Introduction and Background to Open Access Journals
June 12, 2008 – 9:46 amCreated with support from the National Library of Sweden and its development program OpenAccess.se
Jörgen Eriksson and Aina Svensson, 2007
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/se/
Description
This section describes what we mean with Open Access journals and how these differ from traditional journals and hybrid journals. The text also describes where to find Open Access journals and what it costs to publish in Open Access journals.
The purpose with the section is to describe publishing in Open Access journals.
The scholarly journal
The scholarly journal plays a central role for the dissemination and communication of research results. A survey of today’s journal production carried out through a search in the reference database Ulrich’s International Periodicals shows that there are close to 24, 000 actively publishing peer-reviewed journals. Together they produce around 2.5 million journal articles per year. The scholarly journal has a history of more than 300 years and builds on a system of an external peer-review system which guarantees the quality control of individual articles. To the individual researcher the scholarly journal is thus fundamental, partly as an information channel but partly also for quality assessment and research qualifications. Approximately 90 % of all scholarly journals are now accessible electronically, in most cases via subscriptions which the libraries pay dearly for.
Prehistory
The birth of the scholarly journal is normally set at 1665. This was the year in which the French Journal des Savants and the British Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society appeared. Henry Oldenburg, secretary at the Royal Society, had earlier acted as a hub in the mediation of news between researchers in Europe and he did this through an extensive private correspondence. As he writes in the preface to the first issue of Philosophical Transactions he saw the journal as a suitable alternative to the correspondence of letters.
“ — there is nothing more necessary for promoting the improvement of Philosophical Matters, than the communicating — [of] such things as are discovered or put in practice by others; it is therefore thought fit to employ the Press — “
Up until the emergence of “Big Science” during the second half of the 20th century, and the general increase in the world regarding researchers and publications, the publishing of journals did not change very much. The majority of the scholarly journals were published by scholarly societies and universities and their subscribers were libraries and members.
A crisis in scholarly information provision
From the 1950’s and onwards the picture changes and this is a consequence of the substantial increase of research and the resulting increase in the number of publications. Commercial publishing companies show an interest in the market and start new journals, principally within new emerging research areas produced as a result by the rapid advance by science. The powerful increase of publications together with the profit interest of the commercial publishing companies resulted in the commercial publishing companies taking over an increasingly larger part of the market from the scholarly societies.
The period between 1975 and 1995 has been referred to as “the serials crisis”, a crisis in the scholarly information provision, as the prices for primarily the commercially published journals during this period increased dramatically, more than 300 % over and above the inflation (the European Commission, 2006). This occurred during a period which preceded the great technical development in the publishing market. When the publishing companies at the end of the 90’s began to use the Internet as a parallel way to distribute their journals this, however, meant no reductions in price increases. Instead a new subscription model sometimes called “the Big Deal” emerged in which a subscriber is offered quantity discount when subscribing to a whole package of electronic journals from a specific publishing company. For a start, the model was welcomed by the libraries but later the model also proved to involve disadvantages. As “the Big Deals” swallowed an increasingly larger part of the common library budget the possibilities of making an active selection of individual journals were reduced. Access was instead given to journals of less interest at the cost of not being able to afford subscribing to individual top journals in a subject field not included in the packages. In addition, the heavy price increases of journals together with package purchasing have in many places meant that the purchases of monographs have been cut down considerably. Given that the amount of research and thus also the number of publications increase faster than the budgets of the libraries, the result is that an increasing number of the world’s research institutes can afford a diminishing share of relevant publications.
” Reed’s [Elsevier] adjusted pretax profit in the year to end-December [2006] rose 5 per cent to 1.052 billion pounds.” (Haycock, 2007)
Many researchers are of the opinion that the profit share of such surpluses should be returned to research instead of being converted into share dividends.
In his preface to the first issue of Philosophical Transactions, Henry Oldenburg mentioned the importance of “communicating,” i.e. dissemination of information as the reason for the journal’s existence. Through the years, the scholarly journal has also been given further tasks (Rowland, 1997). The articles undergo a quality control, either through a referee procedure, or the assessment of the editorial staff and through these means there is an attempt at keeping away inferior science. Journals are ranked according to quality, a so-called impact factor, and this ranking is practically universally accepted by both researchers and research financiers. This means, if stretching the argument, that it is more important where one gets published than what one gets published. A consequence of this is that the whole system becomes relatively slow since it takes time for new journals to establish themselves and advance in the hierarchy.
