[GOAL] Plan S: APC and service level

Tue Apr 23 17:46:02 BST 2019

hi Victor,

Thank you for raising a suggestion about connecting APCs to service levels, i.e. journals with more services charging more for APCs. Some thoughts on this subject follow. In brief, I agree with Babini that the APC model is problematic for OA. I argue that the APC model is not consistent with the vision or GOAL for OA, and has the potential to continue or exacerbate market problems with scholarly publishing. Research funder policies requiring OA are welcome, but in my opinion should focus exclusively on OA archiving and in particular should avoid encouraging or financially supporting APCs.

Details

Vision

The first paragraph of the original Budapest Open Access Initiative (see below) is the best brief description of what I consider the GOAL of open access (or the global knowledge commons, the term I use):

https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read

"An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge".

Comment: a commons as described by Bambini is a better fit to achieve this vision than an APC market. Fostering APCs and allowing journals with more services to charge more is an "even more for the rich" approach, the exact opposite of "laying the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation".

Transitioning market dysfunction?

The transition to open access is taking place in the context of a scholarly communication ecosystem that has been dysfunctional for at least half a century. The market has become very concentrated, and a few large commercial scholarly publishers have gained large profits in an inelastic market, arguably at the expense of access and dissemination, not-for-profit university presses, smaller journals and societies, and the less well endowed humanities and social sciences.

In the process of transition to open access via APCs, there are 2 reasonable hypotheses that we are exploring through the longitudinal APC project. Will APCs introduce competition and lower prices because they are more transparent than subscriptions? OR, will a transition to APCs simply transfer the must-purchase imperative that created an inelastic subscriptions market to an equally (or possibly more) dysfunctional must-pay-to-publish in system. To date, our evidence is far from conclusive. Recent evidence (large percentage price increases by some APC publishers) tends to support the hypothesis of transitioning an inelastic market. Any approach that focuses on transitioning the existing large commercial publishers seems likely to transition the marketing strategies of these companies. To minimize this possibility, I recommend an exclusive policy focus on OA archiving and dissemination via OA archives; leave the market (and the commons) to adjust.

Some OA journals and publishers are successfully using APCs. Most OA journals do not use them. There are, in my opinion, better models. For example, I recommend direct subsidies as either APCs or subscriptions / purchase are essentially less-efficient indirect subsidy models, because in the case of scholarly publishing the authors and readers are largely the same group.

best,

Dr. Heather Morrison

Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa

Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa

Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project

sustainingknowledgecommons.org

Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca

https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706

________________________________
From: goal-bounces at eprints.org <goal-bounces at eprints.org> on behalf of Victor Venema <victor.venema at grassroots.is>
Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2019 11:39:39 AM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Plan S: APC and service level

Dear colleagues,

One of the discussions of Plan S is about its impact on researchers from
less wealthy institutions. The article below is typical and I found the
comment below insightful.

It made me wonder, would it be possible to link APCs to the service
level? We could make a system where you can only ask for the maximum APC
mentioned in plan S if you provide all services required by Plan S,
while journals fulfilling less requirements would have a lower maximum APC.

Maybe an old idea/compromise, but I had not seen it anywhere yet.

With best regards,
Victor Venema
https://grassroots.is

https://theconversation.com/how-the-open-access-model-hurts-academics-in-poorer-countries-113856

>  Dominique Babini
>
> Thank you for this very interesting reading and contribution to the conversation on the negative impact of APCs in developing regions.  You are so right.Why did APCs started?  We, in Latin America, worked the past 20 years to build successful non-commercial, non-APCs, academic-led, open access journals (only 5% of journals charge very low APCs) and now we are shocked to see that the basic question is not raised again and again: why should publicly-funded research outputs be a product in the market and not a commons/public good, and why open access should be a market and not a commons managed by the scholarly community?We are concerned with growth in the number of articles published with APCs, and because Plan S favors commercial APCs journals because they will comply with Plan S requirements which are not easy for developing regions quality OA journals to comply with.
https://theconversation.com/how-the-open-access-model-hurts-academics-in-poorer-countries-113856
_______________________________________________
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/20190423/da37b388/attachment-0001.html 