On Wed, 2 Jan 2002, Peter Suber wrote: > > Re: Excerpts from FOS Newsletter > http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/index.htm > http://www.topica.com/lists/suber-fos > > Dissemination fees, access fees, and the double payment problem
> First let's distinguish access fees from dissemination fees. Access fees > pay for access. Subscriptions and licenses are the primary examples but > not the only ones. There are secondary examples in micropayments and other > forms of pay-per-view. By definition, access fees make access unfree. So > if we want free online access, then we must find a way around access fees. It is for this reason that for several years now I have telescoped all three forms of access-blocking tolls under the portmanteau of "S/L/P" tolls. It blocks the temptation to imagine that one can be the remedy for the other! However, Peter's partition is not quite complete: One can indeed separate the costs of access and the costs of dissemination. But there is a third cost, the cost of quality-control (peer-review), which is not part of either cost, but is typically recovered through one or the other (S/L/P access fees or dissemination fees -- mostly the first). In addition, Peter describes the partition as if all the costs were essential, and hence that the same amount must be recovered one way or the other. This is incorrect. The access model is a PRODUCT acquisition model: The product is the text, and that is what the S/L/P tolls pay for accessing (either on-paper or on-line). But there is an alternative to this if we consider only the on-line text (as we should): The on-line text is (1) an OUTGOING product (and a give-away one, at that), FROM the author (more accurately, from the author-institution), rather than (2) an INCOMING product, TO the reader-institution, as on the S/L/P access model. Let us call the model in which the outgoing product is free (1) a "service" model, where the service purchased is quality-control (peer review), and it is purchased by the author-institution, as a 3rd party evaluation, to inspect, improve and certify the quality of its (give-away) outgoing product: its (peer-reviewed) research papers. What about dissemination then? On an outgoing, service-based model, the (free) product-provider-institution pays for the quality-control service and provides the "dissemination" too. But what does this dissemination amount to? Nothing more that the Web-archiving of the quality-controlled product, freely accessible to all! The token that has to drop in our minds if we are to understand this PostGutenberg reality is that institutional self-archiving DISTRIBUTES the "dissemination" burden across provider-institutions by covering it for each outgoing article AT SOURCE, instead of bundling products willy-nilly from disparate institutions and trying to "disseminate" them all jointly as a 3rd party venture, as Gutenberg journals did. That 3rd-party bundling was necessitated by the on-paper dissemination-medium. But the PostGutenberg (on-line) dissemination-medium no longer requires it at all! Gutenberg dissemination, if you like, was analog and dynamic. It required physically distributing a physical object worldwide. PostGutenberg dissemination is digital and "static": The provider need merely archive the text on the Web. Search engines, harvesting, alerting, and user downloading take care of the rest (provided the text is made interoperable, hence harvestable, through OAI-compliance). http://www.openarchives.org/service/listproviders.html So it is misleading to speak of access costs versus dissemination costs. Dissemination costs shrink to almost zero (the archiving cost per article is virtually zero) if the "dissemination" is done at source, by the provider-institution (i.e., the researcher's own university), leaving only the essential quality-control cost (per article) to be paid for -- likewise by the provider-institution. Nor is this apparent double-dipping the unjustified burden to the long-suffering provider institution (which is already providing the research for free, and always has been!) that it sounds like on first hearing! For the provider-institution's annual windfall savings from the huge and needless expenditures for S/L/P access tolls (once they no longer need to be paid, because all costs have been covered at source) will be more than enough to cover the much smaller quality-control (and virtually-zero "dissemination) costs (at source)! > Dissemination fees pay for dissemination (publication, distribution) rather > than access. If they pay the full cost of dissemination, then the provider > has completely covered its costs and can offer access free of charge. So > dissemination fees solve the problem of free online access, if we can find > the money to pay them. True, but, in light of the above, this is an over-simplification, omitting the most important details of the actual quid-pro-quo involved: What is paid for? why? and by whom? Separate answers are needed for the the Gutenberg and the PostGutenberg medium. And what remains essential (peer review) and what (like paper, or the publisher's PDF) becomes merely optional, PostGutenberg? > Who will pay dissemination fees? There many potential sources and in the > best future many different funding models might co-exist. Authors might > pay dissemination fees, On the face of it, this sounds like adding insult to injury! Authors already give away their refereed research (to publishers as well as to all users) for free: Should they now have to PAY for that privilege? But of course, once we realize that the PostGutenberg "dissemination" fees per