-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: Journal Papers vs. Books: The Direct/Indirect Income Trade-off Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2002 23:51:07 +0100 From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@COGPRINTS.SOTON.AC.UK> On Wed, 10 Apr 2002, Chris Zielinski wrote: > This discussion presents an over-simplified binary opposition: > > 1) Group 1: academics who want to give their scholarly journal work away > > 2) Group 2: publishers who want to earn money from the sales of > scholarly journals > > There is a third path, however: > > 3) Group 3: academics who (noting those 40%+ operating profits achieved > by some major academic journal publishers) would like to be paid for > their scholarly journal papers. These academics do not feel that they > are satisfactorily and sufficiently compensated by research grants, > tenure and the joy of communication. > > I am not offering this observation as a proponent of Group 3, but > because the discussion is incomplete without reference to those who > would go along with the status quo, provided they get a cut. Group 3 is > not as organised, vociferous and iconoclastic as Group 1 but could > represent a greater long-term economic threat to Group 2, because they > don't need to smash the business models altogether. I could not disagree more! This topic has already been discussed in this Forum on the thread: "Journal Papers vs. Books: The Direct/Indirect Income Trade-off" http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0317.html as well as: "Journal Article Royalties: Reanimating the 'Faustian Bargain'" http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0380.html Chris is making a speculation here, namely, that if authors were offered a choice between open-access to their work and a share in the publisher's profits ("royalties") per article, not only would some authors choose the share in the profits over open-access, but that enough of them could do so to pose a greater economic threat to publishers than open access poses. I regret that I have to say that this is so far-fetched that one wonders why Chris (who is not advocating it) even mentions it. Let us sort out the logic and causality, making some rather liberal assumptions along the way: (1) The average gross revenue per published article is $2000. Out of that, $500 pays for peer review and at least another $1000 pays for all the other products/services provided by the publisher -- copy editing, mark-up, reference-linking, print-on paper, distribution, "marketing," "fulfilment"." There is some dispute about how much of this is really essential, over and above peer review, but in order even to begin making concrete sense of what Chris is conjecturing here, we will have to pretend as if the full $2000 "value-added" product is what is at issue. (2) Now let us make the very generous assumption that 40% of that average $2000, namely, $800, is profit. And let us make the further generous assumption that publishers would be willing to split that profit 50/50 with the author in order to preserve the toll-access model. (3) Does anyone really believe that authors would rather have $400 per published article in exchange for renouncing all the potential impact made possible by open access? http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers/online-nature01/ (4) Are we forgetting that it is not long ago that authors were PAYING $400 or more in order to purchase and (snail)-mail (likewise at their own expense) paper reprints to the would-be users who scanned Current Contents and wrote to request them? Indeed, Tom Walker's recommended strategy for achieving open access, the one that launched the American Scientist Forum, was based on an author payment of more than the above in exchange for open access, rather than in exchange for renouncing it! "Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?" http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0018.html Chris says of the special population he has in mind: "These academics do not feel that they are satisfactorily and sufficiently compensated by research grants, tenure and the joy of communication." Academics, whether contents or malcontents, apply for research grants and/or are subject to salary review annually. This determines the lion's share of their revenue. The principal criterion for both of these basic sources of revenue is research impact. http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/thes1.html Is Chris suggesting that the prospect of $400 per refereed article per year would be sufficient to offset whatever benefits the lost potential impact (because of toll-access) might have provided them in the form of grants and salary? But let us grant him even that far-fetched hypothesis, for the sake of argument. I now have a much more telling question about the causality and indeed the coherence of his conjecture: There are at least 20,000 refereed journals, publishing at least 2 million articles per year. If they really do average $800 profit per article, and publishers would be willing to split that with authors as a kickback to buy them off of providing open access to those articles by self-archiving them, then exactly what causal sequence is Chris imagining as getting us from HERE (toll-access, no profit-sharing) to THERE (toll-access, profit-sharing)? For there is certainly no incentive to share profits until the need arises. And the need would only arise if there were a palpable threat to revenues from self-archiving. At the moment, only physicists are self-archiving in any significant numbers. And there has been no loss of publisher revenue there yet, hence no pressure to buy those authors off. The BOAI http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ is dedicated to hastening and facilitating open access through self-archiving (as well as open-access journals). The BOAI's rationale for this is to enhance research access and impact. If BOAI succeeds in inducing authors to self-archive, they will have done it for that reason. Now let us pursue Chris's hypothetical scenario: This impact-driven self-archiving starts to threaten publisher revenue, so what do publishers do? My own hypothesis is that that they cut costs, downsize, phase out the inessentials, and eventually convert to open-access publishing, with the essential costs (perhaps no more than the $500 per paper cost of peer review) covered by institutions out of their annual $2000 windfall savings, per outgoing paper, instead of as access-tolls, per incoming paper. http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.2 What is Chris's alternative hypothesis? That instead of cutting costs, downsizing to the essentials, and converting to open-access, publishers will approach their authors with profit-sharing proposals? Which authors? For the ones that will already have brought the situation to a head will be the ones who did it in order to maximize the impact of and the access to their own research. Does Chris imagine that the offer of $400 per paper will change enough minds to make a difference? This is not even how Chris puts the alternatives. He implies that somehow the profit-sharing drive from authors is (already?) an independent force, and a bigger and more threatening one than the impact-maximizing drive! I rather doubt it. I think this is just another one of the incoherent bugbears that are being floated willy-nilly by those who would like to discourage researchers from self-archiving, or at least to keep them in that state of confusion and ignorance that has so far kept this optimal and inevitable outcome at bay, well past the time when it has become not only possible but readily reachable. Or it is simply the straightforward propagation of confusion, from not thinking things through. I am an optimist, and I think that whereas you can fool (or confuse) all of the researchers some of the time, and some of them all of the time, enough will come to their senses soon enough (with the help of the BOAI) to fast-forward us all to the optimal and inevitable -- open access -- at last. Amen. Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html or http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Discussion can be posted to: september98-forum@amsci-forum.amsci.org See also the Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess and the Free Online Scholarship Movement: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm