[GOAL] Re: The dramatic growth of BioMedCentral's open access article processing charges

[Jan Velterop]

A big flaw in the way journals are financially sustained — true for Article Processing Charges (APCs) of OA journals as well as for subscriptions to pay-walled journals — is that the entire cost of publication is loaded solely on the published articles. That may seem logical, but a large proportion of a journal's cost is proportional with the number of submissions, not with the number of published articles. It follows that the rejection/acceptance ratio has a major effect on the cost. If the submissions rise, and the published articles don't, e.g. because a journal becomes more selective, the costs per accepted/published article increase. All the work done on a submitted paper that is eventually rejected will have to be paid out of income in respect of published articles, be it via APCs or subscriptions. In the case of APCs it means they would have to rise, unless they were too high to begin with.

There are two possibilities that I can think of here, at least for OA journals sustained by APCs:
1) Set the level of APCs according to rejection rates of the journal (e.g. of the previous year; there is bound to be a lag). This would logically mean increasing APCs for increasingly more selective journals;
2) Charge an APC per submission, irrespective of whether the article will be accepted or not (a bit like exam fees; you pay also if you fail).

In my view, 2) is logically the right solution, but perhaps not psycho-logically (and it has unintended consequences, too, which I won't go into right now). However, without submission fees, APCs that vary with selectiveness of the journal are pretty much inevitable. The differences may well become greater than they currently are.

Jan Velterop

On 28 Feb 2014, at 13:50, Heather Morrison <Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca> wrote:

> hi Jan,
> 
> Good question! No, I have not looked into whether BMC's rejection rates have increased.
> 
> Whether this would be an acceptable reason for increasing prices at all, or at a particular rate, is a different question.
> 
> For example, unlike a print-based journal with size constraints imposed by the need to bundle articles into mailable issues, an online open access journal can easily increase in scale with more submissions. PLOS ONE has demonstrated the potential for translating rapid growth in submissions to rapid journal growth, with no price increase, technological innovations, and a more than healthy surplus.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Heather Morrison
> 
> 
> On Feb 28, 2014, at 7:08 AM, "Frantsvåg Jan Erik" <jan.e.frantsvag at uit.no> wrote:
> 
>> Interesting numbers!
>>  
>> Have you investigated if some of this increase could be explained by an increased rejection rate? – this would be an acceptable explanation, in my opinion.
>>  
>> The suspicion is, of course, that this could be one result of e.g. the RCUK OA policy, which creates a less competitive market and better conditions for generating super-profits.
>>  
>> I think it was Guédon who asked why currency fluctuations always led to price increases … J
>>  
>> Best,
>> Jan Erik
>>  
>> Jan Erik Frantsvåg
>> Open Access adviser
>> The University Library of Tromsø
>> phone +47 77 64 49 50
>> e-mail jan.e.frantsvag at uit.no
>> http://en.uit.no/ansatte/organisasjon/ansatte/person?p_document_id=43618&p_dimension_id=88187
>> Publications: http://tinyurl.com/6rycjns
>>  
>>  
>>  
>>  
>> Fra: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] På vegne av Heather Morrison
>> Sendt: 28. februar 2014 00:54
>> Til: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
>> Emne: [GOAL] The dramatic growth of BioMedCentral's open access article processing charges
>>  
>> Thanks to the University of Ottawa's open sharing of their author fund data, I've been able to calculate that over the past few years there is evidence that BMC is raising prices at rates far beyond inflation (and far beyond what could be accounted for through currency fluctuations). 
>>  
>> Details are posted here:
>> http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2014/02/the-dramatic-growth-of-biomedcentral.html
>>  
>> Note that this data reflects BMC practices and cannot be generalized to open access publishing as a whole. Public Library of Science, for example, has achieved a 23% surplus in the same time frame without increasing their OA article processing charges at all.
>>  
>> best,
>>  
>> -- 
>> Dr. Heather Morrison
>> Assistant Professor
>> École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
>> University of Ottawa
>> Desmarais 111-02
>> 613-562-5800 ext. 7634
>> http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
>> Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca
>> 
>>  
>> _______________________________________________
>> 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/20140228/a30bb6bb/attachment-0001.html