References
- 1The scenario is not hypothetical: one of the authors was one of the signatories of the 2001 Budapest Open Access Initiative and the organizer of the ELSSS project (2000–2004).
- 2Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon, “The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era,” PLOS ONE, 10(6): 20 June 2015,
e0127502 , DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0127502 (accessed 11 October 2019). - 3This is not to deny that there has been a large increase in the volume of articles that can be accessed without subscription or that new OA journals have not entered the market. See, for example, Heather Piwowar et al., “The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles,” PeerJ, vol. 6
e4375 . 13 Feb. 2018, DOI: 10.7717/peerj.4375 (accessed 11 October 2019), but the bulk of ‘established’ journals are still paywalled. - 4Admittedly, some editors are paid honoraria and/or expenses (sometimes as an incentive not to defect to alternative publishing models), but these costs pale into insignificance compared to the billions of pounds paid annually by libraries and authors as subscriptions and APCs (see note 8 below).
- 5In some cases, aggrieved authors may argue that the value of their own camera-ready AM is reduced by the introduction of misprints by underpaid proofreaders!
- 6Kent Anderson, “96 things that publishers do” (updated 2016 edition), The Scholarly Kitchen, 1 February 2016,
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/02/01/guest-post-kent-anderson-updated-96-things-publishers-do-2016-edition/ (accessed 11 October 2019);Quantifying even broad categories of post-AM costs appears to be very difficult. Searching RELX’s 184-page 2018 annual report for ‘marketing expenses’ yields zero results, RELX Annual Report and Financial Statements 2018,https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/reports/annual-reports/2018-annual-report.pdf (accessed 11 October 2019). RELX is the corporation owning Elsevier, among many other companies. How much of the £1.191billion reported in 2018 by RELX as ‘distribution and selling costs’ benefits authors and readers? - 7On the ‘Big Deal’ as an example of bundling, see Theodore C. Bergstrom et al., “Evaluating big deal journal bundles,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(26), 16 June 2014, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1403006111 (accessed 11 October 2019). The meaning of unbundling in our article is germane to the decoupling of academic book publishing as described by S.A. Hill (“Decoupling the academic book”, Learned Publishing, 31(S1), 6 September 2018,
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/leap.1201 [accessed 14 October 2019]) and similar to Toby Green’s “We’ve failed: Pirate black open access is trumping green and gold and we must change our approach,” Learned Publishing, 30(4), October 2017, DOI: 10.1002/leap.1116 (accessed 11 October 2019), with substantial differences explained above in the article. - 8Publishers can claim that the activity of organizing peer review is critical to the production of an accepted article, but the cost of setting up a peer-review system (which can be organized as semi-automatic) is a sunk cost, not a recurring cost. We can easily imagine that if the organization (and set-up cost) of journal peer review were to be transferred from publishers to academic departments/centres, the universities concerned would compete for the prestige associated with hosting a respected journal. Again, any attempt to quantify what publishers call ‘pre-publication costs’ is frustrated by the opacity of their annual reports. For example, the RELX 2018 report mentioned above (reference 6) states: ‘pre-publication costs are stated at the lower of cost, including appropriate attributable overhead, and estimated net realisable value. Such costs typically comprise direct internal labour costs and externally commissioned editorial and other fees. Pre-publication costs, representing costs incurred in the origination of content prior to publication, are expensed systematically reflecting the expected sales profile over the estimated economic lives of the related products, generally up to five years’. We note that in 2018 pre-publication costs amounted to £171m against revenues of £7,492m, i.e., to less than 0.023%. On the basis of these illustrative figures, our contention that pre-publication costs are relatively insignificant and non-recurring (and hence not to be included in the final price) seems reasonable.
- 9We are aware that there are discipline-specific differences in what constitutes an AM.
- 10We are simplifying somewhat here: there other non-labour costs, such as the hosting of articles, but these are largely of the sunk-cost variety and comparatively small and thus could be sustained by academic/charitable funders.
- 11Notice the stress on effective cost: this refers to the minimum cost at which AMs can be produced, not the actual cost, which can be inflated by ‘gold-plating’. The simple reason why profit-seeking publishers may wish to incur unnecessary costs is that their pricing model is essentially a mark-up on costs.
