APPENDIX 26
Memorandum from John Wiley & Sons
We acknowledge the financial challenges that
have become apparent in the scholarly journals environment, which
we believe arises from the failure of library funding to keep
pace with R&D funding and primary research output.
The STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publishing
industry can validate its recent claims that access to and use
of its content have dramatically increased as a result of investments
in technology platforms, linking protocols, and in the content
itself, turning journals into highly functional databases, and
enabling us to demonstrably increase their outreach and utility.
Easy access to scientific publications at a fair price and the
maintenance of their credibility and integrity as we move into
the age of e-publication are our paramount concerns.
We welcome the opportunity to experiment with
new models of information dissemination (such as open access),
bearing in mind the following key issues:
the importance of an independent
system for publishing high-quality science, free from government
or charitable subsidy or mandated submission, and irrespective
of discipline, provenance of authorship, or ability to pay;
the sustainability and scalability
of publishing models to ensure the continuity and accessibility
of the authentic scientific recorda simple pared-down cost-recovery
business model does not give sufficient opportunity to invest
in product development and content delivery technologies or to
ensure that due care and attention is given to important legal
issues relating to fraud, malpractice and plagiarism; and
an equitable relationship between
producers and consumers of scientific information,
such that current net producers of research (eg the academic community
of "UK plc") do not subsidise net consumers (eg the
pharmaceutical industry or low-primary-research countries who
currently purchase more research publications than they produce)
OUR COMPANYBACKGROUND
1. John Wiley & Sons is a publicly quoted
(JWa, NYSE) publishing house headquartered in the USA but with
a major presence (as John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.) in the UK, employing
nearly 600 people in Chichester, Bognor Regis, Guildford and Ealing.
2. Wiley was founded nearly 200 years ago
(in 1807). After seven generations, the Wiley family are still
very actively involved in the company, with Peter Wiley the Chairman
and Deborah Wiley Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications.
The family give the company stability, a sense of history, and
impeccable integrity.
3. We are proud to include dozens of Nobel
laureates among the authors, editors, editorial boards and scientific
advisors with whom we have worked over the years.
4. Our Publishing (Editorial, Marketing
and Production) staff are almost exclusively graduates (and higher),
many with degrees in scientific disciplines. We are the largest
private employer in Chichester with a reputation amongst the local
population of being the employer of choice, as evidenced by our
relatively low staff turnover of under 10% per annum.
5. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. publish (produce,
market, sell and distribute) our own indigenous product; market,
sell and distribute the publications of our parent company; provide
a global corporate support service in areas such as journals fulfilment,
web-delivery technology, and IT; and distribute books published
by a number of the most prestigious American university presses
(Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago) and other reputable publishers
such as Norton, O'Reilly and Sybex.
OUR PRODUCT
LINES
6. We produce books, journals, major reference
works and web-based products and services for scientific, technical,
professional and consumer markets. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.'s
STM and other academic output is about 200 books and 125 journal
titles (approx 10,000 articles) per annum.
7. In revenue terms, Wiley STM (globally)
is currently Number five in the world, after Elsevier, Springer,
Wolters Kluwer (Lippincott Williams & Wilkins), and Blackwell,
although it is not always easy to tease apart the STM portions
of all of these businesses. Our market share is 5-6.5%, depending
on whether the primary STM book and journal market is reckoned
to be $4.6 billion or $6.5 billionestimates and classifications
vary.
8. We are a broad-based scientific publisher,
with particular strengths in Life and Medical Sciences
(especially molecular biology, bioinformatics, oncology, medical
imaging, neurology, psychiatry, pharmacology, diabetes, and arthritis
and rheumatism; we have recently expanded via prestigious society
contracts into surgery, hepatology and gastroenterology); Chemistry
(especially chemical engineering and organic, bioorganic and analytical
chemistry); Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Telecommunications
(including computing, maths and statistics); and Materials
Science (ie all aspects of the chemistry, physics and engineering
of materials, with a special strength in polymers).
9. The large investments made in transitioning
our journal publishing to a digital environment have enabled us
to undertake similar developments for our book and major reference
work programmes in a way that would otherwise not have been possible.
We believe that books and other non-journal product types continue
to fulfil an important role in the process of scholarly communication.
