<div dir="ltr">On 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 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:</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>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. </i></span></div>
<div><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13px"><i><br></i></span></div><div><b style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:14px">Harnad, S. (2010) </b><a href="http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:14px"><span class=""><b>No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed</b></span></a><b style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:14px">. D-Lib Magazine </b><span class="" 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">16 (7/8)</a></b></span><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13px"><i><br>
</i></span></div></div></div></blockquote><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></div>