- 12If journal subscriptions were replaced by APCs ‘… subscriptions paid by academic libraries globally would fall by £2.91bn. But these savings would be offset by an increase of £2.92bn in the charges that the academic and research institutions of which they are a part (or their funders) would have to meet in author-side publication fees’, Cambridge Economic Policy Associates, Activities, costs and funding flows in the scholarly communications system in the UK (Research Information Network Summary Report 2008), 8; Ralf Schimmer, Kai Karin Geschuhn, and Andreas Vogler, “Disrupting the subscription journals’ business model for the necessary large-scale transformation to open access,” (2015), DOI: 10.17617/1.3 (accessed 11 October 2019) make the point that current subscription charges would be more than sufficient to cover the costs of article processing, a not altogether surprising finding, especially in view of the 30%–40% profit margin included in subscription charges. It should also be pointed out that the paper does not consider the issue of the large back catalogue that would still remain largely paywalled.
- 13This is not to deny that the library profession is built on people who believe in access to knowledge and in doing everything they can to connect users with information. The evidence shows that this pool of goodwill is not sufficient to overcome the systemic mismatch of incentives.
- 14Green, “We’ve failed”.
- 15Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon, “The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers”.
- 16Min Tan et al., “Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time,” PLOS ONE, 28 October 2009, 4(10):
e7595 , DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0007595 (accessed 11 October 2019). - 17Juan Gorraiz, Christian Gumpenberger, and Christian Schlögl, “Usage versus citation behaviours in four subject areas,” Scientometrics, 101(2), November 2014, DOI: 10.1007/s11192-014-1271-1 (accessed 14 October 2019).
- 18See, for example, Johan Bollen and Herbert Van de Sompel, “Usage impact factor: The effects of sample characteristics on usage-based impact metrics,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59 no. 1 (2007): 136–49,
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/asi.20746 (accessed 28 October 2019), DOI: 10.1002/asi.20746 - 19See Ted Bergstrom, Richard Uhrig, and Kristin Antelman,
“Looking under the COUNTER for overcounted downloads,” UC Santa Barbara: Department of Economics, 2018,https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0vf2k2p0 p. 1 (accessed 14 October 2019); and Ted Bergstrom, “Do download reports reliably measure journal usage? Trusting the fox to count your hens?,” UC Santa Barbara: Department of Economics, March 2018,https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2cd2h7vt (accessed 14 October 2019). - 20The Springer Nature’s report (Mithu Lucraft, Hélène Draux, and John Walker, “Assessing the open access effect for hybrid journals,” June 2018, DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.6396290 [accessed 14 October 2019]) provides data to support the unsurprising conclusion that open access content receives more views/usage than restricted content.
- 21See Camillo Lamanna and Stevan Bruijns, “Measuring regional impact: The case for bigger data,” Learned Publishing, 31(4) October 2018,
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/leap.1183 (accessed 14 October 2019), DOI: 10.1002/leap.1183 - 22While it is recognized that Altmetrics can offer geographical insights into impact, its measure may be skewed by differing social media activity patterns globally (Cameron Neylon, Michelle Willmers, and Thomas King, “Rethinking Impact: Applying Altmetrics to Southern African Research,” Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme, Paper 1, January 2014, pp. 1–20,
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ee96/d67a9ce474247de9824da43fe44349fc4ce0.pdf [accessed 14 October 2019]). - 23Stevan Bruijns and Camillo Lamanna, “Rethinking Impact: Applying Altmetrics to Southern African Research,” ecancermedicalscience, 12,
ed78 , 29 January 2018,https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ee96/d67a9ce474247de9824da43fe44349fc4ce0.pdf (accessed 14 October 2019). - 24We are aware of the pitfalls of Elsevier-supplied viewing data: they are not transparently validated and, more generally, the data contain far too much noise to extract a meaningful signal. For example, the most cited article (with 298 citations) contains resuscitation guidelines and it has apparently been viewed only 131 times.
