Open Access News

Higher education is not in a position to provide the injection of funds required to pay for increased print and online publishing costs as the volume of the research literature grows. For these reasons alternative models for publishing peer-reviewed research are required since existing business models for the scholarly communications system which rely most heavily on subscription fees paid by institutions are becoming unsustainable. Open Access business models have been widely promoted within the scholarly publishing community as the basis for transforming and resolving the funding problems of the communication of research, however precise data on revenues and costs of publishing peer-reviewed journals in print and online have been difficult to access....The focus of this study is an in-depth exploration of nine learned society journal business and pricing models in the context of their societies and the Open Access business model (See Section 2). Eight of the publishers are based in the UK and one in the USA. The study considers whether and how OA can be adapted by the representative sample of STM publishers who agreed to participate in the study by providing full circulation, revenue and cost data for 2002-2004 inclusive....The average cost per article for print and online publication (See Section 4) for all 13 journals in 2004 was £1,447 and per page was £144 but this average covers a broad range including one journal that is online only....Average revenue per article for all 13 journals in 2004 was £1,918 and per page was £194....The key requirements for a society journal business model to be financially sustainable are identified. These include covering costs and returning a modest surplus to re-invest in innovation and ongoing support structures such as new content and functionality, and archiving of existing content. The [upfront funding] OA model as currently construed is unlikely to meet all of these needs....The Open Access business model is attractive in principle to each of the publishers who participated in the study but there was deep concern expressed over the financial sustainability of a switch to this model across the board....Two key features seem most likely to influence the uptake of OA by authors as customers and publishers as service providers. Firstly, are articles that are OA from first publication cited, read and integrated into research more, and more rapidly than subscription-only access articles? Secondly, does an open access journal receive more high quality submissions than a competing subscription-based journal?