[GOAL] Re: Comparing Revenues for OA and Subscription Publishing

[Stevan Harnad]

On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 5:32 AM, David Prosser <david.prosser at rluk.ac.uk>
 wrote:

Stevan makes a central assumption that is misleading....  It is certainly
> true that in a mixed economy institutions will pay both subscriptions and
> publication fees...  But Stevan implies that this is for the same content.
>  With the exception of some hybrid OA papers (which are in the minority)
> this is not the case.... OA is taking thousands of papers out of the
> subscription model and therefore reducing price pressures on subscriptions.
>  Put simply, if these OA papers had been published in subscription journals
> then subscription prices would have been higher.  (This is obvious if you
> think what would have happened if those 190k OA papers had been in
> subscription journals - do we think that the publishers would have just
> absorbed the costs and accepted reduced profits/surpluses?) So, even in a
> transition period it is clear that there are cost savings in OA Gold
> publishing....
>

Here (as in his advice to authors to worry about the double-talk hedging
the publisher's statement that "Immediate posting and dissemination of
accepted author manuscripts is allowed to personal websites, to
institutional repositories, or to arXiv") I think David Prosser is quite
simply wrong.

"190K Gold OA" articles sounds like a lot, but as we know ""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)."

It is a safe bet that (apart from the hybrid Gold minority) those 190K
articles are not articles from the must-see journals to which most
institutions have been reduced by the un-affordability of subscriptions.
Those are the subscription journals at the heart of the serials crisis.
They are the ones that institutions must keep buying in for their users,
regardless of how many papers are being published as Gold OA in other
journals. They can only be cancelled when their content is accessible by
other means. (And it is that other means on which I think all efforts
should be focussed.)

Nor is it clear why David imagines that those must-see journals would lower
their subscription prices because 190K articles published in other journals
happen to be Gold OA.

The double-payment is not to the same publisher (except in the case of
hybrid Gold, in which case it is also double-dipping): The institution
continues to pay, undiminished, for the must-see subscription journals it
can afford to buy in, and, on top of that, the institution's authors pay
for whatever Gold they are foolish enough to pay-to-publish, instead of
providing cost-free Green *(if their motivation was just to provide OA*).
(I hope David will not reply "but they are paying for it with RCUK funds,
not subscription funds!": Payment to publishers -- not necessarily the same
one -- is doubled no matter whose pocket it is being poached from, as long
as subscriptions still have to be paid: that's what "double-payment" means.
The payers and payees may both differ, but any Gold payment is over and
what is already being paid via subscriptions.)

Now what is really behind all of this? Two motivations, one innocent but
naive (David's, for subscription price reductions, and a migration of
authors from subscription to Gold journals), the other not so innocent, and
certainly not naive (publishers', to preserve current revenue streams, come
what may, via pricing strategy and embargoes). It is greatly in the
interest of publishers and their current revenue streams -- whether they
are subscription, pure-Gold, hybrid-Gold or junk-Gold publishers -- to have
the research world waste yet another decade inching toward Gold (on
publishers' terms and timetable) instead of first mandating cost-free Green
universally.

And inching it is, if you look at the actual Gold OA proportions and growth
rate, especially among the must-have journals indexed by Thomson-Reuters
ISI.

An update of Gold proportions and growth rates will be published soon, but
this older one from Springer is still pretty much on-target:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Bjorkspring.png

And I've never said "we should not discuss Gold OA at all until we have
100% Green OA."

I have consistently been saying that "we should not discuss [or pay for]
Gold OA at all *until we have first mandated Green OA*."

Apologies to those who are not interested in the details, but they are
all-important, when it comes to the question of how to invest our time and
money (and hopes) regarding Green and Gold.

The good news is that when it comes to rights-agreements from publishers
that state "*Immediate posting and dissemination of accepted author
manuscripts is allowed to personal websites, to institutional repositories,
or to arXiv*" we can (and should) all ignore the hedging details and go
ahead and provide un-embargoed Green OA immediately.