- 25PIRUS, Developing a global standard to enable the recording, reporting and consolidation of online usage statistics for individual journal articles hosted by institutional repositories, publishers and other entities (Publisher Metadata and Interoperability Projects 3) Final Report, January 2009,
https://irus.jisc.ac.uk/about/pirus2/pirus_finalreport.pdf (accessed 14 October 2019). - 26Ross MacIntyre et al., “Measuring the usage of repositories via a national standards-based aggregation service: IRUS-UK,” in New Avenues for Electronic Publishing in the Age of Infinite Collections and Citizen Science: Scale, Openness and Trust: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Electronic Publishing, eds. Schmidt B, Dobreva M (Amsterdam, Netherlands: IOS Press, 2015), 85,
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9235/f5e88705411088588bf0116b7c729fd0c122.pdf (accessed 14 October 2019), p. 3. - 27It should be noted that the recent Crossref-led Distributed Usage Logging project differs substantially from BitViews in both aims and scope. (For a recent account see Jeffrey G. Coghill, “Distributed Usage Logging: What to Consider,” Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries, 16(2) June 2019, DOI: 10.1080/15424065.2019.1638870 [accessed 14 October 2019].) The differences are best encapsulated in the DUL mission statement: “This initiative, driven by the DUL working group, is exploring how to provide a private peer-to-peer channel for the secure exchange and processing of COUNTER-compliant private usage records from hosting platforms to publishers.” “Publishers are unable to demonstrate the full value of their content to library customers. They are also unable to provide authors will a full picture of usage of their articles. Because use is distributed, institutions do not have a complete picture of usage when making purchasing decisions.” [italics added]
https://www.crossref.org/community/project-dul/ . The main motivation of the DUL initiative appears to be the desire to establish a closer link between online usage and pricing of published articles. - 28Camillo Lamanna and Manfredi La Manna,
“BitView: Using Blockchain Technology to Validate and Diffuse Global Usage Data for Academic Publications,” in: Maturity and Innovation in Digital Libraries, eds. Milena Dobreva, Annika Hinze, Maja Žumer (ICADL, 2018), part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series, vol. 11279. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-04257-8_28 (accessed 14 October 2019). - 29Notice that our use of blockchain technology is completely different from Phil Davis’ suggestion of using it as an authentication tool. See Phil Davis, “Bitcoin: A Solution to Publisher Authentication and Usage Accounting,” The Scholarly Kitchen, 1 June 2016,
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/06/01/bitcoin-a-solution-to-publisher-authentication-and-usage-accounting/ (accessed 14 October 2019). - 30Pierluigi Cuccuru, “Beyond bitcoin: an early overview on smart contracts”, International Journal of Law and Information Technology, 25(3),
Autumn 2017, DOI: 10.1093/ijlit/eax003 (accessed 26 October 2019). - 31We address later the issue of whether publishers such as Elsevier would join the BitViews consortium. The above example applies if ‘IR’ is substituted for ‘Elsevier’.
- 32While we recognize that adoption of DOIs has not been universal, it has increased significantly in the past decade and the majority of material published in peer-reviewed journals has an associated DOI (Christophe Boudry and Ghislaine Chartron, “Availability of digital object identifiers in publications archived by PubMed,” Scientometrics, 10: 1453 (2017), DOI: 10.1007/s11192-016-2225-6 (accessed 14 October 2019).
- 33It has been estimated that the majority of IR ‘usage’ is due to non-human activity (Patrick O’Brien et al., “RAMP – the Repository Analytics and Metrics Portal,” Library Hi Tech, 35(1), 2017, DOI: 10.1108/LHT-11-2016-0122 [accessed 14 October 2019]). A single, transparent set of filtering criteria is essential to make IR usage statistics valid and comparable.
- 34Bergstrom, “Do download reports reliably measure journal usage?”.
- 35The term ‘conditional crowdfunding’ is sometimes used in the fundraising community to mean “conditional on the funded project/person undertaking (or refraining from undertaking) a given action”, for example, fundraising for a Congressional candidate but only if a certain cause (e.g., gun control, reproductive rights, etc.) is supported. Instead we use it to mean that the supporters’ financial commitment is conditional both on the attainment of the target (sometimes called ‘threshold crowdfunding’) and on the total amount committed (with any surplus returned on a pro rata basis).
- 36The suggested contribution is meant to establish a link between a library’s budget and its participation in the project.
- 37It should be stressed that libraries’ initial contributions are not binding financial commitments to the project, but merely an indication of the maximum amount each library is willing to contribute to the development of the BitViews application. If the fundraising target is reached and once the total amount of maximum contributions is known, each contributor will be invoiced for a pre-order payment (expected to be lower than its maximum willingness to pay).