OUR RELATIONSHIP
WITH THE
SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY
10. About a third of our journals are published
on behalf of or in affiliation with learned societieswe
proactively work with our society partners to develop their titles
in the light of scientific progress, as new disciplines emerge
and research foci shift. Key society journals that we publish
in the UK include the British Journal of Surgery, Child Abuse
Review (on behalf of the British Association for the Study
of Child Abuse and Neglect), Journal of Gene Medicine (the
official journal of the European Society of Gene Therapy), Journal
of Pathology (for the Pathological Society of Great Britain and
Ireland), Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology, and
four titles for the UK's Society of Chemical Industry. We also
publish the Cochrane Library, a regularly updated collection
of evidence-based medicine databases that is available to all
users in the UK under the terms of a national provision agreed
with the National Health Service. In addition, we have strong
long-standing relationships with a number of prestigious European
and international societies, especially for example the German
Chemical Society.
11. Many societies specifically approach
us to publish on their behalf, in recognition of our editorial,
content management and production skills; our ability to reach
the maximum number of people with dedicated sales and marketing
staff; our fulfilment, customer service and e-support; our investment
in a state-of-the-art web delivery platform (Wiley InterScience,
see http://www3.interscience.wiley.com); our integrity and founding
leadership role in technology initiatives such as the DOI
(Digital Object Identifier) and CrossRef (the free service that
links citations to articles); and our economies of scale.
12. We see ourselves as part of the scientific
communitywe employ many scientists and our commercial venture
is driven by anticipating and responding to the requirements of
our customers in developing journals. Take as an example our highly
successful journal Prenatal Diagnosis, which brought together
papers on genetics, imaging, and obstetrics in a way that had
not been done beforea typical entrepreneurial development
that also had a profound impact on real-life diagnosis.
13. We also serve and protect our authors'
interests by granting back to them many rights (such as the ability
to post preprints of their articles; to distribute copies of the
published article to colleagues for their personal or professional
use in the advancement of scholarly or scientific research; to
republish all or part of an article in a book written or edited
by the author of the article; to use selected figures, tables
and text for incorporation into another work by the author as
part of an edited work published by a third party; and to include
the article in a coursepack, an electronic reserve room, or an
in-house training programme), and we may pursue legal actions
on their behalf in the event of infringement by a third party.
RECENT TRENDS
IN THE
STM BUSINESS
14. The transition from print to digital
has required significant investment, with the creation of
a specialist software engineering team based in Ealing working
on behalf of the whole corporation. We have also completely re-engineered
our production, marketing and customer service/technical support
departments, and just about every back-office function has been
impacted. Investment in our electronic delivery platform and content
functionality has been of the order of tens of millions of pounds
over the last eight years. Commercial publishers such as ourselves
have been at the forefront of these industry developments, and
we still need to support both print and electronic versions of
our material. We believe this is an excellent example of a business
that has rapidly and efficiently converted its mode of operation
to take advantage of the Web while simultaneously continuing its
traditional activities.
15. In response to customer encouragement,
we have pioneered enhanced features, such as optimal browse and
search facilities, EarlyView (articles published before needing
to wait for print-issue compilation), ContentAlert (notification
of newly published articles matching a customer's specific search
criteria), Mobile Editions (tables of contents and abstracts delivered
free to personal digital assistants (PDAs)), and Roaming Access
(access to content by users from outside their usual IP address
range). Customers are also provided with in-depth web application
and user behaviour statistics, in compliance with industry standards
such as ICOLC (International Consortium of Library Consortia)
and COUNTER. We are also still investing in new print technologies
such as print on demand, short-run and distributed printing, as
well as building digital asset repositories and supplying our
editors with the latest editorial office and web-based peer review
systems.
FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE
16. Our business as a whole is profitable,
as can be seen from our financial accounts, but we have three
core businesses (STM, Professional and Trade, and Higher Education)
and we do not separate these out since many of our activities
(general administration, HR, publishing technologies, finance,
legal, rights and licensing, advertising sales, publicity, exhibitions,
warehousing, occupancy, IT, customer service, fulfilment, distribution
and general management) support all of them.
17. Our journal prices have increased over
the years in line with increased output, market conditions, allowance
for attrition, and the need to make a sufficient return to support
new product development and to invest in significant technological
development at the same time as maintaining a print business.
The increased output has been brought about by consistent increases
in the volume of primary research activity and the emphasis placed
by researchers, their institutions and grant-awarding bodies on
publishing in the most authoritative journals in their field.
18. We do not believe that comparisons with
UK RPI are meaningfulthe RPI measures a static family basket
of goods and services that has little bearing on any specific
niche product, with its own characteristics, influenced by output,
currency fluctuations, risk profile and investment requirements.
19. Our journal revenues are almost completely
(85%) reliant on subscriptions, not, for example, membership fees,
endowments, advertising or sponsorship.
SPECIFIC RESPONSE
TO THE
OPEN ACCESS
DEBATE
20. Wiley has worked hard to ensure a smooth
transition to electronic journal publishing and, as noted previously,
has committed very significant resources to increasing access
to and usage of our content. The marketplace is highly competitive,
both for authors and readers, with many new entrantsanyone
is free to offer their services to our marketplace. During the
last ten years, we have explored a number of alternative business
models in the transition to both offline and online digital publishing.
