Open Access News

Open Access proponents praise the untold possibilities the new digital age affords for scholarship but, like Cohen and Rosenzweig, are highly critical of its commerical side. Many of them believe the serials crisis in journal publishing --which is tied to the thirty-year weakening of the scholarly book market with libraries as the chief purchasers of these books-- is due to the “commodification of information” by...powerful conglomerates....Open Access directly challenges the standard economic instrument --price-- used to control and distribute information by promoting free electronic dissemination of research findings....

A study [subscribers only] published in the most recent Journal of Scholarly Publishing (JSP), which analyses data from the Institute for Scientific Information regarding 1,317 scholarly journals in 25 marker fields during the years 1981-2000, found the vast majority of nonopen access journals were reasonably priced and fairly accessible --a conclusion that ought to temper the reformist zeal of the Open Access movement....

The economic reality is that revenue from journal publication is what often keeps a university press’s book divisions afloat. What will likely happen if these publishers lose subscription and advertising revenues, or their editors and authors? There is a symbiotic relationship between the price of a journal, the public estimation of its importance, and the probability that it will be sustainable for decades to come. Open Access journals that are completely free have no mechanism for determining just how much readers value the service it provides....

Comments.

1. Avoiding high price barriers is only one motivation of the OA movement. The primary motivation for researchers themselves is to enlarge their audience and increase their impact. Moreover, even low and moderate journal prices are access barriers to many readers and most of the software that mediates serious research. And individually affordable prices quickly add up to unaffordable totals, preventing libraries from subscribing to the full range of research. Subscriptions just do not scale (for readers, libraries, subscribers) in proportion to the explosive growth in published research.
2. The OA movement focuses (to quote the BOAI) on "literature that...scholars give to the world without expectation of payment" --i.e. journal articles, not books. OA to books is possible and desirable, but secondary.
3. What will happen to journal publishers that now charge subscriptions? They will continue to charge subscriptions and coexist with OA; or they will offer a mix of OA and non-OA articles and journals; or they will permit author-initiated OA (called self-archiving) without providing any themselves; or they will convert to OA; or they will fail. We presently see examples of each possibility except the last.
4. Journal prices are either unrelated to quality or inversely related to quality. As Theodore and Carl Bergstrom concluded from their analysis of journal prices and citation impact (Nature, May 20, 2004), "libraries typically must pay 4 to 6 times as much per page for journals owned by commercial publishers as for journals owned by non-profit societies. These differences in price do not reflect differences in the quality of the journals. In fact the commercial journals are on average less cited than the non-profits and the average cost per citation of commercial journals ranges from 5 to 15 times as high as that of their non-profit counterparts."
5. It's not true that OA journals and repositories "have no mechanism for determining just how much readers value the service [they] provide." They have download numbers and citation counts, both of which demonstrably increase when content moves from toll access to open access. Moreover, in a journal market so distorted by anti-competitive practices and monopolistic concentration, downloads and citations are more accurate measures of what readers value than willingness to pay publisher prices.