Skywritings: Scholarly and
Leisurely
An occasional column
by archivangelist
Stevan
Harnad
Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences
Université
du Québec à Montréal
The Green
and Gold Roads to Maximizing Journal Article Access, Usage and
Impact
July 1, 2005
In my
first column, I described how researchers do their
research and write up their results for publication in peer-reviewed
journals for one reason, and one reason only: to make their findings
accessible to as many potential users as possible. For it is their
articles' usage and impact that pay their salaries and
fund their research.
I also described (without yet assigning it a color), the "green" road to
maximizing research access, in which authors deposit a supplementary "Open Access"
(OA) copy of their article online in their own institutional repository for any
would-be user webwide whose institution cannot afford to subscribe to the journal
in which that particular article was published.
This is called the green road to Open Access because 7716/8460 or over 90% of the journals registered
to date (including all 254 published by Haworth Press) have already
given this "self-archiving" their
official "green light" for the sake of the benefits that maximizing research usage
and impact provides not only for research and researchers, but for their
publishers too, in maximizing their journal impact factors, visibility, and the
usage of their articles:
There is a second road to Open Access too, one that has not yet been fully tested,
and hence still holds some uncertainties and risks for publishers: the "golden"
road of Open Access (OA) Journal Publishing. So far only 1634 journal are gold, and these consist of two
kinds:
(G2) Other OA journals have instead adopted a new economic model: They
have abandoned producing a print edition, and rather than charging the
user-institution per journal for online access, they charge the author-institution
per article for publication.
No one yet
knows how viable the two forms of OA journal publication will prove in the
long run. Will free access online eventually eliminate the subscriber base for the
print edition, and force G1 journals to convert to the G2 publication-charge
model? Will the G2 publication-charge model be enough to make ends meet? How will
it fare in competition with the conventional subscription model?
Some publishers (such as Springer "Open
Choice") have hedged their bets with a hybrid model: Springer authors can
elect to publish without charge, in the traditional way, or they can pay to make
their articles gold (with Springer then making the online version free for all).
G2 publication charges vary from about $500 (BioMed Central) to $1500 (Public Library of Science) to $2500 (Springer) or
more per article. The reason the charges vary so much is partly that this is still
a minority niche market (among the total number of peer-reviewed journals
published: c. 24,000) and no
one yet knows what charges the market will bear, nor even what the true costs of
pure gold publishing would be. Journals also vary a good deal in their submission
load and rejection rates.
Right now, institutions still want the print edition and have a serials budget
that is committed to subscriptions. But if and when there were ever a wholesale
transition to golden journal publishing across the boards, both the costs and the
institutional resources available to pay them would look very different. A rough
estimate of the revenue per article (for the 24,000 journals published today) for
the average journal is about $2000 (chipped in from those institutions that
subscribe to that particular journal). If institutions no longer paid to subscribe
to journals, 100% of their serials subscription budgets would be unspent. On the
assumption (if and when this hypothetical transition were ever to occur) of (i) no
longer having the expense of producing the print edition, and perhaps even (ii)
offloading digital access-provision onto the research institutions themselves,
thereby eliminating those production and distribution costs, journal publication
costs would shrink to those of providing peer-review, copy-editing and (perhaps)
mark-up alone. As long as that reduced cost averaged less than the current average
revenue of $2000 per article, the institutional resources are already there in the
present system to cover them. Institutions would simply pay for the publication of
their own outgoing research, instead of paying for access to other institutions'
incoming research.
But this is all pure speculation
now, because we are here - with only about 2000/24,000 (8%) of journals gold, with
demand for print still intact, with most institutional resources still tied up in
subscriptions, and with author-institutions still leery about paying to publish.
And there is one more thing: We have forgotten about green! The motivation for an
author to publish in a gold journal rather than a non-gold one is that it will
maximize access and impact. But self-archiving one's own article will have the
same effect! Consider the authors of Springer articles: Springer's 502 journals are all green.
The "Open Choice" author actually has three choices: (1) publish conventionally
and settle for the limited usage and impact that that limited access entails, (2)
pay $2500 for Springer to make your article gold to maximize its usage and impact
or (3) self-archive your supplementary draft in your own institutional archive and
maximize its usage and impact that way!
Moreover, the benefits of institutional self-archiving trump merely publishing in
a gold journal, because the institutional archive also enhances the visibility and
impact of the researcher's institution, it is a means of record-keeping for the
institution's own assets, and it is a means of monitoring, evaluating and
rewarding institutional research performance. So chances are that even articles
published in golden journals will need to be self-archived in the author's
institutional archive. An institutional policy of requiring researchers to
self-archive all their journal article output - with which 81% of researchers worldwide have
now said they would comply willingly, and which has been recommended for adoption
by the UK
Select Committee, the US
Congress and the Berlin
Declaration - looks as if it will soon be adopted by all the research funding
councils in the UK (RCUK) and has
already been adopted by the CERN megalab (improving on an earlier, weaker policy
adopted by the Wellcome Trust, which allowed a 6-month delay, and a still weaker
policy adopted by the National Institutes of Health, requesting instead of
requiring, and allowing a 12-month delay).
So whereas the golden road of OA publishing may prove to be the road of the future
for journal publishing, the road to maximizing journal article access, usage and
impact right now is the green road of OA self-archiving.
"[W]e asked the American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of
Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) what their experiences have been over the 14 years
that arXiv [for self-archiving] has been in existence. How many subscriptions have
been lost as a result of arXiv? Both societies said they could not identify any
losses of subscriptions for this reason and that they do not view arXiv as a
threat to their business (rather the opposite -- in fact, the APS helped establish
an arXiv mirror site at the Brookhaven National Laboratory)."
(JISC international author survey, Swan & Brown 2005)
(G1) Some of the OA journals have a print edition and continue to sell it in the
traditional way, through institutional subscriptions; but, in addition, they also
make their (full-text) contents accessible online, for free for all, webwide.