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RSS feedsLeading lights of the scientific publishing community in the UK have endorsed the findings of a new ALPSP-backed study on open access publishing.
The Facts About Open Access report has been compiled on behalf of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Stanford University's HighWire Press. Its objective is to establish, in the words of ALPSP chief executive Sally Morris, "a baseline of comparison with traditional subscription publishing".
The findings, the core of which come from emails sent to OA publishers listed on the DOAJ directory website, are not good news for the open access movement. They raise doubts about the quality of peer review editing, impact factors and editorial independence (see table, below).
Key financial findings from the study show that 41% of OA journals are losing money, 24% are just breaking even, and a mere 35% making profit.
Bob Campbell, president of Blackwell Publishing, told IWR that the survey showed that the long-term viability of OA publishing was highly questionable. "Most OA publishing houses are financially stretched," he said. "The OA model is not secure financially, it isn't delivering a stable platform and I don't think it's sustainable."
Campbell said that a core problem was the unpredictability of revenues in an author-pays environment. "The subscription model gives the stability that means you can do peer review properly. In OA you're under pressure to accept a paper for the revenue."
Publishing Association president and Macmillan ceo, Richard Charkin, welcomed the data and experimentation with new publishing models, but warned against compromising content. "Publishing is as much about the selection of high-quality manuscripts as it is about their publication," he told IWR's sister title, The Bookseller. "In my view, sustainable business models must provide cost-effective support for selection and high-quality publication."
Not surprisingly, open access publisher BioMed Central was quick to retaliate, branding the report as containing " significant factual inaccuracies" and drawing "unjustified conclusions concerning the long-term sustainability of OA journals".
BioMed Central publisher, Dr Matthew Cockerill, said: "The fact that many open access journals currently operate at a loss is simply a sign that these are early days. There is every reason to think that the passage of time will profoundly improve the ability of open access journals to cover their costs."
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Facts about Open Access? "Study clarifies just how much less is published in an OA journal, and how much lower the rejection rate is than in subscription journals" "Most have not achieved the same level of impact as more established journals " "Many conduct peer review purely in-house, which is not what would generally be understood as classical peer review" "Fewer do any copy-editing for style and grammar" "Surprisingly few of the OA journals raise any author-side charges at all" "Author charges are considerably more common (in the form of page charges, colour charges, reprint charges, etc) among subscription journals" "OA journals are generally far more dependent on other sources of income, such as advertising and sponsorship" |
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