peer-reviewed online article are almost zero, this question becomes trivial. The nontrivial question is "Who will pay the peer-review service fees?" (which are likely to be between $200 and $500 per article)? There are several possible candidates, but the poor author certainly should not be one of them! As we are contemplating here a system in which there are no longer any S/L/P access tolls, those who are no longer paying those access tolls are now the beneficiaries of (their subcomponent) of the collective institutional windfall savings of $2000 - $5000 per article (that is the average total amount that those of the planet's institutions that can afford it, currently pay for their access in S/L/P tolls, if you add all their contributions together, per article). Who are making those windfall savings once there are no more S/L/P tolls? The erstwhile payers of those annual S/L/P tolls were of course the authors' institutions! Hence it would seem to make the most sense that they should be the ones to redirect a small portion (10-30%) of their 100% annual windfall savings on their now-obsolete purchases of the peer-reviewed journal articles from authors at other institutions, paid for as incoming products, to pay instead only for the peer-review service on their own authors' outgoing articles. > and so might their employers (universities and > labs) or their funders (foundations and governments). Authors' employers (institutions) are already subsidizing the dissemination of their research by buying it (and everyone else's research) back through their annual library serials budget. (This "buy-back" scenario is often evoked by libraries, tearfully, but without noticing the critical fact that it is mostly not their OWN institution's research they are buying "back," but one another's!) Hence the 100% savings on this annual S/L/P "buy-back" look like the most natural pot from which to draw the smaller (10-30%) costs of the up-front "buy-out" of the peer-review costs for each institution's own outgoing research. The other funders of the research -- when there is indeed a research grant, for it is not clear what proportion of the annual [perhaps] 2-4 million articles published in the planet's 20,000 peer-reviewed journals is actually supported by a research grant -- are indeed the research foundation and government grants (from which the institution is often also a receiver of overhead costs). Yes, those research funders could cover the peer-review costs too, but research funds are already scarce enough and shrinking, so one can understand why researchers and their institutions might not wish to have still more of them redirected elsewhere -- particularly when the windfall savings for covering the $200-$500 per paper costs in question are already in the hands of the institution (on the hypothesis of terminating all S/L/P access expenditures)... > Journal publishers > might pay them out of the profits from the sale of add-ons. Yes, but let us be more specific about this: What are the "add-ons"? They are the paper version, and any enhanced on-line version (publisher's PDF version, hypertext-linked version, etc.). Those add-ons are optional -- and paid for by S/L/P tolls! As long as there is still a market for them, publishers themselves can indeed "subsidize" free on-line access for everyone. But will they want to? Particularly if the competition from the freely accessible version might erode their optional add-on market? A much more promising and natural scenario (than that of expecting or asking or waiting for publishers to provide free online access themselves) is for the provider-institutions simply to go ahead and provide it themselves, through author/institution self-archiving! And then the chips can fall where they may. If the optional add-on S/L/P market continues to cover all the essential costs, the publishers are doing the de facto subsidization, and everyone wins (because the for-free version is accessible to anyone who cannot afford the optional for-fee version, which nevertheless keeps on paying all the bills). Whereas if the optional S/L/P market shrinks, the institutional savings will grow proportionately, ready for a part of them (10-30%) to be redirected to cover the essential peer review costs -- if/when that ever becomes necessary. > For me one the > most hopeful possibility is journal endowments. If a journal is endowed > and can pay its dissemination expenses from the interest on its endowment, > then it needn't hustle funds from any source ever again, creating a very > stable, long-term solution. Since dissemination costs for online journals > are low, the needed endowments are correspondingly low. Yes, but where are those journal endowments (for 20,000 peer reviewed journals worldwide, mind!) to come from? > If there are many potential sources of funds to pay dissemination fees, > then we shouldn't assume that authors must pay. I've argued against author > fees in the past (FOSN for 9/6/01), but we shouldn't make the mistake of > thinking that the objections to author fees apply to every kind of > dissemination fee. First, the "dissemination fee" is a red herring, as the dissemination costs per peer-reviewed article are nearly zero, thanks to the Web. It is the $200-$500 peer-review service costs per article that need to be covered, and the only natural source for that (the only one that does not envision redirecting committed funds from elsewhere) is the prospect of a portion of the windfall savings (if and when they occur!) -- from the $2000-$5000 per-article currently paid collectively by all subscribing institutions as S/L/P access-tolls