Annex 3
OPEN ACCESS AS A MODEL FOR SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION
SOME THOUGHTS FROM THE SOCIETY FOR ENDOCRINOLOGY
FEBRUARY 2003
OUR PERSPECTIVE
AS A
NOT-FOR-PROFIT
PUBLISHER
The Society for Endocrinology's charitable object
is the advancement of public education in endocrinology. Disseminating
research results between scholars is a direct fulfilment of this.
As a charity, we do not exist for the benefit of our members,
but for the "public" at large. This is consistent with
the fact that, as for most learned society publishers, the vast
majority of our authors and readers come from outside our membership.
Thus, although our membership is about 75% UK-based, only about
8% of institutional journal sales go to UK libraries and about
13% of submissions are from the UK.
The Society has historically derived a surplus
from its journal publishing activities, despite much lower prices,
and price rises, than many of its competitors. This has enabled
us to fund a range of activities supporting researchers in our
subject, from conferences with low or no registration fees, subsidised
training days and workshops to studentships and travel grants.
In our subject area, these activities have made a significant
difference to our discipline, particularly in the UK, in terms
of recruiting good researchers into the subject as postgraduates,
keeping them there as postdoctorate researchers, and enabling
them to improve the quality of their research by attending conferences
(our own and others for which we provide grants) and training
courses. The academic community has therefore clearly benefited
(the so-called "science dividend"), but there will have
been less benefit to the academic community outside the UK, and
this benefit is at the expense of the library budget.
There are steps that societies such as ours
can take to reduce their reliance on journal surpluses whilst
continuing to serve the academic community. However, this is likely
to involve mainly shifting costs from the library budget to other
budgets that can equally ill afford it, for instance if we charged
commercial prices for conferences. In addition, such steps can
only really apply to not-for-profit societies and do not address
the dysfunctionality of the market. Any viable new business model
needs to address the following points:
— The mismatch between funding for
research and funding for dissemination of its results, as represented
by library budgets. This mismatch is the root cause of the infamous
serials price spiral
— The lack of any connection between
the appeal of a journal to its end market (whether authors or
readers) and its price, which some publishers (but by no means
all) have capitalised on
Consortium licensing and Open Access
The two potential solutions that are mainly
being discussed are consortium licensing and Open Access. Consortium
licensing has the advantage that, in principle at least, there
is a straightforward route to it from the current model, and considerable
predictability for both publishers and librarians. However, it
does have disadvantages:
— Whilst it alleviates the current
problems, it does not address the root cause
— It requires substantial administrative
effort
— It disadvantages the smaller publishers,
many of whom are societies producing the leading journals in their
field, often at relatively low prices
— It usually ties the library in for
several years, reducing flexibility
OPEN ACCESS
AS A
POSSIBLE SOLUTION
The Open Access model posits that authors (or
their institutions/research grants) pay for their work to be published,
and that online access is free to all from the outset. This is
intuitively attractive to academics, who often feel that all scholarly
information should be freely available: as readers, they want
ease of access from any location, and as authors they want their
work to be disseminated as widely as possible. These expectations
are frustrated by a system that restricts access to the fraction
of journals that libraries can afford.
The mismatch between funding for research and
for its dissemination could be removed at a stroke if research
funding bodies included, as part of their research grants, funds
for authors to pay for the publication of their results.
The current mismatch between the price and quality
of journals would be directly under attack if an author's choice
of journal were influenced not only by the journal's perceived
prestige and quality but also by the publication costs. Any price
differentials would then be transparent to the researcher and
the market would force a link between price and quality.
Under the new model, publishers would sell a
service to authors. They would be judged by the extent to which
they maximised the exposure and credibility of the work they published,
and by how much added value they gave the work compared with authors
merely depositing their manuscripts on their institutions' web
sites, for example, or on a preprint server.
At the Society for Endocrinology, we have been
enthusiastic about the Open Access model for some time. In a 1999
research document we recommended "that the academic and publishing
communities begin taking action to move the funding of primary
research information away from the library purchase model and
towards the funding of dissemination via the research grant for
each project. This would both allow for funding of information
to keep pace with any increases or decreases in the funding of
research, and would also allow individual research groups to choose
where to submit their results in the light of both the scientific
quality and the cost-effectiveness of the services available."
OBSTACLES TO
OPEN ACCESS
In order for Open Access publishing to be viable,
charges to authors may well need be higher than many academics
would currently expect. They will almost certainly significantly
exceed the US $500 typically charged by the current experiments
using this model (such as BioMed Central or the New Journal of
Physics). However, as noted above, there will be greater transparency,
and competition between publishers for the best authors will drive
prices (and probably many publishers' profit margins) down. In
addition, the fact that the libraries will no longer have to buy,
store and provide access to these journals will presumably release
not just the former purchase costs, but also some of the overheads
associated with them
We need to take into account that the Open Access/author
pays model may not work for all subject areas or types of journal.
For instance, many articles in some clinical journals are based
on the authors' observations during their clinical work and have
no research grants associated with them. How would these papers/journals
be funded? If such papers were no longer published, clinical practice
and patient care would clearly suffer. In addition, review journals
are clearly not susceptible to the "author pays" model.
The major obstacle in the case of basic research
journals seems to be how we get from here to there. For Open Access
to succeed there will need to be a global culture change. Funding
bodies around the world will need to become willing to include
an allowance for publication fees in their research grants, and
publishers will need to be willing to adopt the new model. It
is difficult to see how this can be effected piecemeal; an international,
co-ordinated approach seems to be needed, which is likely to be
difficult to achieve. All parties have grounds for being reluctant,
nervous and defensive. We believe, however, that as partners in
support of scientific and scholarly research, it is in our interests
to work together to find and adopt the most sustainable and most
cost effective model.
As we stated earlier, we have been enthusiastic
about this model for some years already. As a learned society,
we consider ourselves to be part of the academic community, not
an external supplier. We already make substantial amounts of information
available free on our web site (www.endocrinology.org), but it's
a fact of life that there are major costs associated with providing
any kind of quality service, especially if we are to develop it
constantly to meet new needs and standards, and we need enough
funds from somewhere to cover this.
Our "back of an envelope" calculation
of the likely cost of submission and publication via Open Access
is £150-200 per article for submission and £900-1,200
for publication. Of course, some individuals or institutions would
still want paper subscriptions. As much of the origination costs
would be covered by the submission and publication fees, the print
price is likely to be more than the current run-on costs, but
a fraction of current institutional prices. We had assumed that
there would be resistance to the level of submission and publication
fees mentioned above, but recent conversations (for instance with
Fred Friend at the ALPSP/OSI Open Access meeting in October) indicate
that this may not be so. We had also assumed that, as a small
learned society, we would need to follow rather than lead, but
if there is scope for a national (or better still, international)
trial project, then perhaps the learned societies have a bigger
role to play.
Sue Thorn (Executive Director) and Steve Byford
(Publications Manager), Society for Endocrinology.
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