Researchers’ initiative
In the beginning, open access journals were started on the initiative of individual researchers. Besides the fact that researchers saw possibilities of spreading information fast and easily in an electronic form new journals were also started as a protest against the increasingly higher journal prices. The first e-journals were started around 1990, i.e., already before the launching of the Web. The newly started journals were freely accessible e-journals and they were published with primitive technology. An early example of a freely accessible journal is Psycoloquy which in the year of 1989 was started by Stevan Harnad and sponsored by the American Psychological Association. Another example is the researcher Eddy van der Maarel who together with the main part of the editorial staff at the journal Vegetatio as a protest against the journal’s price increase left the journal and instead put Journal of Vegetation Science on the market in 1989.
In the 1990’s committed researchers began to worry more and more over the accelerated price level and the increasingly limited access to scholarly journals. One of the precursors was the Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus. At that time he was the head of the National Institute of Health which is the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. Harold Varmus then introduced the idea of PubMedCentral, a freely accessible archive for scholarly articles in biomedicine. The purpose was to find a form of collaboration with the publishing companies where published articles would be deposited in PubMedCentral preferably 6 months but maximum 12 months after the publishing of the journal. After that the articles would be open for access. On the part of the publishing companies there was no great support, which contributed to the researchers pursuing the matter further, forming a lobby group, the Public Library of Science, and presenting a threat of boycott. The group formulated an open letter on the Webdemanding that the publishing companies deposit their articles for free access within 12 months after publishing. If not, the researchers threatened to boycott the journals, i.e., they would no longer write in the journals nor edit or make contributions of evaluations. 26, 000 researchers from practically all countries in the world signed the open letter. This was the start of an extensive debate that placed the research community’s focus on the publishing companies’ control of the journal market.
New economic models
Given this situation with a system for scholarly communication that was shaken to its foundation and given the possibilities for changes which Internet offers researchers, publishing companies and libraries have started to explore new solutions for the publishing of articles and for making them freely accessible to the user. Traditionally the costs and profits in connection with the publishing of scholarly journals have been directly linked to the subscriptions where the reader (often via his or her library) pays for access to the journal. The research society has contributed with article manuscripts, peer reviewing and editors, often without any financial compensation. The reward has instead come in the form of an increase in status resulting from having one of these positions and being published in the right journals.
In the Open Access movement there is a search for durable models with peer-reviewed journals freely accessible to the reader. This means that somebody who is neither the reader nor the subscriber will pay the costs. Today three different variants of financing Open Access publications can be seen:
- Publishing fee
- The costs are paid by the institutions that conduct the research
- OA journals without any author’s fee
Generally it can be said that the costs for printing and distribution of a printed edition disappear at a change-over to OA and electronic publishing. However, some OA journals offer a yearly collected volume or print-on-demand as a complement. In addition, the costs for handling subscriptions and access rights disappear at a change over to OA.
Publishing fee - the reader has free access
Two of the most noticed publishing company initiatives in the Open Access movement are based on the publishing fee as a business model, BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science (PLOS).
BioMed Central is the first and largest commercial publishing company that goes in for the model with the publishing fee. With their concentration on biomedicine 175 titles are published today (2007-03-05). The models for quality review are the same ones as those used by traditional publishing companies, as is the agreement with the Dutch National Library in Haag concerning long-time archiving of the journals. Several of the journals have in short time gained recognition for their quality and are ranked by Tompson ISI.
BioMed Central has till now had problems with making their activities profitable. In 2002 it cost $500 to publish an article in BioMed Central and researchers from an institution which had paid for a membership were able to publish without an individual charge. After having experimented with prices and only a reduced cost for memberships there is now a model where the members pay for publications in advance which also grants a discount off the publications and the more you pay in advance the bigger the discount. The full price for publishing in a BMC journal without a membership is now $1480 and 2007 will supposedly be the first year without any financial loss.
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Public Library of Science was started as a roll call and it is a non-profit association of scholars. The purpose of the organization is to make the world’s scholarly medical publications freely accessible and the publishing of journals constitutes one of the paths chosen . From the start in 2003 the goal was to show that OA journals can indeed be among the leading ones and of the same class as, for example, Science and Nature. This has been successfully proven and the journals PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine are already counted among the top journals in their respective subjects. The cost for publishing in these journals was, from the beginning, considerably higher than in the BioMed Central journals ($1500 compared to $500 in BioMed Central) and today it is $2500.
PLoS has, since, moved on with a few more specialized titles and in 2007 PLoS One was started as a contrast to PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine in the sense that the objective is to publish all qualitative research that is submitted and not only exceptional research. Therefore the price for publishing is $1250, significantly lower than the other two.
PLoS has till now presented losses and is partly financed by grants from non-profit foundations. When the PLoS business model has been criticized for being long-term untenable it has been argued that PLoS is also to be seen as a non-profit experiment for the marketing of OA and that a dependence on external proceeds will be needed also in the near future.