for each incoming article -- at each individual institution being redirected to cover the peer review costs for its own outgoing articles. > BMC does not depend on authors to pay its processing fees, although it once > called these fees "author charges" > (http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-8219/2/2). Its latest thinking > emphasizes universities. By offering to waive processing fees for authors > employed by universities with institutional BMC memberships, BMC is > appealing to universities to see the economy of paying small processing > fees for free online journals rather than paying large subscription > fees. Despite this, I'm sure BMC would be delighted if foundations made it > a practice to include funds for article processing fees in every research > grant. Alas, charging service fees for outgoing articles now, before institutions have the S/L/P savings to pay them out of, may be premature (although perhaps some foundations will be willing to tide them over for a while, as an investment in the transition toward free online access). But to cast these charges as "dissemination" fees rather than the peer-review fees that they really are would be to perpetuate the obsolete Gutenberg practise of wrapping the optional add-ons in with the essentials: Archiving and dissemination are trivial, and can be done much more cheaply by the author-institutions themselves, on a distributed basis, without paying journals any more money (no double payment). It is only the peer review service costs that need to be covered. (That may require some further downsizing by free-access journals such as BMC: It is not enough to become online-only. The archiving/dissemination may be best left to the distributed provider-institutions, if it entails larger costs when covered instead by the publisher.) > But let's focus on the pitch to universities. It's true that universities > would save significantly if they paid for journals with up-front > dissemination fees (subsidizing their authors) rather than back-end access > fees (subsidizing their libraries). However, this savings will only > materialize in the long run, after priced-access journals have been driven > out of the field by competition with free-access journals. Until then, > universities will have to pay twice, first in processing (dissemination) > fees and then in subscription (access) fees. The problem facing BMC is to > find a way to help institutions get past the short term loss to the long > term gain. Exactly. So tide-over subsidy may be the only hope for new start-up online-only free-access journals like BMC (while self-archiving subverts the rest of the system until either the institutional windfall savings become available or free online access becomes the norm for all). I am afraid all this means is that the alternative-journals route to free-access faces certain financial obstacles that the self-archiving route to the same goal does not. > Before looking at solutions, let me restate the problem. Funding journals > through dissemination fees is the only way to make journal access free for > readers. Except that it continues to be misleading to call them "dissemination fees" in the Web-era! Dissemination is a Gutenberg problem. Molecules are heavy and expensive to disseminate; bits are not! > So insofar as FOS is embodied in journals, dissemination fees are > the long-term solution. But since traditional journals charging access > fees will not disappear immediately, and since no university will want to > cancel all its subscriptions to them immediately, there will be a > transition period in which universities face a daunting double payment > --first, for the desirable new journals representing the future, and > second, for the important existing journals. Again, there is the implicit assumption here that the future we desire -- all 20,000 peer-reviewed full-text journals accessible online for free for all -- requires a transition to new journals, rather than freeing access to the existing journals! It is only the new-journals route that entails the problem of double-payment. The institutional self-archiving of all existing peer-reviewed research does not. And the possible expense that might (perhaps) need to be covered eventually by this second (self-archiving) route is not dissemination but peer review. And it need not be covered until when (and if) the S/L/P expenditures no longer cover them. Until then, there is only the (old) single S/L/P payment from those institutions already paying it now; and if that time (S/L/P cancellation) ever does come, then, by definition, the shrinking S/L/P revenues for publishers will have their exact counterparts in growing S/L/P savings by institutions, which will then be available for paying the remaining essential cost (peer review). It is important not to make the "double payment" problem appear to be a problem for freeing access online: It is only a problem for freeing access online by the route of creating new alternative free-access online-only journals (or instantly converting existing journals into free-access online-only journals). It is not a problem for the route of institutions self-archiving their own peer-reviewed research, right now. The latter transition route will continue to be "subsidized" by ongoing S/L/P expenditures until such a time as competition from the free versions causes those to begin to shrink. That time may or may not come, and it may come sooner or later. But, unlike the problem of covering alternative free-access, online-only journals' expenses now, it is not a problem institutional self-archiving needs to worry