Open access - again

The Research Information Network (a very worthy organization which, consequently,will probably be axed under the new coalition government regime) has produced An introduction to open access.  As is so often the case, the guide (which is intended for researchers) fails to distinguish effectively between true open access, where there are neither subscription costs nor author charges and partial open access, which involves author charging.  Both of these go under the label of gold access, following a distinction suggested years ago by Steven Harnad.  But these are not identical methods of achieving open access, which is why I describe true open access as Platinum access.  So-called "gold" simply transfers the production costs to the author, from the subscriber; "platinum" calls upon neither of these sources for finance but relies upon either subsidies or voluntary work, or a combination of the two.

Governments, universities and research funding agencies around the world have been slow to see the potential of the platinum route - largely it seems (at least in the case of governments) to protect the publishers. The exceptions are countries in the smaller language groups, where publication of scholarly research has generally been through journals produced by universities, produced with subsidies, and exchanged around the world for other journals to reduce library acquisition costs.  In such cases, the transfer to free, subsidised open access has been quite logical and simple to achieve.

The economics of scholarly publishing undoubtedly support the platinum route since social benefit is maximised in this way.  It is possible, although I hold out little hope, that the current financial crisis in the UK will lead institutions to embrace the platinum method: individual universities, or, better, collaboration between universities would enable the publication of journals in specific disciplines which could be funded at very low costs, and universities could require researchers to publish in these journals, just as they mandate the deposition of papers in institutional archives.

How low are the costs?  Well, taking Information Research as an example of the platinum journal, the only direct costs of production are borne by the University of Lund and those costs amount to whatever proportion of server maiintenance costs can be attributed to the journal: I imagine that these costs are rather low.  All other costs: editing, copy-editing, reviewing, layout, production, are borne by the voluntary workers of the journal.  Is there really any economic case to answer?

Paying for news

Big news in recent weeks has been Rupert Murdoch's conversion to paying for online news. Originally, he believed that online news could be paid for by advertising but, buying the Wall Street Journal and being shown the books was his 'on the road to Damascus' moment and he was suddenly converted to the opposite.

Now RM is a big media baron owning everything from Sky tv to The Sun newspaper - as well as Fox tv, the Times newspaper and dozens of other properties. Probably his aim is to take over the media world in its entirety.

But will he really get people to pay for news? The Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal are specialist business newspapers and subscriptions to their online content is likely to be a business expense rather than a personal expense, but is anyone going to pay for The Sun's content?

There's no denying that newspapers are in real difficulties - hit, on one hand, by the new technology, which makes the worldwide distribution of news so easy, and on the other hand by the recession, which has cut into their advertising revenue. To a degree, newspaper publishers are in the same fix as scholarly publishers - the technology has made them potentially redundant and they are desperate to find out how to 'monetize' their online activities. What business model will replace the existing one is hard for me to tell - not having the gift of foresight, but I imagine that one consequence, and a very undesirable one, will be to concentrate ownership of the news media in even fewer hands, with fewer journalists, little on-the-ground foreign coverage, and more and more regurgitated wire services content.

Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold of Smart Mobs and The Virtual Community fame has a presentation on the TED site. The programme notes say:

Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action -- and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. As he points out, humans have been banding together to work collectively since our days of hunting mastodons.

Well worth viewing, as usual with the TED presentations

Journal economics

Quite by chance, I came across The Cost-Profiles of Alternative Approaches to Journal-Publishing by Roger Clarke. The abstract reads:

The digital era is having substantial impacts on journal publishing. In order to assist in analysing these impacts, a model is developed of the costs incurred in operating a refereed journal. Published information and estimates are used to apply the model to a computation of the total costs and per-article costs of various forms of journal-publishing. Particular attention is paid to the differences between print and electronic forms of journals, to the various forms of open access, and to the differences between not-for-profit and for-profit publishing undertakings.

Insight is provided into why for-profit publishing is considerably more expensive than equivalent activities undertaken by unincorporated mutuals and not-for-profit associations. Conclusions are drawn concerning the current debates among conventional approaches and the various open alternatives.

One of the implications of Clarke's analysis is:

As journals have migrated to dual-mode publishing and to purely electronic formats, the advantages originally offered by for-profit publishers have dissipated. The level of professionalism required to operate an eJournal remains significant, but it is not out of the reach of committed senior academics supported by junior academics and students. Acquisition of infrastructure, and management of infrastucture and processes, are less challenging than was previously the case.

Information Research is an example of what Clarke calls the Unincorporated Mutual, Gratis eJournal and its business model is '...a communitarian undertaking, or from an economist's terms a "gift economy".' As Clarke notes, the costs of such journals are essentially zero, since all costs are absorbed by the partners involved. The nearest costed equivalent is the scholarly society producing just a single e-journal, the cost of which is estimated at $22,000 and the cost per paper, if supported by author-charging, $730 - so now all the readers of Information Research know what a bargain they are getting :-)

More on open access

Thanks to the BOAI Forum and Steven Harnad for drawing attention to the paper ©Copyright and research: an archivangelist’s perspective© by A.A.Adams, which refutes another paper by K. Taylor (Copyright and research:an academic publisher's perspective.

It's a well-argued piece and my only complaint is that, once again, the case for what I have called the Platinum Route of collaboration and subsidy is ignored and 'Gold OA' is associated with author payments.

With today's technology, collaboration in the production of a journal is very straightforward and, rather than subsidising journal publishers by allowing time for editorial work and peer reviewing, universities could be subsidising OA journals in the same way. The only office you need is Microsoft Office - and, really, not even that - you can get by with a browser and an html editor. There will be questions about how far this model scales and, as far as I am aware, no OA journal published on this basis has yet reached the point at which the question becomes important. There are many niche research areas with relatively low numbers of active researchers who can be provided for under this model and scalability is only an issue in terms of dealing with submissions. Scalability in use is not an issue, since the technology can cope.

I noted in an earlier post that the JISC in the UK invested well over £300,000 in author payments to publishers, when the same amount of money could have got to subsidising new OA journals. I wonder if anyone is listening?

Migrating to the e-world

It seems that Harvard's top economists are looking more to electronic dissemination of their work than they are to publication in the top journals. The explanation from Dani Rodrik's Weblog:

Several pieces of evidence bolster the view that one factor contributing to these trends is that the role of journals in disseminating research has been reduced. One is that the citation benefit to publishing in a top general-interest journal now appears to be fairly small for top-department authors. Another is that Harvard authors appear to be quite successful in garnering citations to papers that are not published in top journals. The fact that the publication declines appear to be a top-department phenomenon (as opposed to a prolific-author phenomenon) suggests that a top-department affiliation may be an important determinant of an author’s ability to sidestep the traditional journal system.

Rodrik is Editor of The Review of Economics and Statistics and he notes that his own experience as an editor of a prestigious journal supports this conclusion.