[GOAL] North, South, and Open Access: The view from Egypt with Mahmoud Khalifa

Wed Apr 25 16:56:06 BST 2018

I agree with Ricky and Hilda that the "most journals charge no APCs" is
misleading. It's been around for years and has worried me. Assuming the
normal power-law distribution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law) the
following are by statistical definition true:

* most journals have small volumes
* most papers are published in a few large volume journals

That's true regardless of whether they are Open Access or not.

I suspect that the "most journals have no APCs " are in the long tail of
the distribution. If you correlate volume of articles against APC you will
resolve this.

Now ... for speculation

The long tail of small journals are likely to be niche journals in some
way. There are exceptions such as the J Machine Learning Research which is
APC-less, and CC BY  run by the goodwill of the community. That used to be
fairly common. (I used to be the treasurer of a scholarly society and all
work was voluntary). When all the articles are from and to a smallish
community of practice it makes sense. But I suspect that when a journal
gets to a over a few hundred articles a year then most organizations need
to pay staff to manage the process. Maybe not much. But it's a temptation
to solve the admin by paying.

Then the options are:
* subsidise from elsewhere (University, or in my society's case revenue
from events).
* membership scheme - I believe arXiv is subsidized through a membership
scheme.
* charge authors
* charge readers

And so most large journals need to raise income.

P.

