Open Access, library and publisher competition, and the evolution of general commerce

« Discussions of the economics of scholarly communication are usually devoted to Open Access, rising journal prices, publisher profits, and boycotts. That ignores what seems a much more important development in this market. Publishers, through the oft-reviled “Big Deal” packages, are providing much greater and more egalitarian access to the journal literature, an approximation to true Open Access. In the process they are also marginalizing libraries, and obtaining a greater share of the resources going into scholarly communication. This is enabling a continuation of publisher profits as well as of what for decades has been called “unsustainable journal price escalation.” It is also inhibiting the spread of Open Access, and potentially leading to an oligopoly of publishers controlling distribution through large-scale licensing.

The “Big Deal” practices are worth studying for several general reasons. The degree to which publishers succeed in diminishing the role of libraries may be an indicator of the degree and speed at which universities transform themselves. More importantly, these “Big Deals” appear to point the way to the future of the whole economy, where progress is characterized by declining privacy, increasing price discrimination, increasing opaqueness in pricing, increasing reliance on low-paid or upaid work of others for profits, and business models that depend on customer inertia. »

URL : http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/libpubcomp.pdf

What Do Journals Do? – Voluntary Public Goods and the Doomsday of Commercial Science Publishing

Commercial (and non-commercial) science publishing has evolved as a solution to a number of problems in the market for research results. It has reduced transaction costs by bringing together authors and readers, which is just the simple advantage of market intermediaries. It has delivered added value to readers by filtering out bad work.

It has added value to authors by delivering signals of high quality work. It has added value by sorting, relieving readers from the necessity to identify relevant work in some field of interest. And it has contributed to the value of published work by delivering guidance from reviewers to authors.

But technological changes already have and will continue to erase the value of these services. These services can be provided in much better quality and at much lower costs via open access science networks like SSRN.

All we need to make this work are some simple technical improvements and a few new but simple modes of peer interaction. My conjecture is that commercial science publishing will not survive for more than a couple of years.

URL : http://ssrn.com/abstract=2189631

Academic Administrator Influence on Institutional Commitment to Open…

Academic Administrator Influence on Institutional Commitment to Open Access of Scholarly Research :

« This quantitative study investigated the interrelationships among faculty researchers, publishers, librarians, and academic administrators when dealing with the open access of scholarly research. This study sought to identify the nature of any relationship between the perceived attitudes and actions of academic administrators and an institution’s commitment to open access as reported by library directors. A survey research design was used to collect data based on perceptions of library directors at four year colleges and universities in the United States. Results of this study show that as academic administrator attention to open access increases so do the open access activities of faculty and librarians. Information presented may benefit members in each stakeholder group by allowing them to better position their organizations for future success in a complex environment. This study may also benefit advocates of open access who wish to expand services and other initiatives that encourage the greater accessibility of scholarly work. »

URL : https://dspace.iup.edu/handle/2069/1916

Managing your assets in the publication economy

« The issue this article aims to address is the fact that publications may nowadays be used to assess impact and quality of research in ways academics may not be fully aware of. During recent years, scholarly publications have gained in importance, not primarily as the traditional vehicle for the dissemination of new scientific findings, but as a foundation for assessing the production and impact of organizations, research groups and individual researchers. This means that publications as artefacts per se are starting to play a new important role in the scientific community and that researchers need to be aware of how publication and citation counts are being used to assess their research and the outreach, impact and reputation of their mother organization. University rankings, for instance, often have some parameters based on the publishing of the ranked institution. This article is thus not about scientific writing as such; it focuses on what happens to your publication after the publishing has taken place and on aspects to take into account while planning the publishing of your article, report or book. »

URL : http://confero.ep.liu.se/issues/2013/v1/130117/

Open Access Versus Traditional Journal Pricing: Using a Simple ‘Platform Market’ Model to Understand Which Will Win (and Which Should)

Economists have built a theory to understand markets in which, rather than selling directly to buyers, suppliers sell through a platform, which controls prices on both sides. The theory has been applied to understand markets ranging from telephony, to credit cards, to media.

In this paper, we apply the theory to the market for scholarly journals, with the journal functioning as the platform between submitting authors and subscribing readers. Our goal is to understand the conditions under which a journal would prefer open access to traditional pricing and under which open access would be better for the scholarly community.

Our new model captures much of the richness of the existing economic literature on journal pricing, and indeed adds some fresh insights, yet is simple enough to be accessible to a broad audience.

