---
layout: post
status: publish
published: true
title: 'Publication: Co-operating for gold open access without APCs'
link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1629/uksg.166
doi: 10.1629/uksg.166
date: 2015-03-05
categories:
- Publications
comments: []
---

<p>The current transition to gold open access (OA) through the implementation of an author- or
   institution-facing charge (an article or book processing charge: APC or BPC) is based upon two
   key flawed assumptions that are particularly acute in the humanities disciplines.</p><p>The first of these assumptions is that a market will emerge in which rational actors
   (researchers) will develop price sensitivity in the selection of their publication venue. This is
   the line of the UK government. However, as we see in the market for shoes, for example, various
   manufacturers of trainers manage to sell the same essential product, often made by the same
   workers from the same material, with wild price differentiation. In other words, in markets that
   deal with symbolic capital (prestige or reputation), perceived value is little to do with the
   services or goods provided, but instead wholly concerned with the brand that is valued by
   one’s peers. To believe that price for the actual service rendered would trump this
   perceived brand-value will remain a naïve position while scholarly communication retains its
   dual roles in dissemination <em>and</em> assessment.<span class="xref"><strong><a href="#B1">1</a></strong></span></p><p>The second assumption is that APCs and BPCs are simply a straightforward substitution of the
   point of payment to the supply side of the economic system. The problem with this assumption,
   though, is that the economics of risk have been inadequately modelled for the proposed APC set-up
   in contrast to the current subscription set-up. The most common way of conceiving of the
   subscription and sales environment that we have had so far is as one where we are ‘paying
   to read’. We buy material so that we have access and we exclude those who don’t pay.
   There is another way of thinking about this, however. This model is also one where, as a group,
   we all pay a relatively modest amount in order to subsidise the work of publishers. This is
   particularly the case in the instance of mission-orientated publishers, like university presses,
   who often do not make huge profits and combine subscription revenues from many institutions so
   that they can continue to publish work. In other words, subscriptions and sales act as a risk
   pool. There may well be problems in conceiving of this as a market – after all, there is
   little rationality and a high level of monopoly, as well as the fact that it operates on an
   exclusionary model that is antithetical to the dissemination claims of publishers – but it
   is a model whereby a large number of institutions bear the cost of publishing
    <em>all</em> the material that appears in a journal or in a book list.</p><p>The same is not true of article and book processing charges. This new environment may look rosy
   for institutions that do not produce much, or any, research. After all, they have no researchers
   for whom they have to pay. This is not the case, though, for research-intensive institutions or
   for younger institutions with smaller budgets that wish to break into the research-intensive
   groupings. In each of these cases, a subscription will work out far cheaper at the local level
   than a switch to direct author-facing payments. Indeed, even with offsetting measures in a hybrid
   environment that are designed to make this a transition, the costs are located at different
   places in an APC/BPC model. Of course, there is enough money in the system if we were to
   theoretically transition immediately to pay for all the publication that we have to be OA and if
   redistributions were put into place. The funds are not, though, distributed evenly throughout the
   world’s universities. At the moment this is manifest in an access crisis. In an APC/BPC
   model, it will be evident on the supply side, particularly in the humanities disciplines. This
   explains the widespread resistance to this model within those fields: if researchers feel the
   need to publish in specific venues with specific access requirements and the economics are not in
   their favour, they feel the effects directly.</p><p>To put this all somewhat differently, though, what is actually happening here is that we have
   devised a way of kidding ourselves, to some degree. When justifying expenditure from the library
   budget in a supposedly competitive market, we need to conceive of what we are doing under
   classical economic incentive theorisations: ‘we are buying this publication as a commodity
   object so that our researchers can read it’. We really know, though, that what we are
   actually doing is collectively paying for the labour of publishing as a service, which we can
   achieve far more easily if we spread the risk. The fact that we have inter-library loan services
   and librarians who are committed to spreading knowledge without payment indicates the disjunct
   between the idea of paying individually and feeling a grudge at giving the fruit of that purchase
   to others who have not paid. In other words, ‘free riders’, deemed problematic in
   classical economic theory, are not so amid the strange market contours of the academic library
   and scholarly communication communities.</p><div><h2>Precedents for consortially funded open access</h2><p>This is not just theoretical speculation; we have concrete demonstrations that consortial
    purchasing for OA is desired by library communities. We also have real evidence that free riders
    are no hindrance to such schemes working, so long as a sufficient number of institutions
    participate. How else, after all, to explain the continued funding of arXiv or mass
    participation in Knowledge Unlatched? ArXiv’s well-known revenue model, for instance, is
    one in which ‘Cornell University Library (CUL), the Simons Foundation, and a global
    collective of institutional members support ArXiv financially’.<span class="xref"><strong><a href="#B2">2</a></strong></span> For the sustainability of arXiv, ‘each member institution pledges a
    five-year funding commitment to support arXiv. Based on institutional usage ranking, the annual
    fees are set in four tiers from $1,500-$3,000. Cornell’s [the host of arXiv] goal is to
    raise $300,000 per year through membership fees generated by approximately 126
     institutions’.<span class="xref"><strong><a href="#B3">3</a></strong></span> While such a model is entirely
    susceptible to free riders, the project notes that ‘arXiv’s sustainability should be
    considered a shared investment in a culturally embedded resource that provides unambiguous value
    to a global network of science researchers. Any system of voluntary contribution is susceptible
    to free-riders, but arXiv is extremely cost-effective, so even modest contributions from
    heavy-user institutions will support continued open access for all while providing good
    value-for-money when compared with subscription services’.<span class="xref"><strong><a href="#B4">4</a></strong></span></p><p>This may be all well and good in the case of a heavily used preprint server with concrete
    usage metrics known in advance, but what about extending such thinking to full publication and
    selection? Moves are afoot. Rebecca Kennison and Lisa Norberg, for instance, have proposed a
    model for the humanities under which there would be a central fund, created by ‘an annual
    or multi-year payment made by every institution of higher education’, for which
    ‘[i]nstitutions and scholarly societies come together in partnership to apply […]
    through a competitive grant process’.<span class="xref"><strong><a href="#B5">5</a></strong></span> While there
    are many details of a practical implementation of this precise model that are yet to be decided
    (and I might query whether we want more competitive grant processes), the principle is similar.
