[GOAL] Re: Hybrid OA/subscription journals — double talk

Wed Jul 3 21:30:20 BST 2013

Jan:
I agree with you that pricing journals for a publisher is complicated, at
least when looking from the inside out. But that is no different from any
other supplier of a product. The problem with the academic journal market
is price transparency.

With Hybrid Gold OA publishers essentially tell us to trust them to do the
right thing. The problem is that the market is already so distorted because
of other business practices that there is no way for buyers to check they
are doing the right thing.

Hybrid Gold OA is just one other part of market-distorting practices, which
include:

1. Site licenses
    a) They force a university to make uniform decisions for a large and
diverse group, rather than let individuals decide what exactly they need,
which would be a far more realistic indicator of usefulness of a journal
than impact factor or surveys. It forces universities to buy more than they
need.
    b) Publishers try to hide the costs of journals through nondisclosure
clauses in contracts, thereby reducing transparency. It is impossible for
universities to evaluate how good a negotiator their library is, as there
is no way to compare the results with other universities and libraries.

2. Bundling
    a) Publishers use the market power of one journal to force universities
to subsidize new and marginal journals.
    b) Forces universities to subscribe to more than they need,
exacerbating 1.a)
    c) It decreases price transparency, exacerbating 1.b)

3. Consortial deals
    a) Again, this is a strategy to make universities buy more than they
need, exacerbating 1.a)
    b) Decrease price transparency, exacerbating 1.b)

All of these practices make it impossible to assess prices. Their
complexity increases the total cost at the publisher's end. It increases
the administrative cost at the university's end. And, this market cannot
operate without a plethora of middlemen, each of which add administrative
overhead and profit margins.

I have no doubt there are many people among publishers who work hard and
try to do right. But, there is no way of knowing. In this context, Hybrid
Gold is impossible to support.

--Eric.

http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com
Twitter: @evdvelde

Telephone:      (626) 376-5415
E-mail: eric.f.vandevelde at gmail.com

On Tue, Jul 2, 2013 at 10:24 AM, Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'll leave it to others to reply to the many questionable details below.
> Let me just say that "double-dipping," is not motive term but a very clear,
> objective one (though it might well give rise to some emotions!): It means
> being paid twice for the same product.
>
> And that's precisely what happens with hybrid-Gold OA: The same publisher
> is paid twice for the very same article: once by subscribing institutions,
> once by the author. To ask people to think of this as "two different
> journals" is double-talk.
>
> On Tue, Jul 2, 2013 at 10:38 AM, Jan Velterop <velterop at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hybrid journals – journals that combine toll access to some articles with
>> open access to others – do not generally enjoy a good press. Terms such as
>> 'double-dipping' are frequently used. This is not justified, as a general
>> rule.
>>
>> The difficulty is that even a basic understanding of how a subscription
>> system works is often lacking outside (and even sometimes inside echelons
>> of) the publishing community. For example, deciding on the price of
>> subscriptions depends on a number of prior assumptions. There are possibly
>> more than these three, but they are important ones:
>> 1) how many subscriptions do we expect to be able to sell;
>> 2) how many submissions will we get and how many of those will be
>> accepted for publication (i.e. what will the costs be); and
>> 3) what margins can we expect to contribute to overheads and profit (or
>> surplus, in the case of a not-for-profit publisher).
>>
>> Typically, a publisher will have a portfolio of journals of which some do
>> well, some just break even, and some make a loss if all costs, including
>> overheads, are fully allocated. Hybrid journals will be found in all three
>> categories. So what does 'double-dipping' mean? Are loss-making hybrid
>> journals 'half-dipping'? Is 'double-half-dipping' — in the case of those
>> loss making journals — just 'single dipping'? Does it even make sense to
>> think in those terms?
>>
>> I think not. If a rebate on the subscription price is expected for a
>> hybrid journal with OA articles in it, would one also expect to pay a
>> premium on the subscription price of a loss-making hybrid journal? The
>> objective way to look at it is to see the subscription price as the price
>> to be paid for the non-OA articles that are published in a hybrid journal,
>> simply ignoring the OA articles (which are freebies, to the subscriber).
>> That subscription price may be perceived as low or high — whether or not
>> expressed in subscription price per non-OA article — but that is what a
>> subscription to a hybrid journal is: a subscription to the non-OA content.
>> Incidentally, comparing subscription prices per article (p/a) across a
>> library collection will show a very wide range, and the inclusion or
>> exclusion of hybrid journals is not likely to make any difference
>> whatsoever in the distribution of p/a in that range.
>>
>> It may be helpful to think of a hybrid journal as twin journals sharing
>> the same title, Editor, Editorial Board and editorial policy: one
>> subscription-based, and one OA.
>>
>> The OA articles in a hybrid journal are just as much OA as in any OA
>> journal as long as they give the reader/user the same rights (of access and
>> re-use), i.e. as long as they are covered by a licence such as the Creative
>> Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) and not the CC Attribution
>> Non-Commercial License (CC-BY-NC). Applying CC-BY-NC licences, which does
>> happen, is likely to be a sign of insecurity on the part of a publisher
>> (hanging on to a 'control' element that is wholly inappropriate for OA) or
>> of a lack of understanding as to what the purpose of open access actually
>> is.
>>
>> As said, hybrid journals do not generally enjoy a good press, but I have
>> heard positive comments about them as well in the scientific community.
>> Those relate to the notion that the editorial policy (the
>> acceptance/rejection policy) of hybrid journals is not influenced by the
>> potential financial contribution coming from APCs, where the 'open choice'
>> is given as an option only after the article has passed peer review and is
>> accepted (which typically the point where the option is presented to the
>> author). I don't think acceptance and rejection policies of any respectable
>> OA journal are influenced by the prospect of authors paying anyway, and I
>> certainly don't know of any such practices at the OA publishers I am
>> familiar with, but it is an extra assurance hybrid journals offer that that
>> is indeed not the case for them.
>>
>> In any event, 'double-dipping' is an emotive term the use of which is not
>> conducive to a rational debate.
>>
>> Jan Velterop
>> _______________________________________________
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>> GOAL at eprints.org
>> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>>
>
>
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