Stevan Harnad

On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 4:37 AM, David Prosser <david.prosser at rluk.ac.uk>
 wrote:

> I'm sorry Stevan, but [Elsevier] have not answered all the questions in a
> single sentence - they have attached a large number of conditions to that
> sentence.  The full answer only comes from reading the entire policy.  We
> may not like the conditions, may believe that they are gibberish and even
> unenforceable (although that's easy for Stevan and me to say as we will
> never be on the receiving end of the enforcement), but let's not try to
> pretend that they don't exist.
>

On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 5:32 AM, David Prosser <david.prosser at rluk.ac.uk>wrote:

>     Stevan has been consistent over the years in his message that we
> should not discuss Gold OA at all until we have 100% Green OA.  And yet
> some of us still insist on doing so!
>
> My point was to highlight a particular data point for 2012.  Are there
> quibbles? Of course.  Does it give us the whole picture?  Of course not.
>  But for those interested in the transition mechanism it is, as I say, a
> data point.
>
> But Steven makes a central assumption that is misleading - his point 6.
>  It is certainly true that in a mixed economy institutions will pay both
> subscriptions and publication fees (where such fees exist).  But Steven
> implies that this is for the same content.  With the exception of some
> hybrid OA papers (which are in the minority) this is not the case.  One
> paper published in an OA journal is, literally, one less paper in a
> subscription journal.   All the librarians on the list know that one of the
> justifications for subscription and big deal price rises is increasing
> volume of content - either within current journals or through the launch of
> new journals.
>
> Naturally, there is not a simple one-to-one relationship between volume
> increase and price increase, but there is a strong relationship.  OA is
> taking thousands of papers out of the subscription model and therefore
> reducing price pressures on subscriptions.  Put simply, if these OA papers
> had been published in subscription journals then subscription prices would
> have been higher.  This is substitution, not addition.  (This is obvious if
> you think what would have happened if those 190k OA papers had been in
> subscription journals - do we think that the publishers would have just
> absorbed the costs and accepted reduced profits/surpluses?)
>

On 4 May 2013, at 14:39, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>
> Comparing the average price per article of Gold OA today with the average
> s=
> ubscription publisher revenue per article today is uninformative and
> mislea=
> ding.
>
> 1. These are averages across many different forms of Gold OA: (i) subsidy-
> =
> or subscription-based Gold OA (no author fee), (ii) hybrid
> subscription/Gol=
> d OA, (iii) Gold-only OA, (iv) junk Gold OA (no or next to no peer review).
>
> 2. They are averages across all journal qualities.
>
> 3. They are averages calculated at a time when subscriptions are still in
> t=
> he vast majority, and cannot be canceled until/unless their articles are
> ac=
> cessible in some other way.
>
> 4. Hence not only do the (arbitrary) asking prices for Gold vary widely,
> bu=
> t they vary widely in the quality and service they deliver.
>
> 5. Subscription journals vary too, but it is not at all clear (and indeed
> v=
> ery unlikely) that the Gold subset today matches their quality
> distribution=
> .
>
> 6. While un-cancellable subscriptions still prevail, Gold OA is just a
> supp=
> lement, not a substitute, it entails double-payment by institutions
> (subscr=
> iptions + Gold) and even double-dipping by publishers (for hybrid Gold).
>
> 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, t=
> o make journals cancellable, so they are forced to cut costs by downsizing
> =
> to peer-review alone.
>
> 8. Post-Green Gold OA will then be provided at a fair, sustainable price,
> p=
> aid (and not double-paid) out of a fraction of the institutional
> subscripti=
> on cancellation savings.
>
> None of this can be calculated on the basis of averaging the price per
> arti=
> cle of Gold today -- but we can be sure that the post-Green cost will be
> su=
> bstantially lower than the average publisher revenue per article for
> subscr=
> iptions today, pre-Green.
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
>
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