Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 119)
MONDAY 8 MARCH 2004
DR JULIA
KING, MRS
SALLY MORRIS
AND MR
MARTIN RICHARDSON
Q100 Chairman: What effect do their
policies actually have on you? Do you wish they would go away
and never return so you could get on with the job more efficiently?
Mrs Morris: The main effect they
have on smaller publishers is, because their prices tend to be
higher, that they sometimes take up more of the money than the
number and value of their journals would necessarily indicate.
Q101 Chairman: So you would like
them to go away and never return.
Mrs Morris: I would like them
to moderate their prices, so there was more money to go round
the rest of us.
Q102 Chairman: So it is not an instant
death, it is a slow death, is it?
Mrs Morris: Not necessarily.
Q103 Chairman: They would say so,
would they not? They would say they have to charge the prices
they charge.
Mrs Morris: It is partly a matter
of profit margins and non-commercial publishers and some commercial
publishers operate on very much more modest margins than the ones
we heard about last week. It is possible and many publishers do
it.
Dr King: One should recognise
that there are some advantages to scale. If we only had very small
publishers we probably would not get some of the technology steps
forward which you can take if you have larger margins to work
with. I am not defending anything, but saying it is good to have
some big publishers who can help move some of the technology areas
forward because they can afford the investment.
Mr Richardson: I agree. Competition
is very healthy and it is good to have a range of different publishers
fulfilling different needs for different communities and different
markets.
Q104 Mr McWalter: Is there really
a competition between yourselves and, say, Nature, or are
you getting the crumbs off the table? Someone tries to get their
article into Nature they fail and then they will go to
a learned society to get it published.
Dr King: There is not often competition
between journals because journals have different niches, but there
is huge competition for authors and yes, we compete very strongly
for authors in terms of both the prestige of the journals, the
group of people, the community of people with which they want
to be published. The collection in which they want their work
to appear is important in some areas, certainly the quality hallmark
and in some cases the sorts of services which different publishers
offer authors in terms of the linking of references or the follow-up
of people they reference or the speed of publication. There is
a range of different services which some authors find appealing.
That is a very healthy part of the competition which is around
at the moment.
Q105 Chairman: Your major competitor
is the American Institute of Physics not Elsevier and therefore
it becomes an argument about competition for authors, not competition
on prices.
Dr King: The American Physical
Society is one of the major physics publishers and that is certainly
somebody we would look at and see some of the things they do and
some of the authors they capture and that is where we set some
of our challenges.
Q106 Dr Harris: It has been said
that one of the arguments against change to an open access business
model for learned societies is the impact that would have on their
income. How much is that variable? We had an informal session
with the Endocrinology Society and the data they put up showed
that actually only a small part of their net incomenet
incomecame from publishing. Is it a variable picture?
Mrs Morris: Yes, it varies a great
deal.
Q107 Dr Harris: Secondly, would it
not just be an incentive to find other ways of raising money and
offering new services to your members around conferences rather
than relying on the old journal?
Mrs Morris: The first half of
the question first. It does vary a great deal. We are conducting
a survey at the moment of as many learned societies as we can
get to tell us whether their publishing is profitable at all and
what sorts of things they apply the profits to. That is not completed
yet, but the impression I am getting is that there is a wide range,
from some which actually make a loss on publishing, to others
who do make a modest profit. Very few make a large profit. It
is contributing by and large to things like membership fees being
cheaper than they otherwise would be, conference attendance fees
being lower than they otherwise would be, sometimes funding research
and so forth. Yes, if that money were not there, that money would
have to be raised in other ways. It might be a matter of individual
scientists having to pay more to belong to societies or to attend
conferences; there might be other routes for bringing in an income
or indeed bringing in sponsorship.
Q108 Dr Harris: But for many, it
is not Armageddon, is it? It is not a nightmare scenario, given
that for some societies it is 5% or 10%.
Mrs Morris: It is a highly alarming
scenario to some societies. There has been a great deal of correspondence
on some of the e-mail lists about how alarming it must be for
some of them. It varies a great deal.
Q109 Dr Harris: You do not have the
data yet to show the degree.
Mrs Morris: No, we have not finished
our survey.
Q110 Dr Harris: So it might be a
scare, when in fact it only affects a small number of societies
significantly who are relying on the journal and not doing much
else.
Mrs Morris: That is possible,
but we do not have the data yet.
Q111 Dr Harris: The Institute of
Physics is trying this to a certain extent with the New Journal
of Physics (NJP).
Dr King: Yes. May I comment on
your earlier question? Like a number of other societies, something
in the high sixties of the percent of our income as a charity
comes from our publishing business and that is the income we spend,
for example, on developing an A-level physics syllabus which is
now the second largest A-level syllabus in the country. We are
developing materials to help non-physicists teach physical science
in the early stages of secondary education. We do that as well
as keeping our conference rates low for our members, and indeed
for other physicists, with the money we make from the publishing
business.
Q112 Dr Harris: I just want to tease
this out. There are two issues there: one is whether you can still
make a net profit on an open access model by charging more than
your costs to the authors. Then you still get the same income.
Secondlyand I am not sure whether this is the main thing
which concerns you as a societyone of your main selling
points for membership is that they get a journal to which they
otherwise would not have access. By denying access to this information,
that is the way you sell membership of your society. I do think
there are two issues, because the first one can be dealt with
by a margin on the open access model.