URL : http://ssrn.com/abstract=2201773

Deep Impact Unintended consequences of journal rank …

Deep Impact: Unintended consequences of journal rank :

« Much has been said about the increasing bureaucracy in science, stifling innovation, hampering the creativity of researchers and incentivizing misconduct, even outright fraud. Many anecdotes have been recounted, observations described and conclusions drawn about the negative impact of impact assessment on scientists and science. However, few of these accounts have drawn their conclusions from data, and those that have typically relied on a few studies. In this review, we present the most recent and pertinent data on the consequences that our current scholarly communication system has had on various measures of scientific quality (such as utility/citations, methodological soundness, expert ratings and retractions). These data confirm previous suspicions: using journal rank as an assessment tool is bad scientific practice. Moreover, the data lead us to argue that any journal rank (not only the currently-favored Impact Factor) would have this negative impact. Therefore, we suggest that abandoning journals altogether, in favor of a library-based scholarly communication system, will ultimately be necessary. This new system will use modern information technology to vastly improve the filter, sort and discovery function of the current journal system. »

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3748

Pay Big to Publish Fast: Academic Journal Rackets

In the context of open-access (OA) academic publishing, the mounting pressure cross global academe to publish or perish has spawned an exponentially growing number of dodgy academic e-journals charging high fees to authors, often US$300-650, and even triple that amount, promising super-fast processing and publication open-access (OA) online. Jeffrey Beall (Scholarly Open Access, http://scholarlyoa.com) has characterized this phenomenon as ‘predatory OA publishing,’ since it is oriented largely to extorting a high fee from authors. This exponential growth in start-up cyber-journals galore of questionable quality and dubious upstart origin is driven largely by the globalization of Euro-Atlantic research cultures into the Global South and lower-income economies everywhere, part of the now rapid internationalization of scientific research (Jha 2011) and ‘researching under the audit’ (Illner 2011: 70), and is potentially a form of ‘academic racketeering.’ It tends to attract and exploit lesser-privileged academics, often on ‘knowledge production peripheries.’ They are a segment of a hugely expanding global constellation of researchers, in some ways a ‘research proletariat’ (Harvie 2000), many of whom can can least afford the ‘cyber-services’ of these start-up, fee-gouging OA journals. Yet researchers anywhere, including doctoral students and others in an ‘academic precariat,’ may be lured to publish there, given a turnaround time of three weeks from submission to acceptance and publication often offered and implemented (Stratford 2012). A certain kind of ‘market cynicism’ (Power 2010) may take hold, where young academics are forced to think of themselves largely in economic terms and the ‘price’ of quick dubious publication.

In essential ways, the phenomenon of predatory academic journals is also part of the largely ex-colonial and subalternized ‘academic periphery striking back’ against that Eurodominance of research cultures, involving basic contestations about asymmetrical power and representation and the geopolitics of hegemonic and subaltern knowledge production and dissemination on a global scale, the ‘coloniality of power/knowledge’ (Quijano 2000; Grosvoguel 2008; Jaramillo 2012) within the changing face of biopolitical production and the emergence of a new ‘common’ (Hardt 2010; Hardt & Negri 2009) inside globalized immaterial capitalist production. Racist subtexts about ‘academic scams based in Africa and South Asia’ need to be confronted and avoided.

In resisting trends toward corporate, high-cost Western-dominated academic publication, cost-free OA knowledge publication paradigms need to be expanded in the (re)appropriation of a ‘knowledge commons’ under late capitalism. These include arXiv.org, journals like JCEPS, the Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Qualitative Social Research (bit.ly/xjc0mD), and more than 7,000 others associated with the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org) — in the spirit of the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics (bit.ly/zPYYFJ) and the work of the Public Knowledge Project (http://pkp.sfu.ca), Open Journal Systems (tinyurl.com/2ydklr), SciELO (http://socialsciences.scielo.org/) in Latin America — and other initiatives for ‘Green OA’ in open-access repositories elsewhere. These OA needs to be reconceived in the struggle for a ‘communism of the common’ (Hardt 2010: 140). That re appropriation and its self-organization should become a main goal in confronting and dismantling the regime of monopolistic knowledge control today by giant ‘knowledge enclosure’ corporations like Thomson-Reuters, Springer and Wiley.

A key aim of the present paper is to spotlight these ‘predatory’ journals and urge further empirical research. Despite the huge amount of largely bourgeois analysis of OA, there is very scant critical inquiry into such academic journals and their burgeoning conglomerates.

URL : https://web.archive.org/web/20140308062500/http://www.jceps.com/PDFs/10-2-02.pdf