> Mark Doyle said: > > > There are two big hurdles: 1) reducing the cost of handling electronic > > manuscripts and 2) author/institution/funding agency acceptance of > > paying submission fees up front. > > Regarding 2), I have heard some concerns that this would unfairly > penalize the most productive institutions/departments. Institution > A producing 500 research papers p.a. will be liable for twice the > level of charges of less effective Institution B producing only 250 > papers p.a. This may make the management of Institution A less > than enthusiastic about such a move towards submission charges.
I recently wrote an "Opinion" piece for the SPARC Newsletter on this issue. And I have been struggling with the same issue that Mark raises. That productive institutions would carry a disproportionate cost using pages charges. I have now begun to realize that if an organization like SPARC were to collect page charges from universities based on faculty head count and their journals budget, SPARC could then negotiate with publishers for standardized page charges and pay these charges for the consortium of universities who were SPARC members. SPARC could act somewhat like the serials jobbers we now have who pay for our subscriptions to publishers. If a faculty member from a non-SPARC subscriber university submitted a paper to a cooperating journal, they would be expected to pay the full charges themselves. I am sure faculty would quickly pressure their library to join SPARC, much quicker than they would pressure the library to purchase a new subscription. Having SPARC play this role would solve Mark's concern, and give universities added bargaining power with universities to control page costs and the number of articles published per year. Indeed, SPARC could negotiate with each publisher for the number of articles or pages to be published each year and the cost per page. This number would be based on past publishing history. Publishers would therefore have their budget met upfront without fear of subscription cancellation, and they would have a target number of submission to accept. Year by year the number of articles could be negotiated up or down with SPARC with feedback from the academic community on the value of articles published the year before. Low quality journals could expect SPARC to support fewer article the following year. This system might then slow the publication rate of trash and unneeded, repetitive articles. Paul M. Gherman University Librarian 611B General Library 419 21st Avenue South Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN 37240 Office: (615) 322-7120 Fax: (615) 343-8279 [email protected]
