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: > > http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/open-access-in-uk-reinventing-big-deal.html >
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