about now -- and may never be. Hence no "double payment." (I have repeated myself repeatedly in the foregoing passages! But from its history of not being understood, the point does seem to bear repeating...) > So until the competition with > free journals drives priced journals from the field, universities will pay > for both, or want to do so, and their costs will be higher than before or > after the transition period. The question, then, isn't the economic > feasibility of the long-term solution, but the economic feasibility of the > transition. How can we eliminate the double payments? We can try to find subsidies for the new journals -- but we can also simply accelerate our institutional self-archiving of our own articles appearing in the existing journals. > First note that there is only a double payment here because (during the > transition period) universities will have reason to support two sets of > journals when it now supports only one, not because universities would ever > pay twice for the same journal. When a university pays dissemination fees > through its authors, it would support journals that provide free online > access. When it pays access fees through its library, it would support > traditional journals that limit access to paying subscribers. The new > dissemination fees must come out of a budget already strained to cover > access fees. To put it another way: Their S/L/P budget currently only pays for that small subset of the annual 20,000 that they can afford to buy in. If that same money could buy in all 20,000, that would be all the better. If the 20,000 were accessible without having to be bought in, and could be had by simply redirecting each institution's total current S/L/P expenditures toward only its own annual outgoing papers -- and perhaps even saving 70% or more -- all the better. But paying out MORE money now, in order to have "free" access to a few more (new) journals just does not seem like a very inviting proposition... > If all universities simultaneously agreed to pay processing fees through > their authors, and stop paying subscription fees through their libraries, > then the funding paradigm would shift as quickly as institutional inertia > allows. Alas it would not. Instead, it would lead to a rather confusing cost-redirection problem, because paying per-outgoing-article per-journal is not at all the same as paying S/L/P per incoming article/journal! The payment is not for the same product, even though the consumer (the institution) happens to be the same. Earlham might subscribe to, say, 2000 of the world's 20,000 journals, paying, let's say, E dollars annually. Now how does it switch from paying for those 2000 annual incoming products to paying for its own outgoing Earlham articles? First, do those submissions go to the same journals? If the two are not identical (and not simultaneously duplicated at all the other institutions that are currently subscribing to and submitting to those same journals) then we have have a rather complicated coordination and redirection problem. And what, exactly, would be paid, for what? Currently, in exchange for S/L/P tolls, institutions get an on-paper and often also an on-line product -- the annual full-text articles in each journal subscribed to. If journals instantly re-did their arithmetic, and redistributed their annual collective S/L/P charges of $2000-$5000 per article to the submitting author-institutions instead of to the subscribing reader-institutions (let's call this OC for outgoing charges), then imbalances from institution to institution (in terms of which journals they had subscribed to and which journals they submit to) could produce huge local upheavals in the size of their OC budgets, sometimes making them much smaller, but sometimes also much larger than what their S/L/P budgets had been. Moreover, this simple redirection would not produce any pressure for cutting expenses: Every publisher would simply be paid through OC exactly what he had been paid through S/L/P. So no savings from downsizing, and separating the essential costs (peer review) from the inessential ones (paper, PDF, archiving, dissemination), would be realized. For although downsizing to the essentials ($200-$500 per article, instead of $2000-$5000) would not only save all the consumers money, but would buffer against the institutional imbalances mentioned earlier, an instant redirection would not lead to such downsizing, saving or buffering (why/how should it?). Moreover, even the dream of such an instant redirection is itself a very far-fetched one. And the dream of such an instant redirection along with an instant downsizing to the essentials is a still more far-fetched one. We researchers really risk falling into long-term Zeno's Paralysis, if we continue to contemplate such unrealistic abstract scenarios, instead of doing what we can already do immediately, namely, institutional self-archiving of our own outgoing peer-reviewed articles. > Of course, this won't happen and BMC isn't counting on it to > happen. But because this won't happen, the BMC strategy faces a classic > freeloader problem. If affluent and far-seeing universities A, B, and C, > join the revolution and start paying dissemination fees, then less affluent > or less far-seeing universities D, E, and F will have reason to benefit > from the ABC investment without joining it. Exactly. > Another way to put this is that the strategy faces a prisoner's > dilemma. Universities will have a motive to defect against cooperators > (freeload on early adopters and lengthen the transition period), > cooperators will be vulnerable to