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 :-)

On the longevity of papers in OA e-journals

As the year end is approaching, I thought I would take a look at my Google Analytics reports, to see what is going on. At least one thing seems worth reporting, in that the most hit journal paper on the InformationR.net site (which includes many other things than the journal!) was published in Vol. 4 No. 3, February 1999. This was Joyce Kirk's paper on information management and it has racked up 4,177 page views in the past year. Looking further, I found that nineteen papers from volumes 3 and 4 appeared in the top 100 papers (measured by page views). Currently, Joyce's paper has over 48,000 'hits' and, according to Google Scholar, 21 cites. The other early papers in the top 20 were:

Ranked 5: Student attitudes towards electronic information resources, by Kathryn Ray & Joan Day (Vol 4 No. 2 paper 54 )

Ranked 6: Ethnomethodology and the Study of Online Communities: Exploring the Cyber Streets, by Steven R. Thomsen, Joseph D. Straubhaar, and Drew M. Bolyard (Vol 4 No. 1 paper 50)

Ranked 17: "In the catalogue ye go for men": evaluation criteria for information retrieval systems, by Julian Warner, (Vol. 4 No. 4 paper 62)

Ranked 20: MISCO: a conceptual model for MIS implementation in SMEs, by R.Bali, G.Cockerham (Vol. 4 No. 4 paper 61)

In carrying out this exercise, I discovered that not all of the papers in the journal have Google Analytics code in them, so I'll have to remedy that!

DOAJ the biggest 'big deal'?

Heather Morrison suggests that the Directory of Open Access Journals now offers the biggest 'big deal' with, right now, 2996 journals listed.

But is it so? Many of the journals in DOAJ do not fit the model of the scholarly, peer-reviewed journal: for example, in the Library and Information Science area there are journals that are simply the bulletins of professional associations and it is difficult to discover whether or not the contributions are peer-reviewed.

Also, nothing stays still. I checked the eighty journals in the Library and Information Science area and found that thirteen had published nothing in 2007. Of these, two appeared to be completely dead (although one retained the archive of papers) and four had published nothing since 2005.

However, even if this pattern was repeated in other fields (and I suspect that this field might be more prone than others to the optimistic publishing of new journals) and, say, 15% of the journals were inactive this would still leave the DOAJ ahead of the field in the total number of journals 'packaged'. If 'quality' (however we measure it) is taken into account then perhaps another 5% would be suspect, but this would still leave DOAJ with more than 2,300 journals, compared with Science Direct's 2000.

One of the problems is that we still don't have a citation index that covers all OA journals - should SPARC and DOAJ look at that possibility as a further development of the already excellent service?

More on Brass and Platinum

No sooner had my last comment on the topic of Green, Gold (aka Brass) and Platinum hit cyberspace than Peter Suber comes up with yet another bit of misleading information, this time from Jan Velterop, who, in his own Weblog, notes:

Applied to OA, ‘green’ and ‘gold’ are qualifiers of a different order. ‘Gold’ is straightforward: you pay for the service of being published in a peer-reviewed journal and your article is unambiguously Open Access. ‘Green’, however, is little more than an indulgence allowed by the publisher. This, for most publishers at least, is fine, as long as it doesn’t undermine their capability to make money with the work they do. But a 'green' policy is reversible.

Of course, Velterop is entirely right that the Green route of open archiving is dependent, at present, on the 'indulgence' of the publishers - I have suggested elsewhere that open archiving can only be a temporary approach to open access, since either the publishers may withdraw their permissions, or what I have called the Platinum Route, or, possibly more likely, some alternative process of scholarly communication will come to dominate.

However, Velterop conveys the same mis-information about the Gold (Brass) route as I drew attention to in that earlier post: the statement that it involves paying the publisher to open up access. This is true for commercial publishers, but not for those journals, like Information Research, that are published freely on the basis of subsidy and collaborative effort.

I can see that I am going to have to keep on plugging away at this distinction for as long as the notion of 'Gold' is used ambiguously for all OA journals, whether they author charge or not. Let's get into the entirely sensible habit of referring to Platinum for the latter.