However, we do not believe that such experimental models can in
the long term be underwritten by charitable subsidies or enforced
by government mandate.
21. At the moment, no-one knows whether
the nine million dollars-subsidised PLoS figure of $1,500 per
published article is reasonable for an open access author fee.
The PLoS itself admits that this figure represents the very lowest
point in a putative range of first-copy costs (where "first-copy
costs" means the fixed costs incurred to produce one copy
of an article, excluding the variable costs of producing multiple
copies). It is likely that a wholesale shift to a supply-side
model as opposed to the current demand-side model would lead to
higher article fees being required for the best journals
since rejection rates are higher and quality processing would
still command a premium. If the unsubsidised average were only
$1,000 more than the current PLoS rate, and if the current 1.4
million articles published every year all switched to open access
at this average rate, the total costs would be $3.5bn. This is
the same as the current cost of the global subscription-based
primary research journal business and would thus present no savings.
22. Net contributors are likely
to be research-intensive countries and research- intensive institutions
within those countries, and net beneficiaries are likely
to be those who use more research than they generate (eg corporates
such as pharmaceutical companies, and low-primary-research, high-applied-research
countries).
23. Even amongst the small group of current
open access publishers, the charging model is in a state of flux,
with BioMedCentral proposing higher article fees for higher-rejection-rate
titles, and PLoS recently introducing an institutional membership
scheme to give a business model with upfront charges plus processing
fees. We know that page charges are unpopular with authors and
their institutions, and we cannot see that article charges will
be any more popular. Waivers for cases of hardship raise the risk
of means-testing or allowing for "free riders".
24. It is not in dispute that the publishing
process has to be paid for, so the essential question becomes
"who pays?". We think it is unlikely that authors themselves
will pay; neither do we think faculty will pay; nor are library
acquisition budgets likely to be repositioned as publishing-process
fees. The most likely payers are the funding bodies and research
councils, and although some (such as the Wellcome Trust) have
announced that they would be willing to take on this extra charge
as part of the research grant, we understand that the precise
disposal of research funds is already not straightforward, with
universities often having to negotiate over such issues as contribution
to overheads, and we suspect that the funding will not be so readily
forthcoming or may not be earmarked and run the risk of being
spent on other research activities. Research funding also varies
greatly from discipline to discipline.
25. Although the general public are able
to access research articles via Inter-Library Loan or by being
a walk-in user in a library with one of our Enhanced Access Licences,
we should emphasise that the primary audience for these articles
is other researchers from the same specialist field. The public
(and professionals outside a given specialist field) benefit from
reviews of primary research that help to explain the results in
more appropriate language, and put what can often be conflicting
results in context. When we publish an article that is of clear
public interest (as we did recently in the Journal of Applied
Toxicology, with an article on potential links between underarm
deodorants and breast cancer), we seek not only the widest possible
press coverage but also facilitate contact between the authors
of the research and the press to ensure that the coverage is accurate
and responsible.
PURCHASING AND
ACCESS MODELS
26. Many of our sales models have been developed
in close liaison with, and as a direct result of feedback from,
our customers, both on-site in institutions and more formally
through Library Advisory Boards. Customers such as OhioLink and
NESLi have also helped to forge the concept of consortia licensing.
We provide a rich set of options for purchasing research content:
Basic Access Licences (for individual institutions), Enhanced
Access Licences (for multi-site institutions), consortia deals
(for groups of libraries, which can be as large as whole states
or nations), ArticleSelect (a token-based system for purchasing
articles in unsubscribed journals), PayPerView (individual
article purchase), document delivery (purchased via the British
Library Document Supply Centre or other third parties), or inter-library
loan (for non-commercial research or private study). With
inter-library loan, although the requesting library may charge
the end customer a contribution to overheads, publishers receive
no income from these transactions.
27. We allow access for reading-room
walk-in users, and users can set up roaming access if they
only manage to get to their library every three months, for example.
28. We have just concluded our negotiations
with NESLi2 (the UK's national initiative for the licensing
of electronic journals on behalf of the higher and further education
and research communities) that will allow unlimited access to
virtually all of our journal content to over 30 universities and
research councils.
29. Article accesses have increased
from 6.4 million in 2000, to 15.7 million in 2001, 26.9 million
in 2002, and 35.7 million in 2003these figures hardly support
the "publisher as barrier to access" caricature. Recent
independent studies show that authors and readers acknowledge
that access has improved dramatically.
