Open Access News

The article recently published in Nature entitled “Open-access journal hits rocky time,” seems to suggest that the author-pays business model is not financially sustainable. Their argument is based on an analysis of the finances of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), which has recently raised the publication charges in its two main journals. While it is clear that PLoS will be dependent on external funding, at least for the next few years, it is certainly not the case that the author-pays business model is inherently unsustainable.

Based on our experience as a publisher of both subscription-based journals and author-pays open access journals, I would not only argue that the author-pays publishing model is sustainable, but also that it has many economic advantages over the subscription model. Even though our open access journal collection is only a few years old, we have already achieved profitability for the collection as a whole. Moreover, using a business model based on publication charges has enabled us to expand our publishing program in a much more sustainable way than we were able to using a subscription model.

To understand why Hindawi adopted a business model based on publication charges, one must look at the fundamental differences between these two models. In an author-pays model, a publisher’s revenues are directly proportional to the number of articles published. This enables us to expand our publishing operation while ensuring financial sustainability, since an increase in the number of published articles provides a proportional increase in revenue.

In contrast, an increase in the number of articles published in a subscription-based journal does not necessarily lead to a proportional increase in the journal’s revenue. If there is an expansion in the size of a subscription-based journal, a publisher must raise the subscription price of the journal in order to cover their costs. However, raising a journal’s subscription price most often leads to cancellations, since libraries have a fixed amount of money to spend on journals, so an increase in price does not provide a proportional increase in subscription revenues.

If the author-pays model is in fact financially sustainable, one may wonder why the Public Library of Science has had to increase their publication charges. The answer to this is that the price increase is reflective of the costs of publication in general, not of the author-pays business model in particular. In fact, if one looks at the total cost to the academic community, by adding up the subscription revenues from all subscribers, it is clear that PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine are significantly less expensive than most comparable subscription-based journals, even after their recent increase in publication charges....