Adoption of the open access business model in scientific journal publishing – A cross-disciplinary study

Authors : Bo-Christer Björk, Timo Korkeamäki

Scientific journal publishers have over the past twenty-five years rapidly converted to predominantly electronic dissemination, but the reader-pays business model continues to dominate the market.

Open Access (OA) publishing, where the articles are freely readable on the net, has slowly increased its market share to near 20%, but has failed to fulfill the visions of rapid proliferation predicted by many early proponents.

The growth of OA has also been very uneven across fields of science. We report market shares of open access in eighteen Scopus-indexed disciplines ranging from 27% (agriculture) to 7% (business).

The differences become far more pronounced for journals published in the four countries, which dominate commercial scholarly publishing (US, UK, Germany and the Netherlands). We present contrasting developments within six academic disciplines.

Availability of funding to pay publication charges, pressure from research funding agencies, and the diversity of discipline-specific research communication cultures arise as potential explanations for the observed differences.

URL : https://haris.hanken.fi/portal/files/11186226/Bjo_rk_Korkeama_ki_2020_a_Green_version.pdf

The Transcript OPEN Library Political Science Model: A Sustainable Way into Open Access for E-Books in the Humanities and Social Science

Authors : Alexandra Jobmann, Nina Schönfelder

The strategic goal of the project “National Contact Point Open Access OA2020-DE” is to create the conditions for a large-scale open-access transformation in accordance with the Alliance of German Science Organizations.

In close collaboration with the publisher transcript, we developed a business model that strengthens the transformation process for e-books in the humanities and social sciences.

It largely addresses the drawbacks of existing models. Moreover, it is manageable, sustainable, transparent, and scalable for both publishers and libraries. This case report describes the setup of the model, its successful implementation for the branch “political science” of transcript in 2019, and provides a Strengths–Weaknesses–Opportunities–Threats (SWOT) analysis.

We believe that it has the potential to become one of the major open-access business models for research monographs and anthologies in the humanities and social sciences, especially for non-English e-books.

URL : The Transcript OPEN Library Political Science Model: A Sustainable Way into Open Access for E-Books in the Humanities and Social Science

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7030055

Bibliodiversity in Practice: Developing Community-Owned, Open Infrastructures to Unleash Open Access Publishing

Authors : Lucy Barnes, Rupert Gatti

Academic publishing is changing. The drive towards open access publishing, which is being powered in the UK by funding bodies (SHERPA Juliet), the requirements of REFs 2021 (UKRI) and 2027 (Hill 2018), and Europe-wide movements such as the recently-announced Plan S (‘About Plan S’), has the potential to shake up established ways of publishing academic research.

Within book publishing, the traditional print formats and the conventional ways of disseminating research, which are protected and promoted by a small number of powerful incumbents, are being challenged.

Academic publishing, and academic book publishing, is at a crossroads: will it find ways to accommodate open access distribution within its existing structures?

Or will new systems of research dissemination be developed? And what might those new systems look like?In this article we look at the main features of the existing monograph publication and distribution ecosystem, and question the suitability of this for open access monographs.

We look specifically at some of the key economic characteristics of the monograph publishing market and consider their implications for new infrastructures designed specifically to support open access titles.

The key observations are that the production of monographs displays constant returns to scale, and so can (and does) support large numbers of publishing initiatives; at the same time the distribution and discovery systems for monographs display increasing returns to scale and so naturally leads to the emergence of a few large providers.

We argue that in order to protect the diversity of players and outputs within the monograph publishing industry in the transition to open access it is important to create open and community-managed infrastructures and revenue flows that both cater for different business models and production workflows and are resistant to take over or control by a single (or small number) of players.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02175276/

 

Les business models de l’édition open source : Le cas des logiciels

Authors : Amel Charleux, Anne Mione

Cette recherche identifie les business models (BM) mis en œuvre par les éditeurs de logiciels libres et open source. Ces modèles requièrent une approche originale des BM parce que la création de la valeur dépend de l’attractivité du projet auprès de contributeurs dont le nombre, la qualité et la diversité ne sont pas contrôlés.

