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Select Committee on Science and Technology Minutes of Evidence


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 income—net income—came 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. Secondly—and I am not sure whether this is the main thing which concerns you as a society—one 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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