defectors (early adopters will subsidize > freeloaders and pay double payments for a longer period), and yet mutual > cooperators will be best off (by shortening the transition to single > payments). Correct, so why are we even contemplating it, instead of doing and promoting something doable that does not face this dilemma? > Perhaps the simplest way to put the dilemma is that all institutions may > prefer low dissemination fees to high access fees (partly to save money and > partly to get free access), but none wants to adopt this model first. All > want to wait until enough others have adopted it to make double payments > unnecessary. This pattern looks familiar. There are many other situations > in which everyone wants to make a certain choice but no one wants to go > first. For example, all merchants in a town may want a day of rest (say, > on Sundays), but the first to close on Sundays will lose customers to those > who do not. Or, all the states in the U.S. may want a relief fund for the > poor, but the first to raise taxes first in order to provide one will lose > businesses, hence taxes, to those that do not. It is more complicated, for even in prisoner's-dilemma form, the best outcome can only be the redirection of 100% of S/L/P, not downsizing to the 10-30% essentials. But if we sit and wait for the benign resolution of a prisoner's dilemma here, we will be waiting a long, long time! Institutional self-archiving has the advantage of being free of these restraining trade-offs and leading naturally and directly to the optimal outcome, now, with no prisoner's dilemma to resolve first! (Researchers and their institutions are being exceedingly slow about getting down to self-archiving, but this is not because they are facing a prisoner's dilemma; they just have not yet seen and understood the benefits to research and researchers from freeing online access to their peer-reviewed output. Remedying that requires campaigns of information for researchers and their institutions, facilitation and support of institutional self-archiving, and digitometric evidence of the benefits of free online access. No prisoner's dilemma needs to be resolved.) > Finally, if only to show that there are many paths to FOS, remember that we > can have FOS without journals. Peer review is essential for reliable > scholarship, and journals traditionally provide peer review, but journals > are not essential for providing peer review. There are many other > conceivable ways to do so, especially in an era interactive digital > networks. If we get peer review without journals, then self-archiving can > give us free online access to the peer-reviewed literature at essentially > no cost beyond the network infrastructure already present at every > university --plus the cost, if any, of the peer review service provider. Unfortunately, there are some misleading assumptions here too: A journal, medium-independently (i.e., independently of whether it is on-paper, on-line, or what have you) IS just a peer-review service provider and certifier! Speculations about whether we can retain peer-review but dispense with "journals" become incoherent once we think of journals as being online-only! And for the rest, it's just the partitioning problem once again: What is an "entity X" that takes a text, performs peer review on it, and then certifies the outcome as "peer-reviewed to the established standards of entity X" if not a journal? That simply takes us back where we were before, above: Do these entities have to be new ones, like BMC, or can they simply be the old 20,000, but with online access to them freed? And are these entities to perform (and be paid for) only their essential service (peer review) or are they to continue to wrap in the costs of options like paper, PDF, links, dissemination, and archiving? > The double payment problem is a real one, but two conclusions give grounds > for hope. First, it can be solved by any of several strategies, including > coordinated action, external funding, and journal conversion. Second, it > can be bypassed to the extent that dissemination fees are paid by anyone > other than the libraries and universities that now pay access fees. The double-payment problem is an artifact of the alternative-journals route to free access. It can be bypassed either by finding tide-over subsidies for all or some or most of the 20,000 established journals or their new alternative-journal successors, in exchange for free online access, or it can be bypassed by institutional self-archiving. > The economics of FOS are easy compared to the economics of the > transition. But the transition doesn't have or need to have a single, > optimal strategy. Let it be a patchwork of makeshifts. If different > disciplines, nations, or decades have different resources and constraints, > let local experimentation adapt these general strategies locally. Let's hope it won't be another decade! Stevan Harnad Harnad, S. (2001) The Self-Archiving Initiative. Nature 410: 1024-1025 http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/nature4.htm Nature WebDebatesversion: http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/index.html Fuller version: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/selfarch.htm Harnad, S. (2001) For Whom the Gate Tolls? How and Why to Free the Refereed Research Literature Online Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving, Now. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html or http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html You may join the list at the amsci site. Discussion can be posted to: [email protected]
