resources that can substitute for subscription-based resources, perhaps this can drive a sufficient decrease in usage so that the library can move to a lower usage tier the following year.

Another possibility is to simply set up library resources to display open access resources before subscription-based resources.

In either case, there need not be any barrier to accessing subscription resources. In the first scenario, the student is only required to read the open access articles, but could still be encouraged to pursue as much further reading as they desire. Similarly, the second scenario makes it easy for the student who really only needs to read an article or two, to fulfill their needs using open access resources, without presenting any real barriers to the student whose research needs are more in-depth.

Bill Hooker also points out that there are a few journals at U Cal (e.g., some Elsevier journals), where the subscription cost is not that much different from what pay-per-use would cost. If methods like these were employed at U Cal, could the balance be tipped so that U Cal would clearly save money by switching to pay-per-use? Without open access, this would clearly be a harm to scholarly communication. However, with open access, this could be a catalyst to further change. If the monies saved were redirected to support for open access, this could further decrease the need to use expensive resources, resulting in further savings which can then be redirected to more open access support, creating a positive open access cycle, in counter to the negative cycle of the pricing crisis. The publisher could react by increasing their pay-per-use price. For U Cal, this could be a bit of a dilemma; but on the other hand, it would decrease the probability of success of the pay-per-use model, thus avoiding a harm to scholarship.

This post is part of the Essential Efficiencies series.

Elsevier plus LexisNexis earned more than $1.5 billion in PROFIT in 2008

The global market for science, technology and medicine scholarly publishing has been described as inelastic. There is perhaps no better proof than the financial reports of the scholarly publishing industry for 2008. At a time of global economic crisis, two of Reed Elsevier's divisions just reported INCREASED PROFITS.

Together, Elsevier and LexisNexis together earned over $1.5 billion US in profit in 2008, according to Elsevier's 2008 Preliminary Results, available for download from the Elsevier website. Let me emphasize - this is PROFIT, not revenue.

Libraries - negotiating tip. What does a 33% profit mean? One way of looking at this: if Elsevier decreased prices 33% for all customers around the world, they would still be doing just fine, breaking even. If Elsevier decreased prices for all customers around the world by 20%, they would still be making an extremely healthy profit of 13%. Why not demand a 20% cut, and redirect the funds to support for open access?

Details:

2008 Elsevier Revenue: 1,700 million pounds sterling (over $2.4 billion US)
Adjusted operating profit: 538 pounds sterling (over $814 billion US)
Adjusted operating margin: 33%
Elsevier revenue was up 4%, profits, 11%

2008 LexisNexis Revenue: 1,950 million pounds sterling (close to $2.8 billion US)
Adjusted operating profit: £513 (735 million US)
Adjusted operating margin: 26%
LexisNexis revenue up 13% from previous year, profits up 18%

This post is part of the Essential Efficiencies series.

Who Knows Where the Next Great Idea will come from? Why open access to the world's collective knowledge is a great boon in tough times

These are indeed difficult times. Businesses built for the industrial age are failing; jobs and businesses are disappearing, tax revenue is down. What we need to do now is not to prop up the past, but rather to prepare for the future: the kinds of economics that will thrive in a greener and largely knowledge-based economy.

At a time like this, it is fortunate indeed that we already have open access to a considerable portion of the world's collective knowledge. We can readily share our scholarly knowledge with the developing world, at no cost. Many scholars in the developing world are freely sharing their knowledge through open access, and this is a very good thing, as the developing world has a bit of an advantage right now; they are used to having less money, and so have lots of ideas and incentive to develop the kinds of low-cost solutions that we in the developing world could use right about now. This topic is explored in more depth in my post Necessity is the Mother of Invention: Open Access, the Developing World, and the Cost-Effective Solution.

Through services like libraries, the Scientific Commons, Internet search engines, and the Directory of Open Access Journals, any bright person with no job but even as much as a modicum of curiosity can be learning, and many, I hear, are already doing so by returning to formal education. If even a small fraction of those in this situation focus on this learning, and a small fraction of this learning yields brilliant ideas for new ways of doing things, all it takes is a spark of an entrepreneurial spirit - and an open, neutral network - to get a start on the types of businesses that can sustain families and communities, or even thrive and grow into new economic engines.

Other thoughts to kickstart the new economy

In addition to an open internet, to kickstart this type of new business, it would be a good idea for governments examine how easy or difficult it is to start up a new business. While we all need protection from spam and fraud, it should be possible for an honest citizen to set up a new, simple web-based business to sell their own works or services and figure out how to pay their taxes, in just a few clicks. Maybe other countries have this figured out, but in Canada there are people with good ideas and business plans who are totally stymied but the apparently insoluble problem of how to start up a business and pay your taxes like a good citizen. Who knows, if this was made easy enough, I just might have IPJE Commercial (for t-shirt sales and stuff) up and running, already. Maybe I'd have enough sales to have to hire someone to help out.

