Comparing the average price per article of Gold OA today with the average subscription publisher revenue per article today is uninformative and misleading.<div><br></div><div>1. These are averages across many different forms of Gold OA: (i) subsidy- or subscription-based Gold OA (no author fee), (ii) hybrid subscription/Gold OA, (iii) Gold-only OA, (iv) junk Gold OA (no or next to no peer review).</div>
<div><br></div><div>2. They are averages across all journal qualities. </div><div><br></div><div>3. They are averages calculated at a time when subscriptions are still in the vast majority, and cannot be canceled until/unless their articles are accessible in some other way.</div>
<div><br></div><div>4. Hence not only do the (arbitrary) asking prices for Gold vary widely, but they vary widely in the quality and service they deliver.</div><div><br></div><div>5. Subscription journals vary too, but it is not at all clear (and indeed very unlikely) that the Gold subset today matches their quality distribution.</div>
<div><br></div><div>6. While un-cancellable subscriptions still prevail, Gold OA is just a supplement, not a substitute, it entails double-payment by institutions (subscriptions + Gold) and even double-dipping by publishers (for hybrid Gold).</div>
<div><br></div><div>7. The missing factor in all of this is the potential of mandatory Green OA to first provide OA at no extra cost, and once it reaches 100% globally, to make journals <i>cancellable</i>, so they are forced to cut costs by downsizing to peer-review alone.</div>
<div><br></div><div>8. Post-Green Gold OA will then be provided at a fair, sustainable price, paid (and not double-paid) out of a fraction of the institutional subscription cancellation savings.</div><div><br></div><div>None of this can be calculated on the basis of averaging the price per article of Gold today -- but we can be sure that the post-Green cost will be substantially lower than the average publisher revenue per article for subscriptions today, pre-Green.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Stevan Harnad<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 10:18 AM, David Prosser <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk" target="_blank">david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div>(Cross-posted)</div><div><br></div>The Economist has published another piece on open access publishing:<br>
<br><a href="http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21577035-open-access-scientific-publishing-gaining-ground-free-all" target="_blank">http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21577035-open-access-scientific-publishing-gaining-ground-free-all</a><br>
<br>I was struck by one paragraph in particular:<br><br><blockquote style="margin:0 0 0 40px;border:none;padding:0px">Outsell, a Californian consultancy, estimates that open-access journals generated $172m in 2012. That was just 2.8% of the total revenue journals brought their publishers (some $6 billion a year), but it was up by 34% from 2011 and is expected to reach $336m in 2015. The number of open-access papers is forecast to grow from 194,000 (out of a total of 1.7m publications) to 352,000 in the same period.</blockquote>
<br><br><div>By my reckoning this means that in 2012 the revenue breakdown was :</div><div><br></div><div>For Open Access = $890 per paper ($172m / 194k papers)</div><div>For Sub Access = $3,500 per paper ($6 billion / 1.7m papers) </div>
<div><br></div><div>If the 194,000 papers published in OA had been published in subscription journals the extra costs could have been around $500 million ((3500-890)x194000). If you believe that all of these papers would probably have been published whatever the business model you could recast this as the worldwide community having made a saving of $500 million.</div>
<div><br></div><div>If all 1.7m papers published in 2012 had been OA at $890 per paper the $6 billion a year business would shrink to a $1.5 billion a year business.</div><div><br></div><div>There are lots of assumptions here (not least that my maths are correct), but it is clear that </div>
<div><br></div><div>a) the direct costs of publishing in OA journals are current significantly lower than publishing in subscriptions journals</div><div><br></div><div>b) the average cost per paper in OA is significantly lower than the roughly £1,450 per article that represented the break-even point for the UK under which the UK would save money if we moved totally to OA</div>
<div><br></div><div>c) the average is much, much lower than the typical price being offered for 'hybrid' OA. </div><div><br></div><div>It would be very easy to construct an argument that the $890 per paper figure is not scaleable to all of journal publishing, but it is interesting that, at least for the moment, the figure is so low.</div>
<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><div><br></div><div>David</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><div><br></div><br></div></font></span></div><br>_______________________________________________<br>
GOAL mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:GOAL@eprints.org">GOAL@eprints.org</a><br>
<a href="http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal" target="_blank">http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal</a><br>
<br></blockquote></div><br></div>