[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price?

Sat Jan 26 23:18:17 GMT 2013

hi Marcin,

On 26-Jan-13, at 9:09 AM, Marcin Wojnarski wrote:

> Heather,
> I'm curious about your final note that CC-BY is not advisable for  
> humanities. Why is it so? What's so different in HSS publications  
> compared to, say, biology or mathematics where CC-BY is a "gold  
> standard"? What other license is most recommended in humanities?  
> Thanks.

Thank you for raising the question, Marcin. I do not agree that CC-BY  
is, or ought to be, a gold standard for publication in any discipline.  
While CC-BY superficially appears to be the embodiment of the BOAI  
definition of open access, a careful reading of the legal code  
(recommended, it's not that long) illustrates that they are not the  
same. For example, none of the CC licenses are specific to open access  
in the sense of "free of charge". CC-BY is a weak and problematic  
license for open access. It is a means by which a licensor can waive  
certain rights under copyright which places no obligation at all on  
the licensor. I can post a CC-BY work today - behind a paywall, if I  
like - then tomorrow take it down and replace it with the same work  
except All Rights Reserved. This is one of the reasons why I consider  
it unwise to pursue open access publishing without open access  
archiving. That is, if all of the articles published as open access  
are archived in repositories (preferably more than one), this is a  
much more sustainable open access scenario than open access publishing  
on its own.

Because of the weakness of CC-BY, I do not recommend this license for  
journals or authors. If a few journals use this approach this is much  
less problematic than if it becomes a standard. For example, if all of  
the works in PubMedCentral were CC-BY, then a commercial company could  
copy the entire database in order to sell it (behind a paywall if they  
like, as CC-BY does not prohibit this) and then lobby the U.S.  
government to eliminate funding for the public version produced by the  
NIH. Currently, the fact that the NIH policy only covers public access  
(fair use), not CC-BY, means that there is no incentive for a company  
to do this. If in the future the works in PMC are covered by different  
licenses it will be more difficult to duplicate the whole than it  
would be if most or all of the works were CC-BY. If all of the  
articles in PMC are in different PMC international archives, then  
ongoing OA is more secure. Similarly, if all of the articles in PMC  
are also available through the author's institutional repositories,  
then even a commercial PMC takeover assuming all works are CC-BY could  
be countered effectively through this other source.

In addition to the dangers of CC-BY as a default for open access, for  
many disciplines there are other reasons why CC-BY can be problematic.  
CC-BY is sometimes incompatible with research ethics. This is likely  
not a concern for mathematics, but will be a major concern in some  
areas of social sciences and humanities. For example, Sage publishes  
two journals in the areas of action research / participatory action  
research. In this type of research, the researcher acts as a  
facilitator and consultant; the actual research leadership as well as  
most of the content is provided by the participants. With this kind of  
research, it is not ethical for the researcher to give away rights to  
use the results for commercial purposes to any 3rd party with no  
requirement to seek permission. This is what CC-BY does. Those who  
advocate for CC-BY like to point to the positive potential for  
scholarship, but we need to keep in mind that CC-BY allows a  
commercial company to do things like take photos from scholarly  
articles and put them in image databases to sell for commercial  
purposes to whoever will pay the price. It is good to see that OASPA  
is now recognizing this issue by indicating that not all elements of a  
CC-BY article need be CC-BY (see the latest GOAL post by OASPA on  
this). Note that I am not convinced that it is ethical to give the  
results of this kind of research to a commercial company to sell for  
their own profit, regardless of the license used; this is contrary to  
the spirit of this whole type of research.

In many areas of the social sciences and humanities, precise  
expression is important to the author. This may be a very different  
situation from biology and mathematics. When words are changed in a  
derivative, this can impact both the meaning and the author's  
reputation if a derivative is cited. CC-BY allows for derivatives and  
requires attribution - which means that an author could be incorrectly  
cited for a derivative work. The possibility of inaccuracy in  
derivatives and subsequent citation of derivatives is an element that  
biologists and mathematicians might want to consider before adopting  
CC-BY as a standard.

