[GOAL] Re: Elsevier, Flip your journals to Gold OA and/or offer an acceptable Hybrid Model

[Graham Triggs]

On 18 December 2013 12:47, <christian.gutknecht at ub.unibe.ch> wrote:

> 1. Flip your journals to Gold OA. Start with high ranked journals, because
> as you know most researchers still care. Although the true cost of
> publishing remains unclear (http://doi.org/kxz), I think it's safe to say,
> that with an APC between $1500 and $3000 you still can make solid profit.
> Probably not as much as with the subscription model, but still reasonable.
> And if you really have a high ranked journal you can indeed increase the
> price to whatever the demand on researcher side will support.
>
> Others publisher are doing it:
> http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/PressRelease/pressReleaseId-109721.html
> Why not Elsevier?
>

Every single one of those are association / society journals. So this
wouldn't be a commercial decision by a publisher, but a political one by
the association / society. After all, you can't really advocate open
access, if your own journals aren't.

Simply making a hybrid journal into open access only would not be
sustainable, unless a significant proportion of the articles are already
utilising the open access option.


> 2. Offer an acceptable hybrid model. Avoid double dipping on an
> institutional/consortium/national level (not on a global level as you do
> now). We explicitly requested Elsevier to do so in Switzerland. However

Elsevier refused to come up with a solution that reduces our subscription
> price according the amount of paid hybrid of our authors. Elsevier argued,
> subscription and OA are two independent things and shouldn't be mixed
> financially. This might be true for Elsevier, where local sales manager
> obviously are not aware, what's going on about OA in the own company. But
> it isn't true for any institution which has to care about its budget.


I realise local budgetary issues are a concern. And if you do not have
outside funding for research that includes the publication cost of an OA
option, then making use of an OA option is going to be impossible whilst
you are paying a subscription.

But this is not "double dipping". It's just a question of institution /
national affordability.


> How
> can an institution justify additional hybrid costs in a budget if only a
> tiny share will immediately come back with reduced global list prices.
> This may temporary work in UK, but I¹m quite sure they soon will realize
> that Hybrid without reducing the direct subscription cost is not
> sustainable.
>

In theory, Open Access publishing ought to be justifiable in it's own
right, in terms of doing the right thing and maximizing the benefit of
funding in research.

Where the money comes from, how you allocate funds, etc. are a different
matter, and it may well be that given the funding that you have, an Open
Access option may only be an illusion of a choice.

But Hybrid is reducing the direct subscription cost - for Elsevier, it
appears to be a very minor activity in their hybrid journals, so it is
having minimal effect. But if you look at Embo Journal, various Springer
hybrid journals - there are documented cases of the subscription costs not
just increasing by a lesser amount, but actually reducing in price.


> And yes, other publishers are doing it:
> http://www.rsc.org/publishing/librarians/goldforgold.asp
> Why not Elsevier?
>

The publishing arm of a royal society. So, it is a political decision to
expedite the transition to Open Access.

And you are right, there is no reason why Elesvier couldn't use the
subscription income as a limited promotion to drive the adoption of Open
Access.

(Note that under this model, as Open Access publishing increases, the
subscription amount and the subsidy for next year's OA publishing would
decrease. So the each year's expenditure would be made up of a decreasing
amount of subscription, and an increasing amount of Open Access APC
payments).

There is no reason why they can't offer such a promotion, but there is also
no reason - for them - why they should. That isn't just an issue about
revenue / profit either - there will be agreements in place that may make
this tricky, there is investment and re-organisation that would be needed
to cope with the transition, and then there are still people questioning
trust of paying to publish instead of paying to read.

Whilst we are all very vocal about wanting Open Access, it still doesn't
quite translate to the entire community just yet.

G
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20131219/7b1b6596/attachment.html