[Insight-developers] OPEN ACCESS: Economics of Open Access (special issue)

[Luis Ibanez]

Economics Analysis and Policy,
an Australia based open access journal, has just
dedicated a special issue to the Economics of Open Access.

For details, see here:
http://blog.repec.org/2009/04/24/the-economics-of-open-access-publishing/

Christian Zimmermann
Department of Economics
University of Connecticut

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See for example:
http://ideas.repec.org/a/eap/articl/v39y2009i1p71-87.html

    "But what have you done for me lately?
     Commercial Publishing; Scholarly Communication;
     and Open-Access"

           by  John P. Conley and Myrna Wooders

<quote>

"At this point in 2008, well into the electronic era, except for the
signaling value of spending money, we have come to the view that
commercial publishers as they currently operate, whether papyrocentric
or electronic, do more to hinder than facilitate the process of
scholarly communication. This hindrance is due to a variety of changes
in publishing technology."


"In 2008, paper journals are essentially an anachronism, and their
current existence is the result of hysteresis. Few people go to
libraries anymore to get hard copies of journals. For many (especially
younger) researchers, it may be that, if something does not exist
online, it may as well not exist at all."


"The major contribution made by commercial publishers in the electronic
era is in providing typesetting services (sometimes of dubious value),
printing and distributing paper copies of journals that few really want,
and negotiating and policing complicated access arrangements that limit
the distribution of research. None of these activities support the
mission of scholarly communication. Indeed, they mostly impede it. In
a real sense, publishers have become the snake that eats its own tail.
They produce revenue almost solely for the purpose of having enough
income to fund the apparatus that allows them to collect revenue."

...

"Certification also always has been the business of the academy. It is
academics (and some government and industry researchers) who edit and
review manuscripts. One might argue that editorial salaries paid by
publishers and stipends paid to referees by some journals play a role in
getting quality certification. There is very little evidence to support
this. The editorial salaries paid are generally small and by no means in
proportion with time spent by editors on their duties. Many editors
are not paid at all and associate editors almost always work for free.
Neither does there seem to be a pattern in which higher quality journals
pay referees for reports more often than lower quality ones. To the
extent that this is not true, these two small costs could easily be paid
by submission fees. Of course, editors edit largely because they believe
in the intellectual mission of the journal and expect to be paid
indirectly by the satisfaction they experience from aiding the research
of others, from furthering quality research, and from any prestige that
their position offers. Referees have similar professional and
intellectual motivations."

....

"One rather odd legacy from the papyrocentric era is long delays in the
publication of accepted papers. Backlogs of more than a year are not
uncommon. Some of these are a result of the overhead of typesetting and
handling of final drafts of accepted content. Most of these delays,
however, result from a desire on the part of commercial publishers to
produce a fixed number of pages of content per year. This is driven by
the costs of producing and mailing physical copies of a journal, and
also by the fact that the subscription prices charged to libraries are
closely tied to the number of pages published in a given volume of a
journal."


....

"our experience at JPET has led us to this question regarding
commercial publishers:

               What have you done for us lately?

We think the answer has to be

                            ‘Not much.’

The academy produces the research, edits and certifies the research, and
ultimately consumes the research. It is hard to understand why we should
continue to give the research away to commercial publishers and then buy
it back at an enormous price. It is even more mysterious why we continue
to tolerate the closed-access business models of commercial publishers.

It results in interested colleagues being denied access to our research,
which hurts both our intellectual mission and our personal professional
advancement. In the papyrocentric era, publishers provided services
essential to the distribution of new research. In the electronic era,
commercial publishers only impede distribution and add insult to injury
by charging huge fees for their trouble."


...


"The most important requirement for any journal to be successful—be it
commercial or open-access, paper or electronic—is that it serve a
*genuinely useful purpose*."


...


"The bundling implied by the Big Deal [1] is an attempt by commercial
publishers to push the day that they collapse off into the future. It
makes it harder for libraries to signal their dissatisfaction with any
specific journal. Libraries who have agreed to a big deal cannot readily
drop a title when an open-access or cheaper society offering overtakes a
commercial offering in value. Thus, instead of dying a slow death with
weak journals being picked off and replaced by new ones outside of the
commercial offering, commercial offerings lend each other mutual
support"

...

"Thus, it is a myth that a journal must collect tens of thousands of
dollars to pay current costs. (We will consider software development
costs later.) Submission fees in the hundreds of dollars and,
especially, publication fees in the thousands of dollars are hard to
justify. They only create rents that are wasted by commercial publishers
or used to offset overhead expenses that are either inessential to
publishing the journal or that fund other (possibly worthy) spending
by scholarly societies."


----------------

[1] Most commercial publishers offer libraries a ‘Big Deal’ in which
they get access to all of a publisher’s titles in a given area in
exchange for payments that are a fixed percentage higher than what they
are currently paying a publisher for the individual journals to which
they currently subscribe. These bundling deals usually are multi-year
contracts with built in (and quite large) automatic cost increases. Such
deals put the library in a position where it ultimately says yes or no
to a publisher’s entire portfolio in a research area and no longer
makes individual acquisition decisions on a journal by journal basis.

</quote>