My apologies, my previous posting was completely (and I really mean
completely) garbled. Here it is corrected (in *boldface*). Please ignore
the prior version. -- Stevan Harnad
n Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 9:59 AM, Jan Velterop <velte...@gmail.com> wrote:
> A big flaw in the way journals are financially sustained -- true for
> Article Processing Charges (APCs) of OA journals as well as for
> subscriptions to pay-walled journals -- is that the entire cost of
> publication is loaded solely on the published articles. That may seem
> logical, but a large proportion of a journal's cost is proportional with
> the number of submissions, not with the number of published articles. It
> follows that the rejection/acceptance ratio has a major effect on the cost.
> If the submissions rise, and the published articles don't, e.g. because a
> journal becomes more selective, the costs per accepted/published article
> increase. All the work done on a submitted paper that is eventually
> rejected will have to be paid out of income in respect of published
> articles, be it via APCs or subscriptions. In the case of APCs it means
> they would have to rise, unless they were too high to begin with.
>
> There are two possibilities that I can think of here, at least for OA
> journals sustained by APCs:
> 1) Set the level of APCs according to rejection rates of the journal (e.g.
> of the previous year; there is bound to be a lag). This would logically
> mean increasing APCs for increasingly more selective journals;
> 2) Charge an APC per submission, irrespective of whether the article will
> be accepted or not (a bit like exam fees; you pay also if you fail).
>
> In my view, 2) is logically the right solution, but perhaps not
> psycho-logically (and it has unintended consequences, too, which I won't go
> into right now). However, without submission fees, APCs that vary with
> selectiveness of the journal are pretty much inevitable. The differences
> may well become greater than they currently are.
>
I agree with Jan on this one -- i.e., option 2: a no-fault gold OA
refereeing charge, per submission, instead of a publication charge that
charges the refereeing of the rejected papers to the authors of the
*published* papers. -- But for this to work, green OA must come first, in
order to make it possible to offload all publishing expenses other than
refereeing costs onto the distributed global network of green OA
institutional repositories. In fact I've said so, many times, in print:
*Plans by universities and research funders to pay the costs of Open Access
Publishing ("Gold OA") are premature. Funds are short; 80% of journals
(including virtually all the top journals) are still subscription-based,
tying up the potential funds to pay for Gold OA; the asking price for Gold
OA is still high; and there is concern that paying to publish may inflate
acceptance rates and lower quality standards. What is needed now is for
universities and funders to mandate OA self-archiving (of authors' final
peer-reviewed drafts, immediately upon acceptance for publication) ("Green
OA"). That will provide immediate OA; and if and when universal Green OA
should go on to make subscriptions unsustainable (because users are
satisfied with just the Green OA versions) that will in turn induce
journals to cut costs (print edition, online edition, access-provision,
archiving), downsize to just providing the service of peer review, and
convert to the Gold OA cost-recovery model; meanwhile, the subscription
cancellations will have released the funds to pay these residual service
costs. The natural way to charge for the service of peer review then will
be on a "no-fault basis," with the author's institution or funder paying
for each round of refereeing, regardless of outcome (acceptance,
revision/re-refereeing, or rejection). This will minimize cost while
protecting against inflated acceptance rates and decline in quality
standards.*
*Harnad, S. (2010) **No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity
Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed*<http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/>*.
D-Lib Magazine **16 (7/8)
<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july10/harnad/07harnad.html>*
Stevan Harnad
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