On Wed, Apr 25, 2018 at 3:46 PM, Richard Poynder <richard.poynder at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Heather,
>
> Personally, I think that any statement that says that most OA journals do
> not charge an APC needs to be set alongside the following blog post by
> Hilda Bastian:
>
> http://blogs.plos.org/absolutely-maybe/2018/04/02/a-
> reality-check-on-author-access-to-open-access-publishing/
>
> Extract:
>
> 'Technically, the “most journals don’t charge authors” statement could
> well be true. Most open access journals may not charge authors. The source
> that’s used to support the claim is generally DOAJ – the Directory of Open
> Access Journals. One of the pieces of meta-data for journals in DOAJ is
> whether or not the journal levies an APC – an author processing charge for
> an open access (OA) publication.
>
> But I think this is a data framing that’s deeply misleading. And it does
> harm. As long as people can argue that there are just *so many* options
> for fee-free publishing, then there will be less of a sense of urgency
> about eliminating, or at least drastically reducing, APCs. As Kyle
> Siler and colleagues show in the field of global health research, the APC
> is adding a new stratification of researchers globally, between those who
> can afford open publishing in highly regarded journals, and those who
> can’t.'
>
> Richard
>
>
> On 25 April 2018 at 15:16, Heather Morrison <Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca>
> wrote:
>
>> Correction: Chris, you have the proportion of OA journals with APCs in
>> reverse. Data and calculations follow.
>>
>> 73% of fully OA journals (about three quarters) do not charge APCs.
>>
>> To calculate go to DOAJ Advanced Search, select journals / articles
>> select journals, and click on Article Processing Charges. As of today,
>> April 25, 2108, the response to the DOAJ question of whether a journal has
>> an APC is:
>>
>> 8,250: no (73%)
>> 2,979 yes (26%)
>> 65: no information (.5%)
>>
>> Total # of journals in DOAJ: 11,294
>> (Note rounding error)
>>
>> OA journals with no APCs have a variety of business models. Direct and
>> indirect sponsorship appears to be common. For example in Canada our Social
>> Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) has an Aid to Scholarly
>> Journals Program. Journals can apply for grants; these applications go
>> through a journal-level peer review process. This program has been in place
>> for many years. Originally all supported journals were subscription-based.
>> The trend is towards open access, with many journals now fully OA and all
>> or almost all have free access after an embargo period.
>>
>> I recommend this model as a means of support for open access journals
>> that also ensure high-level academic quality control. Regions with no
>> existing program in place would probably find it easier to start with an OA
>> requirement than those with legacy programs like SSHRC.
>>
>> Local journals are important to ensure publishing venues are available
>> for research of local significance. Canadian law, politics, culture,
>> history, local environmental and social conditions are important matters to
>> study, but not high priority for readers outside Canada. Articles on these
>> topics risk rejection from international journal due to selection based on
>> reader interest rather than the quality or importance of the work.
>>
>> Local publishing does not exclude global scholarly engagement. Canada has
>> a large francophone population; our researchers in language, culture, and
>> history often work with scholars in West Africa, France, Haiti, Belgium,
>> etc.
>>
>> For Canada's arctic researchers, "local" has geographic rather than local
>> significance.
>>
>> This is reflected in authorship and editorial boards. A journal hosted
>> and with editorial leadership in Canada will often include international
>> content and reviewers. Journals produced locally can be read anywhere,
>> especially if they are open access.
>>
>> best,
>>
>> Heather Morrison
>> Associate Professor, University of Ottawa School of Information Studies
>> Sustaining the Knowledge Commons - a SSHRC Insight Project
>> Sustainingknowledgecommons.org
>> -------- Original message --------
>> From: Chris Zielinski <chris at chriszielinski.com>
>> Date: 2018-04-25 6:38 AM (GMT-05:00)
>> To: richard.poynder at cantab.net
>> Cc: goal at eprints.org
>> Subject: Re: [GOAL] North, South, and Open Access: The view from Egypt
>> with Mahmoud Khalifa
>>
>> Richard,
>>
>> In this context, you may be interested in a post I recently submitted to
>> the Healthcare Information for All (HIFA) list in the context of a HIFA
>> discussion of this topic:
>>
>> ---------- Original Message ----------
>> To: HIFA - Healthcare Information For All <HIFA at dgroups.org>
>> Date: 18 April 2018 at 19:33
>> Subject: Re: [hifa] Open Access Author Processing Charges (3)
>>
>> In the bad old days before Open Access (OA), a developing country author
>> wrote a paper and submitted it to a journal and, if the paper was good
>> enough, the generous people at the journal organized peer review,
>> redid/redesigned the tables and most of the graphics, and maybe even did
>> some language editing - at no cost to the author. Then they published the
>> journal, charging for access to the paper version and pay-walling any
>> online version. From the author's perspective, thus, there was no barrier
>> to publication, although there were cost barriers to reading the paper
>> subsequently, which was particularly onerous in poorer countries. So the
>> situation in developing countries was good for authors - who simply had to
>> write well - and bad for librarians and readers, who had to find the money
>> to buy the content.
>>
>> Now that Open Access is making serious inroads, we are finding the
>> situation reversed - librarians and readers bask in an avalanche of
>> cost-free online papers, while authors are scrambling to find the resources
>> to pay for publication.From the commentary on this list it is clear that
>> authors in developing countries are being restrained from publishing by the
>> "Article Processing Charge" (APC).
>>
>> Zoe Mullan, Editor of The Lancet Global Health makes the point that "we
>> assume that this cost will be borne by the funding body". This seems to be
>> rather more likely in industrialized countries than in developing ones.
>>
>> Basic research is much more frequently carried out in industrialized
>> countries and supported by the sort of international funding that pays for
>> papers. But the kind of health research that is essential in developing
>> countries - health services and health systems research - is generally
>> undertaken by local institutions and universities. This is a reason for
>> serious concern, as the economic model of OA appears to be blocking the
>> most important local research. I would add that this research needs to be
>> published internationally, not just locally, in order to attract opinions,
>> input and (in some cases) validation and consensus from the global health
>> community.
>>
>> Many OA journals have special rates, flexibilities and waivers for
>> writers from developing countries. It is also true that  about a quarter of
>> the OA journals do not charge an APC at all - I presume they pay for their
>> work by sales of their print editions in industrialized countries, thus
>> enabling those in other countries free access to the online version.
>>
>> Incidentally, this is not just an issue for developing country writers -
>> I am a non-institutional writer in an industrialized country, writing
>> papers which are not based on funded research, and it is a real hardship to
>> find APC money to pay for my papers.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Chris
>>
>> Chris Zielinski
>> chris at chriszielinski.com
>> Blogs: http://ziggytheblue.wordpress.com and
>> http://ziggytheblue.tumblr.com
>> Research publications: http://www.researchgate.net
>>
>> On 25 April 2018 at 08:47 Richard Poynder <richard.poynder at cantab.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>> To try and get a sense of how open access looks from different parts of
>> the world, particularly as the strategy of engineering a global “flip” of
>> subscription journals to a pay-to-publish gold OA model gains more
>> traction, I am interested in talking to open access advocates in different
>> parts of the world, ideally by means of matched interviews.
>>
>>
>>
>> Earlier this month, for instance, I published a Q&A with Jeff
>> MacKie-Mason, UC Berkeley’s University Librarian and Chief Digital
>> Scholarship Officer. (https://poynder.blogspot.co.u
>> k/2018/04/north-south-and-open-access-view-from.html).
>>
>>
>>
>> Yesterday, I published a matched Q&A covering the same themes with
>> Mahmoud Khalifa, a librarian at the Library of Congress Cairo Office, and
>> DOAJ Ambassador for the Middle East and Persian Gulf. This interview can be
>> read here: https://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/north-south-and-open-
>> access-view-from_24.html
>>
>>
>>
>> I have also been asking those I interview to comment on the answers given
>> by their matched interviewee. Mahmoud Khalifa’s response to the
>> MacKie-Mason Q&A is incorporated in this post:
>> https://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/north-south-and-open-
>> access-mahmoud.html
>>
>>
>>
>> I am open to suggestions for further matched interviews.
>>
>>
>>
>> Richard Poynder
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
> --
> Richard Poynder
> www.richardpoynder.co.uk
>
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-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader Emeritus in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dept. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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