Objection-reply: Do journal processing fees exclude the poor?Many authors cannot afford to pay the processing fees charged by open-access journals. This is an increasingly common objection to open-access journals. If conventional journals raise a price barrier excluding readers, then (goes the objection) open-access journals raise a price barrier excluding authors. The most recent and prominent version of the objection is by John Ewing in the October 9 issue of _Nature_. "Each publication model --subscription-based or author-supported-- has trade-offs, but they are not symmetric trade-offs. When a scientist doesn't have a subscription, he or she can nonetheless get information about the article....When a scientist doesn't have the funds to publish an article, the article does not appear....That’s more than an inconvenience."
SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #67
November 2, 2003
by Peter SuberHere's my reply to this objection in seven layers.
(1) PLoS, BMC, and other open-access journal publishers waive their processing fees in cases of economic hardship. This is the single most important reply to the objection. All the others below show different ways in which authors can find the funds to pay the fees or get around the need to pay any fees at all. But bottom line, if they need to pay a fee and can't, then the open-access publishers will waive it.
But is this like the promise of some universities to give financial aid up to a student's level of need? We all know universities that make this promise, but we also know that their definition of need doesn't always match a student's. It's possible that the same will happen with OA journals, and that some authors who can't find funds won't qualify for waivers either. It's possible. But this is an empirical question. Right now we have explicit waiver policies from the OA publishers. Let's monitor the scene and see how well the publishers live up to them.
PLoS waiver policy
http://www.plos.org/faq.html
(Scroll down to "What if I can't afford the publication charges?")also this
http://www.plos.org/journals/model.html
(Scroll down to "Fee waivers")BMC waiver policy
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/apcfaq#waivers(2) BMC offers institutional memberships, which are roughly equivalent to prepaid processing fees at a discounted price. I don't know yet whether PLoS plans to follow suit. Many institutions have bought BMC memberships so that their researchers and employees will not have to pay separate fees. JISC has bought them for every university in the UK.
See the impressive list of institutions that have bought BMC memberships
http://www.biomedcentral.com/inst/More on the JISC purchase of BMC memberships for 180 universities in the UK
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/pr-releases?pr=20030306(3) Many foundations that fund research are willing to pay these fees for their grant recipients. They consider the cost of open-access dissemination to be part of the cost of research. These foundations include the largest private funders of medical research in the United States (Howard Hughes Medical Institute) and the UK (Wellcome Trust), and, as revealed by October's Berlin Declaration, the major science funders in France and Germany as well.
BioMed Central maintains a list of foundations willing to include these fees in their research grants
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/apcfaq#grantsAt least one foundation provided grants specifically to cover these processing fees, regardless of how the original research was funded. See this 2002 grant program from the Open Society Institute.
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/grants-journals.shtml
(This program has expired, but it was an excellent idea that filled an important niche. Other foundations should consider offering grant programs specifically to cover OA journal processing fees.)(4) While some of these solutions will not work in disciplines that are not as well-funded as medicine (in Ewing's field of mathematics, for example, or mine, philosophy), that is no objection to using these solutions in the fields where they do work. The success of this business model in biomedicine is progress for biomedicine, and does not imply that the same model will be adopted without modification in (say) mathematics or philosophy.
(5) Many open-access journals, especially in the less well-funded fields, charge no processing fees at all. For example, in my field there is _Philosopher's Imprint_, and in Ewing's field there is _Documenta Mathematica_.
Philosopher's Imprint
http://www.philosophersimprint.org/Documenta Mathematica
http://www.math.uiuc.edu/documenta/How does Documenta Mathematica pay its bills? See Ulf Rehmann's article in this month's HEPLW for the answer.
http://library.cern.ch/HEPLW/8/papers/3/This month the University of California launched an entire series of open-access journals that charge no fees. The business model is to make each journal in the series a peer-review overlay on an institutional repository, a model that journals can adopt in every discipline and every region.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/peerreview/overview.html(6) When foundations do not pay these fees, universities can. Ewing argues that many universities cannot afford to do so, which is certainly true today. But he should also note that, if open access spreads, then every university will realize large savings from the cancellation, conversion, or demise of expensive subscription-based journals. The natural use for this savings is to support the less expensive and more beneficial open-access model of archiving and publication that made it possible.
The true cost of reviewing, preparing, and disseminating an open-access article is much lower than the amount currently spent by libraries and subscribers to access a conventionally published article. That means that the money already spent on subscription-based journals is enough to support the superior alternative with a healthy savings left over. It's true that this savings depends on a general shift toward open access, which hasn't occurred yet. We're clearly in the transition period now, and still face hurdles. But the other side of the coin is that a general shift toward open access will free up all the funds we'll need for journal processing fees, and therefore that this objection should not derail anyone's commitment to bringing about that shift.
Note that this reply to the objection does not presuppose that this savings is the only source for journal processing fees. For example, see replies ##1, 2, 3, 5, and 6 above. Hence, it's not true that the business model of open-access journals is only viable in the hypothetical future in which open access is the dominant model and triggers huge savings for libraries.
(7) Finally, there are other ways to bring about open access to research articles that do not depend on open-access journals, fee waivers, research grants, affluent employers, or windfall savings in the library budget. The most important is eprint archiving, which authors can do on their own, and ought to do, right now. Eprint archiving lets authors submit their work to any journal, open access or not, and still provide open access to the preprint and usually to the postprint as well.
John Ewing, "'Open access' will not be open to everyone", _Nature_, October 9, 2003.
http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v425/n6958/full/425559a_fs.html
(Accessible only to subscribers)A shorter version of my reply will appear as a letter in an upcoming issue of _Nature_.
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