Criticism against publishing fees
The criticism directed against the business model which uses publishing fees may be summarized in the following arguments:
The model debars authors from poor institutions and by that also researchers from great parts of the world’s developing countries. The reaction to this has been that both BioMed Central and PLoS publish articles which have passed the peer review without charging the author if he or she can not afford it.
Since the journals depend on proceeds from the authors it may be tempting to publish articles which really do not pass the quality control, for economic reasons. This argument has been met by the assurance that a strict distinction is made between financial aspects and quality controls. The researcher who assesses a submitted article does not know, for example, whether the colleague who has submitted the article is in the position to pay the fee or not.
The model with author’s fees only works in subjects where there is a lot of money in the form of big research grants, with biomedicine as the major example. In great parts of the humanities and the social sciences this is not a feasible business model. This critique has not been challenged in any good way and after the first enthusiasm the experiences show that if you run a major publishing company that offers services like SFX/CrossRef linking, help with indexing in relevant index- and abstract services, long-term preservation, qualified peer review, marketing etc., the cost will end up somewhere between $1000 and $3000 per article. Neither are there any good examples yet of publishing companies offering social sciences- or humanities journals that have adopted the model.
Another problem with this model is that during a transition period, when you pay both subscription and publishing fees, extra resources will be needed as it is difficult to imagine a symmetric cost reduction for subscriptions that follow the cost increase for publishing fees.
The cost is paid by the institutions that conduct the research
An interesting but rather special variant is an initiative taken by CERN, the world’s largest laboratory in particle physics. The idea is for institutions which fund research in particle physics to form a consortium which purchases general Open Access to a number of chosen key journals within the subject field. Neither the author nor the reader needs to pay. The process has begun, the consulted publishing companies are positive and the division of the funding is in progress. This model is probably difficult to transfer to other subject fields. The prerequisites of the subject of particle physics are special with a manageable number of involved financiers and institutions and with a great part of the subject field covered by relatively few journals. An interesting aspect is here the fact that though a very large share of the publications in particle physics are made freely accessible as pre-prints in ArXiv a definite surplus value in the formally published article is considered to arise in connection to further searching, long-term preservation and accessibility (Kaiser, 2006).
OA journals without an author’s fee
The Kaufman-Wills investigation from 2005 showed that 53 % of the studied OA journals did not apply publishing fees. The business models used instead to cover costs are little studied or discussed. As Peter Suber writes in the SPARC Newsletter #103
” I wish I could tell you how many different ways the no-fee journals have found to pay their bills, and which methods work best in which disciplines and countries. But I can’t. No one has done the studies yet. A few ships have approached the coastline of this land mass but we haven’t come close to penetrating the interior or producing a map.”
Most of them seem to be funded by means of direct or indirect support from institutions connected to the journal’s editorial staff or from non-profit work carried out by the editorial staff. Other methods mentioned are advertisements, financing of an electronic OA version by means of sales of a printed edition, membership fees and probably combinations of the above mentioned methods. That it is possible to publish quality journals at a low cost if you give up part of the supplementary services is something that has been shown by Ulf Rehmann who uses the example of Documenta Mathematica (indexed by Thompson-ISI), which in 1999 had a total annual cost of ca €200 for the publishing of 20 articles.
To sum up it may be said that this is still a time of experimenting and that several different business models will surely exist side by side in the future depending on the needs of different disciplines. Most traditional publishing companies experiment with variants of publishing fees in the form of so-called hybrid journals where the author may choose between publishing in the usual way, and then behind a subscription barrier, or pay a fee which results in the article becoming freely accessible.
Sources
European Commission (2006). Study on the economic and technical evolution of the scientific publication markets in Europe. Final Report - January 2006 [Electronic] Access: http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/pdf/scientific-publication-study_en.pdf [15 April 2007].
Haycock, G. Reed Elsevier to sell education arm. (15 February 2007) Scotsman.com [Electronic] Access: http://business.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=246662007
Rowland, F. (1997). Print Journals: Fit for the Future? Ariadne [Electronic], 7. Access: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue7/fytton/ [14 May 2007].
Kaiser, J. 2006. Particle Physicists Want to Expand Open Access Science [Electronic], 313 (1), 1215. Access: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/313/5791/1215.pdf [14 May 2007].
Kaufman, C. & Wills, A. (2005). The facts about open access. A study of the financial and non-financial effects of alternative business models for scholarly journals. ALPSP (the Association of Learned & Professional Society Publishers) [Electronic] 128 p. Access: http://www.alpsp.org/publications/pub11.htm [15 April 2007].
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