My thanks Jan, for such a succinct and accurate analysis. I am heartened to know that others think the "article" has priority over its packaging. I also want to disseminate these concepts more widely in my institution.
Best wishes Arthur Sale From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Jan Velterop Sent: Thursday, 4 July 2013 6:15 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Hybrid OA/subscription journals Eric, You talk about "market-distorting practices". The biggest market-distorting factor in a subscription/licence model is of course that the party who pays is not the party who choses (at least 'gold' models put the choice in the hands of those who can sensibly choose: the authors). The question that I have is whether it is right at all that peer-reviewed literature is subject to choice when it comes to unfettered availability. Should peer-reviewed literature not be regarded as a kind of 'infrastructural' provision, like the road network? Paid for out of common funds, to enable everyone to reach the knowledge they need or like to have? The BigDeal - the site-licence supreme - was intended for just such a purpose. A national (perhaps regional) 'infrastructural' provision of access to all peer-reviewed literature to all academics. Paid out of 'top-sliced' funds. Unfortunately, the wish to choose scuppered that idea. Rather than having access to everything, many librarians and their universities wanted to revert to selection of journals available electronically. Even where it meant paying the same, or even more, for a smaller selection of journals. I regard that as a historical mistake. In the modern world with technologies like the web at our disposal, selecting what should be available to researchers and students seems completely out of order; a remnant of an old order. Individual researchers and students should be enabled to decide what they need in terms of peer-reviewed literature, not having to rely solely on librarians and their local budgets. In my opinion notions like 'double dipping' and other denigrating comments about hybrid OA/subscription journals are not warranted. That said, I am no great fan of hybrid journals. Actually, I am no great fan of journals. They are a way of organising and stratifying the peer-reviewed literature that has had it's time. The article is the meaningful entity; the journal just a label that is attached to an article, like a branded clothes label to a jacket. Nobody would read (or not read) an article just because it is in a particular journal. Nobody would cite (or not cite) an article just because it is in a particular journal. Researchers worth their salt read and cite articles that are relevant to their research, irrespective of the properly peer-reviewed journal they are published in. Which brings me to your remark about bundling. A journal is a bundle, too. I see the journal disappear over time. Articles will more and more often appear in repositories of sorts, 'platforms' if you wish, such as arXiv and PLOS One. (These platforms, by the way, can lay claim to being 'journals' - daily accounts - much more than most so-called journals that are anything but. Indeed, PLOS One is called a 'journal', yet it is essentially different from most traditional journals). Efforts to bring back the situation as it was in the 1950's are futile and no more than rearguard battles. Jan On 3 Jul 2013, at 21:30, "Eric F. Van de Velde" <eric.f.vandeve...@gmail.com> wrote: Jan: I agree with you that pricing journals for a publisher is complicated, at least when looking from the inside out. But that is no different from any other supplier of a product. The problem with the academic journal market is price transparency. With Hybrid Gold OA publishers essentially tell us to trust them to do the right thing. The problem is that the market is already so distorted because of other business practices that there is no way for buyers to check they are doing the right thing. Hybrid Gold OA is just one other part of market-distorting practices, which include: 1. Site licenses a) They force a university to make uniform decisions for a large and diverse group, rather than let individuals decide what exactly they need, which would be a far more realistic indicator of usefulness of a journal than impact factor or surveys. It forces universities to buy more than they need. b) Publishers try to hide the costs of journals through nondisclosure clauses in contracts, thereby reducing transparency. It is impossible for universities to evaluate how good a negotiator their library is, as there is no way to compare the results with other universities and libraries. 