[Wikimedia-l] (semi-OT) Open access "catastrophic" for Elsevier

[Risker]

On 23 September 2012 22:24, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> On 23/09/12 05:24, David Gerard wrote:
> > It's such a pity that Elsevier's attempt to legally block open access
> > requirements [1] means that they must be destroyed utterly with not
> > one stone left upon another and the ground salted. I'm crying real[2]
> > tears here.
> >
> >
> http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2012/09/21/how-do-you-recognize-a-catastrophe/
> >
> http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/files/2012/09/Berstein-report-on-Elsevier.pdf
> >
> > The world's smallest violin is playing the world's quietest tune, at
> > $39.50 a play for non-subscribers.
>
> According to the PDF, each published article costs them 1954 GBP, and
> brings in a revenue of 3256 GBP. A very nice business to be in. They
> already charge the authors a processing fee of 2000 GBP per article,
> so they could break even with open access, without increasing the
> author fee at all. That would be bad for investors, but the company
> would survive. So maybe it's not quite time to dance on Elselvier's grave.
>
>

I tend to agree with Tim Starling that Elselvier (and other for-profit
journal publishers) still have a place.   The author's processing fee
(which covers peer review and publication costs) that Elselvier currently
charges would probably not even cover the cost of peer reviewing; they
depend on sales to make up the difference. Remember that they bundle the
less popular journals with the popular ones, to defray those costs across
several publications.  Thus, the scientist in the little-known field whose
professional journals are read by hundreds doesn't pay significantly more
for "processing"  than the scientist whose professional journal is read by
tens of thousands.

Even open access journals will need to ensure that they charge enough to
cover the costs of peer review, or their publications will be essentially
useless:  even Wikipedia expects that sources used to back
scientific/medical statements be from peer-reviewed journals. That cost
will have to come from the researcher; the articles that David links to
indicates that the "true" cost of peer review is more than double what most
of these journals are currently charging as "processing fees".   A decrease
in the number of peer-reviewed journals in any scientific topic area can
have fairly disastrous effects on research: almost all research grants
require publication in peer-reviewed journals.  If the number of journals
available for consideration of publication is increasingly limited,
scholars will have an increasingly difficult time publishing and may have
to pay those "processing fees" to multiple journals before their report is
accepted.  That's money that's being taken away from the actual science.
It also increases the motivation to seek out research grants from
organizations with deep pockets (including those in the private sector),
and we all know that scientists who accept research grants from Big
Business tend to be considered "sell-outs".

There's no good answer here.  In an ideal world, there would be lots of
Open Access journals with low processing fees that would publish good
peer-reviewed scientific studies regardless of their "popularity".  There's
a long way to go before this will make fiscal sense.

Risker/Anne