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There’s been a bunch of excitement in the open access world recently, such as MIT adopting an open access policy university-wide. As per Peter Suber: “This is big. Another of the world’s great research universities has an OA mandate. Unlike Harvard and Stanford, which now have OA mandates for some of their schools, the MIT mandate is university-wide”.
On the other side of the Atlantic (made aware to me by Bora’s tweeting), Lund University has also adopted an open access policy, and are taking my advice (which no longer seems so pie in the sky) to offset the cost for publishing in OA journals from library funds.
Instead of PLoS standard institutional membership program that give a discount to the publication fee for the authors the Head Office will pay the full publication fee for each article published by LU affiliated authors. acquisition of subscription-based information.
My only wonder how is how long it will take for a critical mass of universities to join the OA party.
I’ve been playing with numbers in my head based on the statistics from my home institution – the University of Toronto – relative to publications, the real cost of open access publishing, and the U of T library’s annual budget for journal subscriptions.
It turns out that U of T is listed as an institution on some 6470 publications per year (averaged during 2000-2004, data from Thomson Scientific), and as of 2005-2006, the U of T libraries (spread over a couple of campuses) have a periodicals budget of just over $10 million per year (see section 7, “LIBRARY ACQUISITIONS COMMITMENTS” in the 2005-2006 budget). For the rest of this article, let’s assume the American and Canadian dollars are roughly equal in value (which was the case until a couple of months ago).
At present, that $10 million a year largely goes to closed-access publishing houses (not just the Elseviers and Macmillans of the world, but also the much-loved not-for-profit societies which publish journals as well). This gives the university students, faculty, and staff access to the literature both on campus and off, via the internet. While this in principle works well, journal subscription costs have been skyrocketing, and university library budgets have not been able to keep up (and I surmise things will only get worse with the hit to university endowments recently). The breadth of subscriptions will surely fall in the coming years.
What, then, if the university decided to embrace the open access movement entirely? This is obviously a pie-in-the-sky idea, but bear with me, as the result is interesting.
Subscription costs would obviously be nil for an open access journal: we are all free to access the content of an open access journal via the internet, with no restrictions on who can read the content. In contrast, the author would pay to publish the article. This is perhaps the biggest resistance from scientists (and I’m sure the situation would be similar in the arts, or law, or what have you) to the open access movement, many feeling they don’t have enough funding for students or experimental equipment as is, and couldn’t possibly afford to pay to publish as well. I can appreciate this argument, though some progress is being made as you can specifically request funding to cover open access publication charges from some of the granting agencies.
(Also, let’s be honest, the current situation of paying for page charges and to have colour figures means the author is already paying to publish, and sometimes non-trivial amounts.)
The funding supplied to the library for journal subscriptions could instead go towards paying for the publishing costs in open access journals. Using the PLoS journals as our benchmark, premium quality publications would cost around $2500/article (the current fee to publish in PLoS Biology or PLoS Medicine), while the bread-and-butter publication costs are maybe closer to those of PLoS ONE — $1300/article.
Let us imagine that 10% of the publications coming out of U of T are of the premium variety, while 90% are your more run of the mill papers, and that there are open access journals in which to publish them. Using the current costs from the Public Library of Science, 650 premium papers would run around $1.6 million dollars, while the 5850 “bread-and-butter” papers would cost an additional $7.6 million each year. This is already less than the 2005-2006 periodicals budget of slightly over $10 million!
Let’s further assume that the economies of scale would kick in if universities around the world decided to embrace this philosophy. This should lead to an overall lowering of the publication costs, all the while bringing access to academic literature to everyone with an internet connection. It is also easy to imagine the costs being even lower, as the collaborative nature of academic work means many papers now have authors from multiple institutions, all of whom could share in the cost of publishing. (Determining the rules for who-pays-what would be tricky, but should be doable.)
There are probably some key issues I’m missing here (the most obvious one which I’ve even mentioned is that we need open access journals to publish in!), and my idea is prefaced on the assumption that universities are the significant driving force in the academic literature game, but I think the take-home message is reasonably clear, at least using the University of Toronto numbers: we could already afford going entirely open access.
I certainly wouldn’t feel bad if Elsevier and their ilk went out of business given the exorbitant increase in subscription costs and the non-obvious reasoning why, and I’m sure the societies could come to embrace the open access movement, which would bring the majority of high quality journals into the fold.
So, what’s the hold up?
Update — Peter Suber’s commentary (showing my conservative estimate of how much it would cost is potentially much higher than would be the case) is well worth a read.
Comment [7]
PhysMath Central has announced the launch of a new open access journal called PMC Biophysics. The journal
will publish research on all aspects of biological physics, including theoretical and experimental aspects of; physical concepts with potential applications to biological systems, physical models inspired by biological systems, biological problems addressed by physics-based methods and soft condensed matter & mesoscale systems.
The journal will also be cross-listed on the BioMed Central site, so it sounds like you’ll get double the exposure for your papers.
I also like the sound of the article formats they will be publishing:
In addition to the usual article types (editorials, research articles and reviews) PMC Biophysics will also be soliciting work in the form of Letters (short communications about a previously published article in the journal), Mini-reviews (shorter reviews on an emerging field) and Problems (where readers are invited to suggest biological problems which may merit further investigation by physical methods).
If done well, papers that describe interesting outstanding problems can be especially interesting. For a physicist interested in biology there are huge vistas opening up that cry out for a quantitative and/or theoretical treatment but it can be very hard to orient oneself in the new terrain. People with an inside knowledge of a particular area can provide invaluable pointers towards particular fertile or unexplored ground.
Finally, to sweeten the deal and to celebrate the journal’s launch, there will be no article processing fee for papers submitted before July 30th.
Comment [4]
From Matt Agnello’s vimeo page:
The SPARC-ACRL Forum at ALA ’08 entitled “Working with the Facebook generation: Engaging students views on access to scholarship.” Panelists discuss the merits of student activism, patent reform, blogs as a communication medium for scientists, and students as active members of a discussion about the right to access information for scholarly work. Features Andre Brown, Nelson Pavlosky, Stephanie Wang, and Kimberly Douglas as panelists.
I’m embedding Matt’s video here, and André is the third speaker up, at around the 42 minute mark.
SPARC-ACRL Forum ’08 from Matt Agnello on Vimeo.
Hat tip: PhysMath Central.
Comment [2]
Biocurious is written by Andre Brown and Philip Johnson, since 2005. Content of the weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
