[GOAL] Re: Elsevier (and other traditional publishers) and PLOS

Fri May 1 03:04:37 BST 2015

Heather

I think using the term "toll" when what we mean is "subscription" is quite limiting. There is always a toll charged or taken whatever the model used to diffuse scientific knowledge. The important question is not about toll or profit, it is about seeking an effective knowledge delivery system that is as close as possible to universal access to academic and scientific knowledge, while doing this relatively efficiently at the system level. Like anything else in our money-mediated society, there is a cost associated with achieving this objective. Several models are available, all with their own tolls.

PLoS charges tolls at the entry point in the form of Article Processing Charge while Elsevier charges tolls in the form of subscription. Both limit access at one end of the communication pipeline (to publish, or to read), both charge money. Hence, Elsevier and PLoS both are toll access publishers.

Everything being equal, between the two, the APC model is inherently more efficient as it more largely unleashes the $450 billion spent annually by governments the world over to support public research. However, it presents its own problems of equal access (that is, equal access to the capacity to publish equal quality papers) and is likely to perpetuate the North-South divide if no steps are taken.  

Gold with no APC is certainly also associated with large tolls, including resource allocation inefficiencies, and lack of sustainability which reduces the value of the published output (it takes a long time to build a reputation for a publication venue and papers in abandoned journals are less likely to be read over time). Individuals in the top 5% income bracket (e.g. university professors) producing journals is not a model of efficient allocation of public money. Finding long term sustainable income to pay for the rest of the personnel involved in APC-less gold also present some definitive challenges, sustainability being the toughest.

Hybrid, à la pièce, gold probably present the worse of all worlds as it is expensive, paid twice for, and very difficult to discover considering that publishers are packaging these papers among the restricted access material. These should be duplicated on separate parts of the publishers' website and their metadata freely harvestable by anyone, and the papers themselves mass downloadable. This would increase their value, and facilitate oversight. 

Green alas does not seem to save it all. On the Southampton repository, there are only some 7000-8000 peer-reviewed published papers which are available for download out of about 57,000 claimed peer-reviewed papers in the repository. For most of these 57,000 items, there is only fairly unequal quality and often incomplete metadata (what is the purpose of putting varying quality metadata in a repo if no associated paper is available is something I still have to understand), and frequently, when there is a paper, access is restricted to Southampton. Postscript files (.ps) are nice for technically inclined users but most ordinary users do not what to do with them and having PDF presenting only a cover page is only a loss of time. Sifting through this is time consuming, presents a huge toll in time, as the signal to noise ratio really is poor. This model takes its toll on the those who depose, and on those who are audacious enough to search in there. In my opinion, for what it's worth, Green in institutional repositories needs to be re-loaded with clean, curated, and useful documents, as currently it is mostly a mess that hides too few gems. 

If we had proper economic models, we would probably find that the social optimum at the moment for green is in the form of central "repositories" such as arXiv, CiteSeerX, PubMedCentral and Scielo. If we had hard data, we would certainly find that they cost very little to operate per available paper. These are smart models as they present considerable economies of scale, reasonable user friendliness and good discoverability, in addition to making their metadata available and making papers fairly convenient to retrieve. This model of access is great. 

Getting closer to universal access to public knowledge is not a simple question of tolls - it comprises subscription costs, publications costs, production costs, distribution cost, opportunity costs.

Eric Archambault

-----Original Message-----
From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Heather Morrison
Sent: April-29-15 8:42 PM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Elsevier (and other traditional publishers) and PLOS

Elsevier has much in common with Public Library of Science: both are scholarly publishing organizations, focused on science, and in my opinion both aggressively advocate sometimes for the best interests of scholarship, but often primarily for their own business interests.

If policy-makers are aiming to help traditional publishers like Elsevier survive in an open access environment (a goal I am not sure we all agree on), then in formulating policies it is important to keep in mind some very basic differences.

PLOS was born digital and open access and with a full commitment to open access. Traditional publishers like Elsevier have a legacy of works under copyright and a business model that involves selling rights to these works and integrated search services (rather a lot of money at that). In the case of Elsevier, this involves millions of works over a long period of time. Even if every single article Elsevier publishes from today on were open access, this would not impact previously published works. Unless I am missing something there is no business model for Elsevier to provide access to these previously published works free-of-charge. This means that traditional publishers like Elsevier are very likely to have to continue with a toll access business model even if they move forward with open access publishing. This is an essentially different environment from that of a full open access publisher like PLOS. It is not realistic to assume that a traditional publisher that must maintain a toll access environment will behave in the same way that born open access publishers do. PLOS was started from a commitment to providing works free-of-charge. Elsevier and publishers like Elsevier have thrived in a toll access environment, and will have to maintain a toll access environment. There will be far more pressure and incentive to revert to toll access for traditional publishers than for PLOS. This is why arguments along the lines that PLOS has been around for a while, therefore there are no problems with CC-BY, don't necessarily apply to a publisher like Elsevier.

Elsevier, unlike PLOS, does have its own suite of value-added services such as Science Direct and Scopus. When friends of PLOS say there is no reason not to grant blanket commercial rights to anyone downstream, I think it is important to remember that this represents the perspective of one type of publisher. Other journals and publishers either provide value added services themselves, or receive revenue from providers of such services, e.g. payments from journal aggregators. 

Note that while Elsevier has no incentive to provide access to previously published works free-of-charge, they are a green publisher and so authors from recent years can make their works published with Elsevier freely available through institutional archives. This is one thing green open access can achieve right now that gold OA cannot. I'd like to acknowledge that Stevan Harnad has been right on this point for many, many years. 

I'm still signed on for the Elsevier boycott, in case anyone is wondering:
http://thecostofknowledge.com/

best,

-- 
Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa
http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca

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