2. Bundling a) Publishers use the market power of one journal to force universities to subsidize new and marginal journals. b) Forces universities to subscribe to more than they need, exacerbating 1.a) c) It decreases price transparency, exacerbating 1.b) 3. Consortial deals a) Again, this is a strategy to make universities buy more than they need, exacerbating 1.a) b) Decrease price transparency, exacerbating 1.b) All of these practices make it impossible to assess prices. Their complexity increases the total cost at the publisher's end. It increases the administrative cost at the university's end. And, this market cannot operate without a plethora of middlemen, each of which add administrative overhead and profit margins. I have no doubt there are many people among publishers who work hard and try to do right. But, there is no way of knowing. In this context, Hybrid Gold is impossible to support. --Eric. http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com <http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com/> Twitter: @evdvelde Telephone: (626) 376-5415 E-mail: eric.f.vandeve...@gmail.com On Tue, Jul 2, 2013 at 10:24 AM, Stevan Harnad <amscifo...@gmail.com> wrote: I'll leave it to others to reply to the many questionable details below. Let me just say that "double-dipping," is not motive term but a very clear, objective one (though it might well give rise to some emotions!): It means being paid twice for the same product. And that's precisely what happens with hybrid-Gold OA: The same publisher is paid twice for the very same article: once by subscribing institutions, once by the author. To ask people to think of this as "two different journals" is double-talk. On Tue, Jul 2, 2013 at 10:38 AM, Jan Velterop <velte...@gmail.com> wrote: Hybrid journals - journals that combine toll access to some articles with open access to others - do not generally enjoy a good press. Terms such as 'double-dipping' are frequently used. This is not justified, as a general rule. The difficulty is that even a basic understanding of how a subscription system works is often lacking outside (and even sometimes inside echelons of) the publishing community. For example, deciding on the price of subscriptions depends on a number of prior assumptions. There are possibly more than these three, but they are important ones: 1) how many subscriptions do we expect to be able to sell; 2) how many submissions will we get and how many of those will be accepted for publication (i.e. what will the costs be); and 3) what margins can we expect to contribute to overheads and profit (or surplus, in the case of a not-for-profit publisher). Typically, a publisher will have a portfolio of journals of which some do well, some just break even, and some make a loss if all costs, including overheads, are fully allocated. Hybrid journals will be found in all three categories. So what does 'double-dipping' mean? Are loss-making hybrid journals 'half-dipping'? Is 'double-half-dipping' - in the case of those loss making journals - just 'single dipping'? Does it even make sense to think in those terms? I think not. If a rebate on the subscription price is expected for a hybrid journal with OA articles in it, would one also expect to pay a premium on the subscription price of a loss-making hybrid journal? The objective way to look at it is to see the subscription price as the price to be paid for the non-OA articles that are published in a hybrid journal, simply ignoring the OA articles (which are freebies, to the subscriber). That subscription price may be perceived as low or high - whether or not expressed in subscription price per non-OA article - but that is what a subscription to a hybrid journal is: a subscription to the non-OA content. Incidentally, comparing subscription prices per article (p/a) across a library collection will show a very wide range, and the inclusion or exclusion of hybrid journals is not likely to make any difference whatsoever in the distribution of p/a in that range. It may be helpful to think of a hybrid journal as twin journals sharing the same title, Editor, Editorial Board and editorial policy: one subscription-based, and one OA. The OA articles in a hybrid journal are just as much OA as in any OA journal as long as they give the reader/user the same rights (of access and re-use), i.e. as long as they are covered by a licence such as the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) and not the CC Attribution Non-Commercial License (CC-BY-NC). Applying CC-BY-NC licences, which does happen, is likely to be a sign of insecurity on the part of a publisher (hanging on to a 'control' element that is wholly inappropriate for OA) or of a lack of understanding as to what the purpose of open access actually is. As said, hybrid journals do not generally enjoy a good press, but I have heard positive comments about them as well in the scientific community. Those relate to the notion that the editorial policy (the acceptance/rejection policy) of hybrid journals is not influenced by the potential financial contribution coming from APCs, where the 'open choice' is given as an option only after the article has passed peer review and is accepted (which typically the point where the option is presented to the author). I don't think acceptance and rejection policies of any respectable OA journal are influenced by the prospect of authors paying anyway, and I certainly don't know of any such practices at the OA publishers I am familiar with, but it is an extra assurance hybrid journals offer that that is indeed not the case for them. In any event, 'double-dipping' is an emotive term the use of which is not conducive to a rational debate. 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