Open Access Submission Fees

Mark Ware Consulting has been commissioned by Knowledge Exchange (www.knowledge-exchange.info), a partnership of JISC (UK), SURF (Netherlands), DEFF (Denmark) and DfG (Germany), to conduct a study into the feasibility of submission fees in open access journals (i.e. as distinct from publication fees).

An open access business model based on submission charges could have real advantages over OA based (solely) on publication charges. For example, at present and under gold OA, authors have an incentive to submit their paper to an unrealistically prestigious journal or conference, since there is no cost to them, their paper might be accepted, and even if it is not, they will receive good feedback from senior reviewers. They can then re-submit the paper to less and less prestigious journals or conferences until it is accepted. There is little cost to them but great cost to the wider scholarly communications community. An approach based on submission charges may also introduce a greater level of competition into the scholarly communication domain by more closely relating payments to services provided. It might also provide a better OA model for high-rejection-rate journals where otherwise the publication charge has to cover the costs of peer review of all the rejected papers.

There may be, however, risks in a model based on submission charges, for example funders may find it difficult to develop an acceptable mechanism to limit the payments they are called on to make. For their part, publishers may be reluctant to deter potential authors by introducing a fee not required by their competitors.

There has been some discussion of this model in the past, for instance in the Wellcome Trust 2004 report Costs and business models in scientific research publishing, while in October last year Gavin Baker raised the topic on his blog post Submission fees: a means of defraying costs for OA journals?, and more recently there was some discussion on the liblicense listserv.

The study will involve reviewing the literature and looking at the past experience of journals using submission charges, and then exploring possible models and testing these through consultation with major stakeholders including research funders, publishers, libraries and infrastructure providers, universities and researchers (as editors, peer reviewers, readers and authors).

At this stage we would be very pleased to hear from anyone with an interest in this topic.

The STM Report: An overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing

STM has just released The STM Report: An overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing.

A follow up to my 2006 report, Scientific publishing in transition: an overview of current developments, this new report collects the available evidence and provides a comprehensive picture of the trends and currents in scholarly communication.

High-tech SMEs’ access to information

The Publishing Research Consortium has published a new report by Mark Ware Consulting today:

Access by UK small and medium-sized enterprises to professional and academic information

From the press release (pdf):

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), with 250 employees or fewer, make up 99.9% of UK businesses, and represent 59% of private sector employment and 52% of turnover. The latest study from the Publishing Research Consortium shows that staff in high-tech SMEs in the UK value research articles even more highly, and read more of them, than do those in larger businesses.

… Of those who considered information to be an important success factor for their organisation, 71% found access to research articles ‘easy’ or ‘very easy’ (compared with 82% in larger businesses and 94% in higher education), while 29% felt it was ‘fairly difficult’ or ‘very difficult’; 60% felt it was easier than five years ago.

Despite this, more than half had experienced some recent difficulty in obtaining one or more articles; although they use a wide range of access channels, they find pay-per-view (PPV) costly and difficult, and ‘walk-in’ access at a local university inconvenient.

The report goes on to consider some suggestions for improving access for SMEs.

I will be presenting the results of the study at an extra session at the ALPSP Annual Conference at 5.30 on Thursday 10 September (slides).

Against The Grain special issue on peer review

Against The Grain, a US-based newsletter, has its special issue on peer review out now.

It includes an article by me, Current Peer Review Practice and Perceptions: The View from the Field. It’s not currently available online but I’ll be putting up a preprint version shortly.

Other articles include Peer Review: The History, the Issues, and New Directions by Irving Rockwood (who also edited the issue); PLoS ONE: New Approaches and Initiatives in the Evolution of the Academic Journal, by Peter Binfield; Interactive Open Access Peer Review: The Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Model, by Ulrich Pöschl; The Open Scholarship Full Disclosure Initiative: A Subversive Proposal, by Gary Hall; and The Odd Case of Book Reviews, by David Shatz.

Scholarly Communications Toolkit – new blog

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I am working with Robin Beecroft of Searchlighter on the development of a web-based toolkit for scholarly communications in the UK.

We have now launched a blog for the project which can be found here: http://rinsc.wordpress.com/

We plan to use the blog to post our research findings as they develop, gather data and documents and to solicit feedback as the project progresses towards implementing the toolkit.

Technorati Tags: Institutional repositories, Libraries, Online publishing, Open Access, Web2.0

Overview of trends in STM journals market

Probably old news for most, but the Library Journal annual survey by Lee Van Orsdel and Kathleen Born is as good this year as ever: Reality Bites: Periodicals Price Survey 2009 (Library Journal, 15 April 2009).

