Hi all, Jeroen Bosman wrote: "Elsevier is the single most important obstacle to achieving and getting support for open access".
Ross Mounce wrote: "I hope no politicians or librarians are fooled by this simple ruse". Well, I very much agree with Jeroen's statement and Ross' wishes. However, I think it's important to understand and take the full measure of the situation and figures mentioned by Heather. If not, I don't know how one can hope influence those who make the decisions. Calling Elsevier "the bad guy" and its recent OA move a "simple ruse" won't do the job, I'm afraid (not that I think Jeroen or Ross thought so ;-). There have been discussions since the very beginning of the OA era (I recently reread the "Subversive Proposal" of 1994, where this issue was already amply discussed) on a possible significant, even radical, decrease of the overall cost of scientific publishing, now estimated at more than 10 G$ worldwide, permitted (or rendered inevitable) by the transition to online dissemination. Now that, as I believe, that universal OA is on the way, no clear scenario as to what will be the new disseminating/publishing/funding model(s) has emerged. Abolishing journals or publishers? Open solutions (OJS) in the hands of the research community? Harnad's Fair Gold (overlay journals based upon repositories)? Major for-profit publishers revenue-preserving (or even revenue-increasing) "solutions"? In this regard, the fact that it's none other than Elsevier that now offers the largest fleet of OA journals, 60 % of them not charging APCs, must be looked at carefully. What I find the most interesting (not in a positive way though) is that those 300 journals without APCs seem to be all society journals. The same applies to journals in the low-end of the OA and hybrid APC distributions (a systematic investigation should be made). So it seems that these societies decided that it's a good thing to subcontract to Elsevier their OA publishing operation. The problem is, we don't know how much (per paper, for instance) it costs them, compared to the "normal" Elsevier non-hybrid APCs ($1500 - $3000). We don't know either if they have envisioned other solutions, like less costly publishers (for instance Hindawi or Ubiquity Press; see http://bit.ly/2iqYglv) or systems like OJS. Maybe society members, if they care, could obtain these figures and, hopefully, explanations; maybe some societies have to be transparent in this regard. Is it possible that Elsevier (and, surely, the other major publishers) succeeds easily in convincing societies that it's worth paying for a more expensive solution? Because it's less trouble? Because of the perceived value of the publisher's imprint (compared to that of the society)? By the way, I noticed in the web pages of some non-APC Elsevier OA journals (again a systematic investigation should be made) that peer-review is "under responsibility" of the society (or institution). This seems to mean that Elsevier is in no way involved in this part of the publishing process, which is often deemed the most significant publisher added value. We certainly need more information to better understand these issues. For my part, I'll probably take some time to dig a little bit further. Marc Couture
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