Re: [GOAL] Plan S: APC and service level

[Heather Morrison]

hi Victor,


Thank you for raising a suggestion about connecting APCs to service levels, 
i.e. journals with more services charging more for APCs. Some thoughts on this 
subject follow. In brief, I agree with Babini that the APC model is problematic 
for OA. I argue that the APC model is not consistent with the vision or GOAL 
for OA, and has the potential to continue or exacerbate market problems with 
scholarly publishing. Research funder policies requiring OA are welcome, but in 
my opinion should focus exclusively on OA archiving and in particular should 
avoid encouraging or financially supporting APCs.


Details


Vision


The first paragraph of the original Budapest Open Access Initiative (see below) 
is the best brief description of what I consider the GOAL of open access (or 
the global knowledge commons, the term I use):

https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read


"An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an 
unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists 
and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals 
without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is 
the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic 
distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and 
unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and 
other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will 
accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the 
poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, 
and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual 
conversation and quest for knowledge".

Comment: a commons as described by Bambini is a better fit to achieve this 
vision than an APC market. Fostering APCs and allowing journals with more 
services to charge more is an "even more for the rich" approach, the exact 
opposite of "laying the foundation for uniting humanity in a common 
intellectual conversation".

Transitioning market dysfunction?

The transition to open access is taking place in the context of a scholarly 
communication ecosystem that has been dysfunctional for at least half a 
century. The market has become very concentrated, and a few large commercial 
scholarly publishers have gained large profits in an inelastic market, arguably 
at the expense of access and dissemination, not-for-profit university presses, 
smaller journals and societies, and the less well endowed humanities and social 
sciences.

In the process of transition to open access via APCs, there are 2 reasonable 
hypotheses that we are exploring through the longitudinal APC project. Will 
APCs introduce competition and lower prices because they are more transparent 
than subscriptions? OR, will a transition to APCs simply transfer the 
must-purchase imperative that created an inelastic subscriptions market to an 
equally (or possibly more) dysfunctional must-pay-to-publish in system. To 
date, our evidence is far from conclusive. Recent evidence (large percentage 
price increases by some APC publishers) tends to support the hypothesis of 
transitioning an inelastic market. Any approach that focuses on transitioning 
the existing large commercial publishers seems likely to transition the 
marketing strategies of these companies. To minimize this possibility, I 
recommend an exclusive policy focus on OA archiving and dissemination via OA 
archives; leave the market (and the commons) to adjust.

Some OA journals and publishers are successfully using APCs. Most OA journals 
do not use them. There are, in my opinion, better models. For example, I 
recommend direct subsidies as either APCs or subscriptions / purchase are 
essentially less-efficient indirect subsidy models, because in the case of 
scholarly publishing the authors and readers are largely the same group.

best,


Dr. Heather Morrison

Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa

Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa

Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight 
Project

sustainingknowledgecommons.org

heather.morri...@uottawa.ca

https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706


From: goal-boun...@eprints.org  on behalf of Victor 
Venema 
Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2019 11:39:39 AM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Plan S: APC and service level

Dear colleagues,

One of the discussions of Plan S is about its impact on researchers from
less wealthy institutions. The article below is typical and I found the
comment below insightful.

It made me wonder, would it be possible to link APCs to the service
level? We could make a system where you can only ask for the maximum APC
mentioned in plan S if you provide all services required by Plan S,
while journals fu

Re: [GOAL] Plan S: APC and service level

[Bosman, J.M. (Jeroen)]

Dear Victor, others,


indeed I have wondered about that as well. Of course, in Plan S the idea is to 
require cost transparency. But the question is of course what is acceptable for 
each of the services? If we can't have full diamond, some a APC could consist 
of 50 USD/Euro each for:


- hosting

- xml

- CC0 sharing of citation data

- CC-licenses

- archiving

- doi

- reciprocal linking to preprints, self-archived versions and datasets

- author contributorship role taxonomy implemented

- handling peer review

- copy-editing

- plagiarism check

- submission admin


Of course this is simplistic and the 50 is just randomly set and too low for 
some services, too high for others. Some reasoned assessments of (ranges of) 
real costs for these are very welcome.


These services could also be taken into account in considerations around 
financing diamond arrangements. And even if this keeps a check on APCs, they 
might still pose a barrier for some, so automatic waivers would still need to 
be available.


Jeroen




---

Jeroen Bosman, scholarly communication specialist and faculty liaison for the 
Faculty of Geosciences | Utrecht University Library | 
email: j.bos...@uu.nl |telephone: +31.6.24865967 | mail: 
Postbus 80124, 3508 TC, Utrecht, The Netherlands |visiting address: room 2.16, 
Heidelberglaan 3, 
Utrecht
 | Web: Jeroen  
Bosman
 | twitter @jeroenbosman



From: goal-boun...@eprints.org  on behalf of Victor 
Venema 
Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2019 5:39:39 PM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Plan S: APC and service level

Dear colleagues,

One of the discussions of Plan S is about its impact on researchers from
less wealthy institutions. The article below is typical and I found the
comment below insightful.

It made me wonder, would it be possible to link APCs to the service
level? We could make a system where you can only ask for the maximum APC
mentioned in plan S if you provide all services required by Plan S,
while journals fulfilling less requirements would have a lower maximum APC.

Maybe an old idea/compromise, but I had not seen it anywhere yet.

With best regards,
Victor Venema
https://grassroots.is


https://theconversation.com/how-the-open-access-model-hurts-academics-in-poorer-countries-113856

>  Dominique Babini
>
> Thank you for this very interesting reading and contribution to the 
> conversation on the negative impact of APCs in developing regions.  You are 
> so right.Why did APCs started?  We, in Latin America, worked the past 20 
> years to build successful non-commercial, non-APCs, academic-led, open access 
> journals (only 5% of journals charge very low APCs) and now we are shocked to 
> see that the basic question is not raised again and again: why should 
> publicly-funded research outputs be a product in the market and not a 
> commons/public good, and why open access should be a market and not a commons 
> managed by the scholarly community?We are concerned with growth in the number 
> of articles published with APCs, and because Plan S favors commercial APCs 
> journals because they will comply with Plan S requirements which are not easy 
> for developing regions quality OA journals to comply with.
https://theconversation.com/how-the-open-access-model-hurts-academics-in-poorer-countries-113856
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