[GOAL] Re: Hybrid OA/subscription journals

Thu Jul 4 10:17:04 BST 2013

Jan:
I agree with almost everything you say. I'd only quibble with the statement
about the Big Deal, but that is a concept from the past.
In particular, the unbundling of journals is definitely something to
pursue. I hope altmetrics and OA accelerate that trend.
--Eric.

--Eric.

http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com

Google Voice: (626) 898-5415
Telephone:      (626) 376-5415
Skype: efvandevelde -- Twitter: @evdvelde
E-mail: eric.f.vandevelde at gmail.com

On Thu, Jul 4, 2013 at 1:15 AM, Jan Velterop <velterop at gmail.com> wrote:

> Eric,
>
> You talk about "market-distorting practices". The biggest
> market-distorting factor in a subscription/licence model is of course that
> the party who pays is not the party who choses (at least 'gold' models put
> the choice in the hands of those who can sensibly choose: the authors). The
> question that I have is whether it is right at all that peer-reviewed
> literature is subject to choice when it comes to unfettered availability.
> Should peer-reviewed literature not be regarded as a kind of
> 'infrastructural' provision, like the road network? Paid for out of common
> funds, to enable everyone to reach the knowledge they need or like to have?
>
> The BigDeal — the site-licence supreme — was intended for just such a
> purpose. A national (perhaps regional) 'infrastructural' provision of
> access to all peer-reviewed literature to all academics. Paid out of
> 'top-sliced' funds. Unfortunately, the wish to choose scuppered that idea.
> Rather than having access to everything, many librarians and their
> universities wanted to revert to selection of journals available
> electronically. Even where it meant paying the same, or even more, for a
> smaller selection of journals. I regard that as a historical mistake. In
> the modern world with technologies like the web at our disposal, selecting
> what should be available to researchers and students seems completely out
> of order; a remnant of an old order. Individual researchers and students
> should be enabled to decide what they need in terms of peer-reviewed
> literature, not having to rely solely on librarians and their local budgets.
>
> In my opinion notions like 'double dipping' and other denigrating comments
> about hybrid OA/subscription journals are not warranted. That said, I am no
> great fan of hybrid journals. Actually, I am no great fan of journals. They
> are a way of organising and stratifying the peer-reviewed literature that
> has had it's time. The article is the meaningful entity; the journal just a
> label that is attached to an article, like a branded clothes label to a
> jacket. Nobody would read (or not read) an article just because it is in a
> particular journal. Nobody would cite (or not cite) an article just because
> it is in a particular journal. Researchers worth their salt read and cite
> articles that are relevant to their research, irrespective of the properly
> peer-reviewed journal they are published in.
>
> Which brings me to your remark about bundling. A journal is a bundle, too.
>
> I see the journal disappear over time. Articles will more and more often
> appear in repositories of sorts, 'platforms' if you wish, such as arXiv and
> PLOS One. (These platforms, by the way, can lay claim to being 'journals' —
> daily accounts — much more than most so-called journals that are anything
> but. Indeed, PLOS One is called a 'journal', yet it is essentially
> different from most traditional journals). Efforts to bring back the
> situation as it was in the 1950's are futile and no more than rearguard
> battles.
>
> Jan
>
> On 3 Jul 2013, at 21:30, "Eric F. Van de Velde" <
> eric.f.vandevelde at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> GOAL mailing list
>>> GOAL at eprints.org
>>> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> GOAL mailing list
>> GOAL at eprints.org
>> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>>
>>
> _______________________________________________
> GOAL mailing list
> GOAL at eprints.org
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> GOAL mailing list
> GOAL at eprints.org
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20130704/83aed55e/attachment.html 