30. We have analysed how many users try
to access our material and fail to do so because they are not
personal subscribers or members of a subscribing institution or
consortium, or because they have exceeded the concurrent user
limit (in which case, they can return later). For 2001, 2002 and
2003, this "turnaway" figure has been around 10%. For
users coming to us from well-used sites such as PubMed and Chemical
Abstracts, the turnaway figure is 5%. What these figures show
is that the vast majority of people who want to access our material
can do so with ease.
31. Wiley played a leadership role in two
initiatives to deliver electronic journals to the world's poorest
countriesHINARI (all of our biomedical titles) and AGORA
(our agriculture, food and nutrition titles). We work closely
with the WHO and the FAO respectively on these initiatives, whereby
access to the titles by eligible institutions in these countries
is either free or upon payment of a nominal fee which is not passed
on to the publisher but is put into a training fund administered
by the relevant Organization.
SPECIFIC QUESTIONS
RAISED BY
THE COMMITTEE
32. What impact do publishers' current
policies on pricing and provision of scientific journals, particularly
"big deal schemes", have on libraries and the teaching
and research communities they serve? We have pricing policies
that are appropriate to our market offering, taking into account
the quality of our publishing and the need to secure a profit
that enables us to continue to develop product and enhance our
service. Our Enhanced Access Licences offer our customers the
ability to lock prices over a number of years, thus avoiding price
increases and facilitating budget planning. Consortia deals allow
many smaller libraries to have access to much more content for
no more money. We offer a "big deal" option but only
in response to customer demandno customer is forced to
take this option, which is based on a standard trading model that
rewards volume purchase with discounted access. As an analogy,
our customers can choose the table d'hôte, the
a" la carte, or the eat-all-you-can option, but it would
not be reasonable to expect to pay table d'hôte prices
for an a" la carte service, nor to buy the all-you-can-eat
option and then expect a reduction because there's a portion that
you don't eat.
33. What action should Government, academic
institutions and publishers be taking to promote a competitive
market? The market is intensely competitivethe sheer
number of competing publishers (both commercial and not-for-profit)
and the significant investments they are making attest to this.
The needs of the research community would not be better served
by a more fragmented supplier base since economies of scale and
dedicated publishing operations bring much-needed efficiency,
competence, stability and innovation.
34. What are the consequences of increasing
numbers of open-access journals, for example, for the operation
of the Research Assessment Exercise and other selection processes?
Should the Government support such a trend and, if so, how?
The "increasing numbers of open-access journals" should
be put into contexteven though the number is clearly growing,
it is still very small (probably <1% in terms of peer-reviewed
articles published per annum). Many open-access journals
are, in our view, of poor editorial quality. PLoS Biology
may be an exception to this, with high-quality material in the
four issues that it has published to date, but it is sustained
by huge subsidies, and charges a per-article price that by their
own admission is set at the very lowest point of the cost of productiontheir
waiver and institutional membership schemes have hardly had a
chance to prove themselves as viable business models. Our response
therefore would be that the increase in open-access journals is
overstated and that they have a long way to go to prove themselves
in the market. The Government should let market forces prevail
and not intervene in a long-established and diverse sector for
the sake of an untried and tested experiment. With regard to the
RAE, if there were to be any mandated submission to open access
journals, this could complicate the RAE since panels may be uncertain
as to the stature of such journals, making that piece of the process
more difficult and time-consuming. We suggest that the RAE benefits
from researchers having the freedom to publish for free in the
best journals of their choice, and that the selection of journal
for submission should be based purely on academic reputation.
35. How effectively are the Legal Deposit
Libraries making available non-print scientific publications to
the research community, and what steps should they be taking in
this respect? Wiley played a significant role in setting up
the JCVD (Joint Committee on Voluntary Deposit) guidelines. We
understand that precise Regulations for electronic deposit following
the Legal Deposit Libraries Act will be drawn up as the result
of discussions involving the major stakeholders. The Association
of Online Publishers will represent our industry.
36. What impact will trends in academic
journal publishing have on the risks of scientific fraud and malpractice?
We believe that the current system protects very well against
fraud and malpractice, with publishers taking responsibility for
managing the authentic record. Recent concern over plagiarism
and the possibility of libel concerning the world's most well-known
preprint archive (ArXiv at Cornell University) and comments such
as "ArXiv is just a mindless redistribution systemit's
not implemented to be a global police force to detect or enforce
professional ethics"[103]
reveal just how little some alternative publishing models may
have considered potential legal liabilities.
February 2004
103 Paul Ginsparg, the physicist who created ArXiv,
as quoted in "Critical comments threaten to open libel
floodgate for physics archive", Jim Giles, Nature
Vol. 426, issue 7 (November 2003). Back
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