Caveat Lector

Vivian Siegel, previously of PLoS

(By the way, Christina Pikas, sitting next to me, is liveblogging DASER also. And she’s got a camera…)

Introduction to OA. Nothing new. Better ROI for research funders with OA; better for researcher needs; better for dissemination. Publishers are actually hindering dissemination! They need to figure out what value they add—what they can legitimately charge for, when they need to get out of the way. (I agree!)

Freely available articles cited more often.

Barriers exist to transitioning from subscription models to OA. Much harder for a new journal; everything is easier if you have established reputation, readership, submitters. A lot of comparisons conflate the difficulties of OA with the difficulties of setting up any new journal—it’d be nice to see comparisons controlled for journal age. (Again, agree; this is a sharp point.)

However, older journals have to cope with legacy data and legacy business models; new journals can start fresh. (See above for my parenthetical comment on Steve Moss’s talk.)

PLoS as a publisher also had to build a brand and a business infrastructure. Philanthropy made that possible. (Again, the deep pockets.)

For PLoS Biology, submissions were slow at first, but doubled almost immediately and remained high when impact factors were released. Early technique: publicizing a list of authors published in PLoS journals. Another technique (not used by PLoS): use value-adds like reviews to draw people to the journal; leads to better impact factor, which leads to more submissions.

Funding sources: philanthropy, article processing fees, memberships, advertising, commercial reprints or other content delivery, non-OA to reviews and other value-adds, letting print support online. Subscription journals charge authors for certain things also, so author fees are not (and have never been) totally unheard-of. PLoS’s charges aren’t out of line at all, compared to what it would cost to publish in subscription journals in the same discipline.

Costs: copy editing (considered dubious some places, and in my ex-typesetter opinion that shows!), figure manipulation, pro editors, frontmatter (reviews and editorials), fee waivers, overhead. (Mostly text/image artisanry, no surprise there. At least they admit it; some of the cloud-nine “the Internet will take over the world!” people don’t.)

Coping methods: subsidies from other journals, charge more for “high-end” journals, fund frontmatter separately, get funding (grants etc.) for fee waivers, charge an editorial oversight fee (for peer review etc).

Going forward:

• Encourage existing journals to offer options.
• Keep frontmatter under subscription barrier.
• Get libraries to make commitments.

Have to lean on authors to make accessibility to their research a priority. Has to be part of reward system. Encourage research funders to cover these costs. Happening now in biomed; harder in ecology, where publication costs are vastly higher. (Why, I wonder?)

Reducing publication costs: OSS for publication management. Give authors control and responsibility over copy editing and figure manipulation. (Ha. Ha. Ha. I love this woman, but I guarantee she has never dealt with author manuscripts.)

Whee, breakout session. My left arm hurts.