The authors are very pessimistic on the impact of the global recession and the prospect for library cuts. They report ARL saying that most of its 123 libraries will lose funding in 2010. Cuts are estimated at 5-15% for FY10, with the same or higher in FY11, and possibly cuts in FY12 and beyond.

The article also covers open access, reporting that over half of NIH-funded articles are now getting deposited in PubMedCentral, with 400,000 users accessing 700,000 articles each day; Orsdel & Born don’t think the “Fair Copyright” Act will get passed but also say it’s unlikely Obama would sign it into law even if it were passed.

Consortia deals and bundles continue to be the dominant business model – libraries now acquire more than half of their content in bundles of 50 titles or more.

Finally, the authors describe as a “startling twist” Outsell’s Nov 2008 analysis that suggested that simply having the content wouldn’t be enough, and that the future of subscriptions would be in providing workflow tools and services to help users manage the existing ocean of information. Since Outsell (and others) have been predicting the importance of workflow solutions since at least 2002 it’s hard to see what’s startling about it, but it’s certainly an important trend. It’s also another trend (like consortia big deals) that favours large publishers (who can afford to invest in workflow technology and have a breadth of content to underpin it), potentially at the expense of smaller, society publishers. Some 25% of Thomson revenues now come from software-based products, according to this article by David Worlock of Outsell from 2007, which sees workflow integration as a potential disruptive technology.

Technorati Tags: Libraries, Open Access

RIN Scholarly Communication Toolkit

We’ve been awarded a contract to develop a web-based toolkit to support key stakeholders (especially research funders, higher education institutions, libraries and publishers) to apply the common principles set out in an earlier RIN document, the Research and the Scholarly Communications Process: towards strategic goals for public policy.

I’m working with Robin Beecroft of Searchlighter on this project, which will run from March to November 2009.

The toolkit will provide guidance to relevant stakeholders in relation to each principle constituting the statement of principles, and their roles in applying them. It will encourage reflection on how the agendas of different stakeholders might be aligned behind common goals and conflicts of interests resolved.

In practice, I think this means we will need to create some community around the project if it is to live and grow beyond the initial design. So we’re looking for ideas on how to create online communities around projects. 

We’re currently in a research and consultation phase, surveying and interviewing people from across the scholarly communications spectrum. 

I’ll shortly create a separate blog for the project – watch this space for an announcement.

Web 2.0 and scholarly communication

I’ve posted a new article on Web 2.0 and scholarly communication

This was originally intended for Learned Publishing but they found it too journalistic for their style, and it also overlapped with other articles already in the pipeline. It’s possible I may expand the last section, We built it, why won’t they come?, into an opinion piece, but in the meantime I hope it may be a useful overview of developments for some people.

Topics covered include:

• What is Web 2.0?
• Web 1.0 and scholarly communication
• Web 2.0 and Open Access
• Blogs
• Social bookmarking
• Social networking
• Podcasts
• Wikis
• Data
• Peer review
• Reasons for lack of uptake to date

Read more here …

Technorati Tags: Online publishing, Science 2.0, Semantic web, Web2.0

A practical definition of semantic publishing

At last! a definition of semantic publishing I can understand and that tells me why I might want to bother:

anything that enhances the meaning of a published journal article, facilitates its automated discovery, enables its linking to semantically related articles, provides access to data within the article in actionable form, or facilitates integration of data between papers. Among other things, it involves enriching the article with appropriate metadata that are amenable to automated processing and analysis, allowing enhanced verifiability of published information and providing the capacity for automated discovery and summarization.

From David Shotton’s excellent article Semantic publishing: the coming revolution in scientific journal publishing, in the April Learned Publishing doi:10.1087/2009202

Technorati Tags: Online publishing, Semantic web, Web2.0

Updating “Scientific Publishing in Transition”

[Update: the new version has now been released: see The STM Report]

I’m about to start an update/revision of the “Scientific Publishing in Transition” paper I wrote for ALPSP/STM in 2006, which attempted to provide an overview of journals publishing issues with data taken from published papers and reports etc.

Obviously there’s been a lot of developments in the last three years. If anyone would like to suggest topics and/or published papers, reports etc. that should be covered in the new edition I’d be very grateful for the suggestions. Similarly, any suggested corrections or amendments to the existing text would be welcome.

In the interests of open discussion I’m suggesting responses could be posted as comments to this blog entry, thus collecting them together in one place. But straight responses to the list or private emails to me are equally welcome!