<div dir="ltr">My apologies, my previous posting was completely (and I really mean completely) garbled. Here it is corrected (in <i><b>boldface</b></i>). Please ignore the prior version. -- Stevan Harnad<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr">n Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 9:59 AM, Jan Velterop <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:velterop@gmail.com" target="_blank">velterop@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><div style="word-wrap:break-word">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.<div>
<br></div><div>There are two possibilities that I can think of here, at least for OA journals sustained by APCs:</div><div>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;</div>
<div>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).</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div>
</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>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 <b>published</b> 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:</div>
<div><br></div></div></div><blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 40px;border:none;padding:0px"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><div><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13px"><i><b>Plans by universities and research funders to pay the costs of Open Access Publishing ("Gold OA") are premature. Funds are short; 80% of journals (including virtually all the top journals) are still subscription-based, tying up the potential funds to pay for Gold OA; the asking price for Gold OA is still high; and there is concern that paying to publish may inflate acceptance rates and lower quality standards. What is needed now is for universities and funders to mandate OA self-archiving (of authors' final peer-reviewed drafts, immediately upon acceptance for publication) ("Green OA"). That will provide immediate OA; and if and when universal Green OA should go on to make subscriptions unsustainable (because users are satisfied with just the Green OA versions) that will in turn induce journals to cut costs (print edition, online edition, access-provision, archiving), downsize to just providing the service of peer review, and convert to the Gold OA cost-recovery model; meanwhile, the subscription cancellations will have released the funds to pay these residual service costs. The natural way to charge for the service of peer review then will be on a "no-fault basis," with the author's institution or funder paying for each round of refereeing, regardless of outcome (acceptance, revision/re-refereeing, or rejection). This will minimize cost while protecting against inflated acceptance rates and decline in quality standards.</b></i></span><br>
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<div><span style="font-size:13px;font-family:sans-serif"><i><br></i></span></div><div><b style="font-size:14px;font-family:'Times New Roman'">Harnad, S. (2010) </b><a href="http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:14px" target="_blank"><span><b>No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed</b></span></a><b style="font-size:14px;font-family:'Times New Roman'">. D-Lib Magazine </b><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:14px"><b><a href="http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july10/harnad/07harnad.html" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:14px" target="_blank">16 (7/8)</a></b></span><span class=""><font color="#888888"><span style="font-size:13px;font-family:sans-serif"><i><br>
</i></span></font></span></div></div></div></blockquote><span class=""><font color="#888888"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:14px"><br></span></font><div><font face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:14px">Stevan Harnad</span></font></div>
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