Make microloans available. Sure, we'd all like to have big businesses employing lots of people in high-paying jobs, but let's not forget that may of these big businesses started out in someone's garage. And if all people want to do is to support or help support their families and communities, there is nothing wrong with that!

Support people who want to try out a micro-business idea. Look at this as a reasonable option for people on employment supports, especially in areas where there aren't a lot of immediate job prospects.

This post is a part of the Creative Globalization and Essential Efficiencies Series.

Wiley revenues increase 36% in 2008

From the Wiley Annual Report 2008 - To Our Shareholders:

Fiscal year 2008 was a transformative year, as reflected in Wiley’s record results. Revenue increased 36% over the previous year to $1.7 billion, up from $1 billion just two years ago.

According to the Wiley Vision, Wiley has achieved superior results and continues to grow by focusing on three overarching goals, the first of which is: Building long-term relationships with our customers.

This is good to hear! What library customers hard-hit by the financial crisis need right now is adjustment, such as lower subscription prices, as Norman Oder reports in Library Journal. With that kind of revenue, Wiley can certainly afford to help out!

Molecular Biology of the Cell, or, Why Open Access by Article Processing Fee Sometimes Just Makes Sense

Re-analysis of data from the American Society for Cell Biology, publishers of the subscription-based Molecular Biology of the Cell, in MBC and the Economics of Scientific Publishing, illustrates how sometimes an article processing fee approach to open access, combined with dropping the print edition to focus on online, can be just a very natural fit. Given the current economic situation, now might be the perfect time to make the switch.

Currently at Molecular Biology of the Cell (MBC):

• article processing fees constitute 61% of the journal's revenue (colour charges 35%, page charges 26%).
• print costs (printing, binding, paper, mailing) are 32% of expenses

In other words, if MBC were to drop the print edition, then article processing fees are already covering all but 7% of the costs. That is, 100% of costs - 32% print costs - 35% colour charges - 26% page charges = 7%. Assuming that the 5% cost for reprints and some of the 6% costs for "other" are print-related, such as tracking subscriptions or managing authentication, then it is quite possible that article processing fees are already covering the full costs of an online-only open access version of MBC.

MBC readers and authors currently do enjoy some of the benefits of freee access through participation in PubMedCentral after a brief 2-month delay. A full shift to OA would mean the full benefits of immediate OA, preferably libre OA with a suitable open license, such as Creative Commons - Attribution (plus, optionally Noncommercial and/or Sharealike).

There is another benefit that would address a concern expressed by authors in the MBC survey. That is, authors are concerned about the cost of page and colour charges. Because of the print version, it is very likely that authors sometimes forego including valuable material for economic reasons. In an online-only environment, adding more pages, colour figures - even audiovisuals and research datasets - does not add costs as it does in the print environment. If MBC were to drop the print edition and switch to OA / online-only, it could immediately begin to do more for authors and for readers.

According to the Association's data, only a small percentage of readers really prefer and read the print. For these few readers, there are now print on demand services. As of 2007, it was still perceived as important to publish in a journal produced in print. This may still be the case, however the impact of the current economic crisis may help to explain to members and authors why it is essential at the present time to move to new, more efficient business models. One of the concerns members had about dropping print was archiving; it might be timely to raise awareness among members of the role of PubMedCentral in which MBC participates, as an archive of the world's medical literature, carrying on the tradition of the U.S. National Library of Medicine in the online environment.

Thanks to Heather Joseph via Peter Suber on Open Access News for the link to the article and background information.

This post is part of the Essential Efficiencies and Transitioning to Open Access series.

RE: Should university presses adopt an OA model

As originally posted to Liblicense-L

In brief, the point of this post is that there is a very great
range in efficiencies of existing publishers. There are
top-quality journals produced by the not-for-profits (society and
professional associations, university presses) at minimal cost.
For a healthy scholarly communication system into the future,
libraries should support these affordable options.

Irving Rockwood (CHOICE) wrote:

...would not some of the energy we seem to be so committed to
putting into making scholarly publishing costs go away, be better
put into finding ways to ensure that we, as a society, can and do
adequately fund things like education (including higher
education)?

Comment: I couldn't agree more. In my opinion, everyone
involved in scholarship and higher education - scholars,
librarians, university administrators, students, and publishers -
should be working together to help everyone to understand the
importance of higher education and research, particularly in this
pivotal time as we are going through so many transitions - to a
global world and economy, a knowledge economy / society, and
towards an environmentally sustainable economy. All of these
require significant and rapid advances in our knowledge, and many
highly educated people with the skills for the work of the
future.