Finally, it is premature to say that CC-BY is considered a standard by  
any discipline. Most publishing in virtually every field is still toll  
access. Most OA journals don't use CC licenses at all, and those that  
do don't necessarily use CC-BY. It is true that a few large publishers  
use CC-BY and advocate for this as a standard. However, I argue that  
size does not define the best approach. It is highly likely that the  
number of scholars at a small journal that does not use CC-BY  
represents the same number of scholars giving serious thought to  
licensing questions as were involved at the larger publishers.

For more detail please see my blogpost, "a simple definition for open  
access: a proposal to open the discussion". I argue that part of the  
problem is actually the BOAI definition, and it might be better to  
abandon this in favour of Suber's brief definition: "Open-access (OA)  
literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most  
copyright and licensing restrictions"
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2013/01/a-simple-definition-for-open-access_8.html

best,

Heather Morrison
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com≠

>
> Marcin
>
> On 01/25/2013 11:32 PM, Heather Morrison wrote:
>> Some reflections on the Sage OPEN $99 per article news
>>
>> Sridar Gutam on the GOAL list has pointed out that even this APF,  
>> for a scholar from India, is far too high a price. Even in the  
>> West, I hear that there are rumblings on HSS listservs that  
>> scholars are up in arms about what looks like an attempt to shift  
>> the costs to them, personally. This could be a downside of a cost  
>> this low.
>>
>> Some reflections on whether for-profit at $99 is realistic - see  
>> Gary Daught's blog post for details on the numbers I'm referring to:
>> https://oaopenaccess.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/article-processing-charges-reduced-to-99-on-sage-open-humanities-and-social-sciences-mega-journal/ 
>> #comment-1872
>>
>> Let’s think a little bit about the work involved and how this  
>> might relate to costs. 1,400 article submissions over the course of  
>> a year, assuming 200 business days per year, amounts to 7 article  
>> submissions per day. 160 published articles means .8 articles  
>> completed per day.
>>
>> How long would it take a managing editor to process 7 article  
>> submissions per day? Some would be immediately rejected as out of  
>> scope or so clearly of poor quality that they aren’t worth sending  
>> out for peer review. With an automated submissions process, there  
>> is some work involved up to the decision point, then often the  
>> rejection can be completed with an automated e-mail reply.
>>
>> Less than one published article per day, even with a high rejection  
>> rate, should not be a huge task for a PLoS ONE-like publish-if- 
>> it’s-good-research and DIY copyediting approach.
>>
>> At $395 / article = $64,000 / year, this should be a fair amount of  
>> money for staffing and overhead – it’s not even clear to me that  
>> this kind of volume would be a full-time position.
>>
>> If Sage OPEN were to increase its acceptance rate – perhaps by  
>> adding staff capable of dealing with a wider range of subjects,  
>> disciplines, languages – then it could benefit from cost  
>> efficiencies. If the acceptance rate were 1,000, at $99 / article,  
>> that’s just under $100,000 per year. Publishing 5 articles per  
>> day, when the publisher’s staff is not actually doing any of the  
>> editing, peer review, copyediting, etc., seems quite doable. Hire a  
>> Managing Editor with some academic background (perhaps a Master’s  
>> Degree?) at $50,000 per year, a junior assistant at $20,000 per  
>> year to deal with invoicing, factor in 25% overhead = total costs  
>> of $87,500, for a profit of $12,500 or an operating profit margin  
>> at 12.5%. Not bad - most of us wouldn't mind at all if our pension  
>> funds were paying out at 12.5% per year.
>>
>> I’m not saying this is what this costs, but it does look like the  
>> idea of attractive profits at $99 processing costs per article is  
>> something we should be having a close look at.
>>
>> As a final note – I find this interesting because of the PRICE.  
>> However, because Sage OPEN uses CC-BY which I consider to be  
>> frequently inadvisable in the social sciences and humanities due to  
>> concerns about research ethics, third party rights, and reasonable  
>> concerns about accuracy and author reputation when derivatives are  
>> allowed, I would NOT advise anyone to publish in Sage OPEN. If Sage  
>> opens their minds about licensing alternatives I’d be much more  
>> interested.
>>
>> best,
>>
>> Heather G. Morrison
>> The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
>> http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
>
>
> -- 
> Marcin Wojnarski, Founder and CEO, TunedIT
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>
> TunedIT - Online Laboratory for Intelligent Algorithms
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