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

[Stevan Harnad]

On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 9:59 AM, Jan Velterop <velterop at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

I agree with Jan on this one -- i.e., option 2: a no-fault gold OA
refereeing charge, per submission, instead of a publication charge that
charges the refereeing of the rejected papers to the authors of the
rejected papers. -- But for this to work, green OA must  come first, in
order to make it possible to offload all publishing expenses other than
refereeing costs onto the distributed global network of green OA
institutional repositories. In fact I've said so, many times, in print:

*Among the many important implications of Houghton et al's (2009) timely
and illuminating JISC analysis of the costs and benefits of providing free
online access ("Open Access," OA) to peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific
journal articles one stands out as particularly compelling: It would yield
a forty-fold benefit/cost ratio if the world's peer-reviewed research were
all self-archived by its authors so as to make it OA. There are many
assumptions and estimates underlying Houghton et al's modelling and
analyses, but they are for the most part very reasonable and even
conservative. This makes their strongest practical implication particularly
striking: The 40-fold benefit/cost ratio of providing Green OA is an order
of magnitude greater than all the other potential combinations of
alternatives to the status quo analyzed and compared by Houghton et al.
This outcome is all the more significant in light of the fact that
self-archiving already rests entirely in the hands of the research
community (researchers, their institutions and their funders), whereas OA
publishing depends on the publishing community. Perhaps most remarkable is
the fact that this outcome emerged from studies that approached the problem
primarily from the standpoint of the economics of publication rather than
the economics of research. *

*Harnad, S. (2010) **No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity
Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed*<http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/>*.
D-Lib Magazine **16 (7/8)
<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july10/harnad/07harnad.html>*


Stevan Harnad
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