Dr King: Sure, there are lots
of different views of what open access means. If you are referring,
as it sounds as though you are, to the model where you simply
move from the library paying to the author paying and the publisher
does all of the same things they do at the moment, which is that
they manage the process, they manage the critical peer review
process, they ensure everything is in good readable English so
that everybody can understand it, they provide electronic gizmos
which help scientists find related references and things, then
all of those publisher services can still be delivered under an
open access model. There is a difficulty that if you have done
the research yourself, then being asked to pay personally to have
it published is giving you a bit of a
Q113 Dr Harris: That is not a learned
society issue, that is a general issue.
Dr King: No, it is also the way
funding is structured. Our experience with New Journal of Physics
which we started in 1998 is that getting the authors to pay has
been quite a difficult thing to overcome. We run it jointly with
the German Physical Society and we have, since it started in 1998,
both subsidised it very considerably and for the last three years
to the tune of about £60,000 a year each. It does have a
business model which says it will break even in a small number
of years' time. At the moment the article charge is $500; it is
waived for an awful lot of authors. We are gradually increasing
that and we are feeling quite bullish about making it break even.
Unless the way scientists are funded changes quite dramatically,
unless you start moving funding from libraries into research grants,
for example, it is difficult to see that there will be huge enthusiasm
amongst the community for paying to have their articles published.
Q114 Dr Harris: I just want to tease
this out because I am not sure whether that was a positive message
you just gave or a negative message. We are making a loss and
have done and will be making a loss for the next few years. Or,
we are going to make a profit even on this, socialism in one country
idea, where you are having difficulty because you are the only
player in the game and therefore you do not have the shift of
resources from libraries to research grants to help authors pay
this. Are you being optimistic or pessimistic, I am not clear?
Dr King: We see it at the moment
as a very interesting experiment which we are very happy to continue
with because we see it moving to break-even, we see it growing
enormously as a journal and increasing in stature and that is
very positive. Unless there are some radical changes, we do not
see it being a sustainable business model. If you cannot have
a sustainable business model, the scientific community will lose
an awful lot because it will start to lose some very good journals.
Q115 Dr Harris: On the one hand you
are saying that it is exciting because the experiment seems to
be working and you are going to break even, which suggests to
me that even when no-one else is doing it and it is difficult
because you do not have the funding streams which go naturally
with it, it is sustainable. Then you said it was not sustainable.
I should like you to clarify that and let me know whether you
think that much of the societies' objection to pursuing this sort
of experiment or model is based purely on the fact that they think
they will have less to sell to membership and that they will stop
being a membership organisation, or they will really have to challenge
themselves to produce extra value in membership through conferences
and CME and other type approaches. Is it just scared of a new
situation or is it really that it is unsustainable?
Dr King: I would say that with
the way we do funding at the moment, it is unsustainable. For
example, the Royal Society in their submission pointed out that
if all their Royal Society Fellows were going to have to pay to
publish the on average four papers a year that they publish, the
Royal Society would be giving out something like twice as much
money to fund the Royal Society Fellows. I cannot remember the
exact figures, but they are in their submission. Yes, we can do
one journal as an experiment and we can be pleased that our experiment
seems to be succeeding, but if everybody moved over to that, then
the Royal Society would be in that position of needing twice as
much funding for all of their Fellows. Unless we start to see
a big shift in the way funding is allocated for research, this
is not going to be sustainable on more than an experimental basis
for us. Clearly the logic is that we can do it because it is not
the dominant mechanism in physics, but if researchers were being
asked to do that for every paper they published, with their funding
coming in as it does at the moment, they would not be able to
pay the fees to publish. That seems to be the worst possible situation,
where we are only getting work published on the basis of affordability,
not work published on the basis of quality, which is generally
the picture we have at the moment.
Q116 Mr Key: The commercial publishers
offer bundling deals. What effect does that have on the non-commercial
sector?
Mrs Morris: Non-commercial publishers
are increasingly doing it too. The medium-sized ones can do it
themselves alone; the smaller ones are increasingly working together
to do it. There are now at least three collections of primarily
non-profit publishers putting together collections of about 200
to 250 journals to compete in that marketplace and that is proving
a very successful way of matching bundles with bundles.
Q117 Mr Key: The Institute of Physics
have told us in evidence that they were not really too bothered
about this; that was the message we were getting. I was a bit
surprised about that. Is it not of concern to you?
Dr King: It is a concern, but
it is not a concern we are shouting from the rooftops about. It
is clearly a concern that if you absorb all of a library's budget
with one or two big bundles the smaller players are going to have
a tougher time.
Q118 Mr Key: Who organises this bundling
in the non-commercial sector?
Mrs Morris: We have organised
one for our members. There is an organisation called HighWire
out of Stanford University which has brought together a number
of society publishers. There is another one in the States called
BioOne, which brings together biological societies. They tend
to be organisations which can represent many similar publishers.
Mr Richardson: We also offer bundling
and choice in our big deals. It is a mixture of our own journals
and journals which we publish for learned societies so we can
achieve that economy of scale. Either by collaboration between
learned societies or learned societies actually contracting with
publishers it is possible to achieve that economy of scale and
compete effectively with commercial publishers.
Q119 Mr Key: When does collaboration
become collusion and price fixing?
Mrs Morris: All the arrangements
I know about of this type are organised in such a way that pricing
is entirely independent. Publishers individually set their own
prices and then the price for the package as a whole is calculated
by looking at the prices they have set separately. It does not
involve any central price fixing.
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