Cette spécificité pose la question du partage d’une valeur qui ne peut pas être anticipée ni formellement négociée. Nous procédons à une analyse quantitative de près de 200 logiciels et réalisons une taxonomie par la méthode TwoStep Cluster. Nos résultats mettent au jour quatre BM, engagement, exploration, expertise et optimisation.

URL : https://journals.openedition.org/fcs/2088

Is open access affordable? Why current models do not work and why we need internet‐era transformation of scholarly communications

Author : Toby Green

Progress to open access (OA) has stalled, with perhaps 20% of new papers ‘born‐free’, and half of all versions of record pay‐walled; why? In this paper, I review the last 12 months: librarians showing muscle in negotiations, publishers’ Read and Publish deals, and funders determined to force change with initiatives like Plan S. I conclude that these efforts will not work.

For example, flipping to supply‐side business models, such as article processing charges, simply flips the pay‐wall to a ‘play‐wall’ to the disadvantage of authors without financial support.

I argue that the focus on OA makes us miss the bigger problem: today’s scholarly communications is unaffordable with today’s budgets. OA is not the problem, the publishing process is the problem.

To solve it, I propose using the principles of digital transformation to reinvent publishing as a two‐step process where articles are published first as preprints, and then, journal editors invite authors to submit only papers that ‘succeed’ to peer review.

This would reduce costs significantly, opening a sustainable pathway for scholarly publishing and OA. The catalyst for this change is for the reputation economy to accept preprints as it does articles in minor journals today.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1219

Do we need to move from communication technology to user community? A new economic model of the journal as a club

Authors : John Hartley, Jason Potts, Lucy Montgomery, Ellie Rennie, Cameron Neylon

Much of the argument around reforming, remaking, or preserving the traditions of scholarly publishing is built on economic principles, explicit or implicit. Can we afford open access (OA)?

How do we pay for high‐quality services? Why does it cost so much? In this article, we argue that the sterility of much of this debate is a result of failure to tackle the question of what a journal is in economic terms.

We offer a way through by demonstrating that a journal is a club and discuss the implications for the scholarly publishing industry.

We use examples, ranging from OA to prestige journals, to explain why congestion is a problem for club‐based publications, and to discuss the importance of creative destruction for the maintenance of knowledge‐generating communities in publishing.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1228

Scholarly Communication at the Crossroad: From subscription to Open Access?

Author : Gayle R.Y.C. Chan

Recent developments in the scholarly communication ecosystem toward open access (OA) have become highly complex in how researchers discover and use information, create, and select publication venues to disseminate their research. Institution policy makers, grant funders, publishers, researchers and libraries are coming to grips with the flux in OA publishing.

What is expected is that OA will secure a growing market share, with major funders pushing OA mandates with timelines and publishers launching new OA versus traditional journals. Libraries have a critical role to play in resolving the complexities resulting from the impending ‘flip’ of journals from subscription to OA.

The University of Hong Kong (HKU), being the foremost research institution in Asia, has experienced YOY double digit growth in gold open access publications in recent years. From the collection development perspective, there is an urgent need to understand the trend in research output in order to reassess the resources budget allocation and expenditures to accommodate the needed funding support for OA publishing.

This paper presents the strategies adopted by HKU in preparing the budget transition toward OA publishing and to strengthen the library’s negotiating power in securing sustainable big deals that factor in support for researchers to go the OA route.

The value for money, challenge and risk of committing in multiyear big deals without accounting for publishing expenditures in OA contents will be discussed. Analytics on research output, journal subscription and article publishing expenditures will be used to inform the bigger picture of funding access to scholarly contents.

URL : Scholarly Communication at the Crossroad: From subscription to Open Access?

Alternative location : http://library.ifla.org/id/eprint/2192