JISC

Mary Waltham June 2005

Report summary

The volume of research literature is growing – as is the price of each journal. Higher education institutions don’t have the budget to keep up and subscription fee journals are becoming unsustainable. Open Access is the obvious alternative but there is little data available about the costs involved. This report focuses on the business models of nine “learned society” publishers (eight in the UK one in the US) publishing science journals who provided detailed figures for 13 journals – one of which is fully open access. For reasons of confidentiality, the publishers are not named.

The report investigates the revenue streams of the journals (average revenue in 2004 was £1918 per article) and current trends. For instance, a steady fall in the number of print subscriptions to all journals over the past 25 years – which has steepened in the past five years. There are several reasons for this decline. As well as the price increases, online journals have had an impact, especially when libraries adopt online-only policies when both print and online versions are available.

Because publishers have access to print bills, print costs (the costs that come after all the preparation costs like copy editing and etc) are easy to work out (they decreased in 2004, although an increase in distribution costs more than made up for this). But it’s very hard to work out online preparation costs and the cost lines often merge. (Print and OA are often sold in the same bundle to further confuse things). The authors recommend that publishers try to keep them separate.

The vast majority of the revenue for the journals (89%) comes from subscribers. Plenty of the publishers make a surplus, but as they are learned societies, they all use this to fund “other activities” (which the authors say are for the greater good of scholarship, like travel bursaries, product development, etc).

The authors then looks at recent and current Open Access experiments and emerging trends (such as increasing access to ‘good enough’ preprint versions of research).

They’ve discovered

• In prestige journals for well-funded disciplines such as bio-medicine author fees are easily obtained.
• In smaller journals for less well funded disciplines, there’s still been a growth in uptake if the fees charged are low.
• Open access is virtually redundant in fields where there is a tradition for authors to publish preprint ‘good enough’ versions of their papers.
• There’s resistance to the producer pays model in some disciplines

A competitive market is emerging in author fees. That’s to say those that charge the least are likely to do the best. But this is a potential problem for learned societies:

“There should be concern about the future of learned societies as publishers because with downward pressure exerted on author fees by the competitive market, the publishing of research articles will become a low margin commodity business.”

Overall, they find that the current OA models are unlikely to allow journals to be financially sustainable – especially from the point of view of producing the much-needed surplus. Nor have they found a strong ‘pull’ from within the author community towards the open access model and they suggest this may only change “very slowly”. Unless funding agencies start to make OA a requirement, anyway.

Key points

Removing print would reduce the costs of the OA business model. “If the variable costs of print are subtracted from 2004 costs then the average publishing cost per article falls to £956 and per page to £97.” (But analysis of pure print models shows that revenues would fall even more than the reduction in costs).

“None of the publishers could see substantial savings from moving to an OA publishing model and most pointed out the additional costs incurred for administering and collecting author publishing fees and the additional costs of marketing to authors versus institutions ie many individuals versus a few institutions.”

VAT protects print, because it isn’t charged on print journals but is on online-only.

As well as straightforward Open Access, other potential models include:

• Delayed Open Access - when journals are made available freely after a time period in which journals are sold on subscription in the usual way.
• Hybrid Open Access – Authors can choose to make their articles OA from the start for a fee.

Read the full report (Word)