As for seeking efficiencies in scholarly publishing, as we have
seen from recent discussion there is a very great range in cost-
effectiveness of existing publishers. There are quite efficient
publishers providing high quality at low costs, to publishers
providing basically the same quality at much higher costs.

CHOICE, as a monthly publication and a premiere source of
reviews, at $315 US for a subscription, is below-average IN COST
for an LIS title, and above-average in frequency and quality.
The opportunities for efficiencies with such a journal are,
obviously, a great deal less than with some other journals.

As a journal of reviews, CHOICE is of course different from peer-
reviewed journals. What about a peer-reviewed journal from the
publisher of CHOICE, ACRL? I did some analysis for a forthcoming
book, and found that ACRL's College and Research Libraries is an
incredible bargain - with a low subscription cost and substantial
contents, the subscription cost on a peer-reviewed article basis
is about $2.50 per article. This is a very great deal less than
other journals, even in LIS. Another commercial journal with a
comparable level of quality averaged about a hundred times more
than College and Research Libraries.

For librarians, this is very important. Keeping a high-cost
option may mean cancelling dozens, even a hundred low-cost (but
often high- quality) options. This is one of the reasons why we
need to take a more wholistic view of scholarly communication, to
think about what kind of journal and monograph publishing options
are in the best interests of scholarship in the medium-to-long
term, and not just how to cope with the latest budget crisis.

What is in the best interests of scholarly communication? A
healthy and substantial not-for-profit sector: society and
professional journals, and university presses. Competition in
the commercial sector - missing from the subscriptions picture,
but a real possibility with open access as authors, departments
research funders actually see what they are paying for publishing
services. Open access, of course.

This post is part of the Essential Efficiencies Series.

Bioline International: Supporting Quality Open Access Publishing in the Developing World

The not-for-profit Bioline International describes itself as "a pioneer in the provision of open access to peer reviewed bioscience journals published in developing countries". Bioline International assists publishers in developing countries with establishing a high-quality online presence; Bioline currently aggregates close to 60 journals, from about 15 countries around the world.

Bioline International is currently moving to a library membership model. Libraries are asked to contribute $500 per year to support this initiative. This is not much to ask; less than the cost of an average single journal subscription in most academic fields. This is a much easier way for libraries to ensure access to these journals than was possible in the days of print, where locating such journals, negotiating local currencies, and arranging for mailing made support quite challenging.

By providing an online presence and the optimal dissemination that comes with open access, Bioline International is reducing the south to north knowledge gap, and facilitating the participation of scholars in the developing world in advancing our global knowledge.

One area where the developing world may bring welcome perspective in the short term as we deal with the current economic crisis, is an increased likelihood that scholars in the developing world working on applied fields, will be looking for more cost-effective solutions. This is because Necessity is the mother of invention; when you don't have much to spend, it's easier to focus on potential solutions that don't cost very much.

Bioline International also reduces the south-to-south knowledge gap, sharing of knowledge from one developing country to another, and also providing a local venue for publishing. Such local venues are a better bet for publishing research on topics of greater interest in the developing world (such as malaria and river blindness). Creating publishing opportunities can only increase the odds that researchers will choose to focus on these topics.

This post is part of the Essential Efficiencies series.

It is good to see that Canadian libraries are well represented among the early sponsors and members of Bioline International!

Cost-Free Open Data with Google and Amazon

Both Google and Amazon are offering free data storage for scientists. Thanks to Mark Jordan.

This post is part of the Essential Efficiencies series.

Drop print to save money, with print-on-demand for those who like print

The costs of scholarly journals directly related to print, that is, the costs of printing and distributing by mail, have been estimated at about 20-30% of a journal's cost.

Fortunately in these difficult economic times, this means that the vast majority of scholarly journals have a ready means to decrease costs by 20-30%. If these savings are passed along to customers, this will do wonders for the sustainability of our scholarly publishing system in the critical near to medium term.

Christopher V. Hollister, in Economics of Open Access talks about the recent move by the open access journal Communications in Information Literacy to provide Print-On-Demand (POD) via lulu.com, providing libraries and readers wishing a quality print journal with the service they desire, in a manner that EARNS modest revenue for this journal, rather than COSTING revenue. (Hat tip to Brian Owen for a pointer to Hollister's article).

As Hollister points out, POD is not only a good move economically, it is also environmentally friendly; no unwanted print issues are produced, and printing can happen locally, reducing shipping costs.

Many libraries have been moving to electronic-only subscriptions for years now. In difficult economic times, even more libraries will be looking for such efficiencies. A move to electronic-only / POD to support open access, or to reduce subscription costs, would likely be very much welcomed by library customers in these difficult times.

This post is part of the Essential Efficiencies and Transitioning to Open Access series.