    By collaborating, irrespective of free riders, we gain extraordinary value for money and can
    achieve gold OA by spreading risk, as we currently do for subscription publication. All that we
    have done is remove the thinking that says we are only willing to pay for a direct, individual
    return. That is not what is happening anyway, so let us strip that from our discourse.</p><p>Such thinking is not, though, radically new. Hugh Look and Frances Pinter first proposed the
    model for Knowledge Unlatched back in 2010. This pilot, which eventually gained just under 300
    participating libraries, was based on the reasoning that ‘if, say 1,000 libraries paid
    into a fund that “bought” the non-commercial open access rights to a book that
    carried, for the sake of the arithmetic, a “getting to first copy” cost of $10,000,
    then each library would contribute $10.00. The average monograph today costs approximately
    $80.00. This would not only get libraries eight times as many titles online, it would be truly
    contributing to making knowledge accessible globally. If, say 5,000 libraries subscribed to the
    scheme (although we feel this is unlikely) the cost would be $2.00 a title, representing a 97.5%
    reduction on the current print or eBook price.’<span class="xref"><strong><a href="#B6">6</a></strong></span></p><p>But 2010 was only the start. Sanford G Thatcher notes the close affinity between these
    consortial mechanisms and the description furnished by Adrian Johns of 17th-century practice:
    ‘another option, of increasing importance after 1660, was to publish by subscription
    … It involved persuading a number of prosperous individuals to invest enough money in the
    proposed publication that the project would be sufficiently capitalized to proceed to
     completion’.<span class="xref"><strong><a href="#B7">7</a></strong></span>, <span class="xref"><strong><a href="#B8">8</a></strong></span> What has changed since then is not the view that the furtherance of the Enlightenment
    project is best advanced by the broadest dissemination of research; this remains as key as ever.
    It is rather the economic systems to which we are willing to rationalize our commitment.</p></div><div><h2>The Open Library of Humanities</h2><p>Free riders or not, there is a hunger among the library community for new models, often
    not-for-profit, that address the economic and social challenges of gold OA. In the remainder of
    this piece, I will describe the steps we are taking with, and the progress towards the launch
    of, the Open Library of Humanities (OLH), of which I am a co-founder. Beginning with an Andrew W
    Mellon Foundation planning grant, this platform aims to provide a transition to gold OA for
    journals in the humanities without any author-facing charges.</p><p>The OLH, which I co-direct with Dr Caroline Edwards, has two distinct topological
    components.</p><p>The first component, the OLH Megajournal, is a multi-disciplinary space for any researcher who
    identifies his or her practice as falling within ‘the humanities’. Although not a
    ‘megajournal’ in the <em>PLOS-ONE</em> sense of ‘peer-review
    light’ (in which ‘technical soundness’ becomes the core determinant for
    admission), this broad space is an area where the approximately 150 researchers who have pledged
    us articles can submit their new work. Of course, we cannot guarantee that all 150 pledges will
    be received. We can guarantee that not all of these will pass peer review. The end result,
    though, at launch, should be a sizeable tranche of initial material across a wide disciplinary
    spread.</p><p>The second component is the provision of a space for individual journals to share in our
    economy of scale. These existing publications can transfer onto the OLH and we will provide,
    through our partnership with Ubiquity Press, a dedicated editorial manager, a hosting platform,
    a submission management system, XML typesetting, digital preservation, COPE membership and
    CrossRef DOI assignment. Each journal may keep its own branding and autonomy over its
    peer-review practices. There are two possible routes for a journal’s inclusion. The first
    is the standard admission route. In this route, in collaboration with the academic director, a
    proposal is put to the academic and library boards. This must then pass a resolution of quality
    control from the academic steering committee and a resolution of budgetary increase from the
    library board. This route may only be available at certain times as publication costs are borne
    solely by the OLH library consortium. In this mode, there are no costs to journals or authors.
    The second route is self-funded quality-assessed admission. In this mode, those journals that
    pass a quality-control decision and that have funds to cover their own publication costs for a
    period of time (usually three years at approximately US$500 per article), in whole or in part,
    may transition to the collective funding pool at the end of this period. This route is subject
    to satisfactory quality requirements, along with an internal financial assessment, and is
    available solely at the discretion of the academic directors.</p><p>It is also well known that books, and particularly the research monograph, form a far more
    important component within the humanities ecosystem. To that end, it is vital that the OLH
    pursues routes by which these crucial outputs can also be made accessible freely over the web.
    In this instance, if we achieve sufficient library participation (see below) and it is desirable
    to our library members, we are in discussions with Cambridge University Press, Oxford University
    Press, Harvard University Press and Open Book Publishers to work on the cross-subsidy of OA
    books.</p><p>The economic model that we have assembled for this initiative is one wherein a moderate number
    of libraries agree to pay an initial rate of ~US$1000 each (with appropriate banding in some
    countries). These libraries are not paying for access to the material. Neither are they paying
    for their own researchers to publish. Instead, they are paying to do things a better way and to
    have a governance stake in the project. By pooling resources while re-conceiving the
    relationship between a not-for-profit, mission-orientated and scholar-led publisher and the
    library, an economy of scale is possible that is simply not there under individualist modes of
     purchase.<span class="xref"><strong><a href="#B9">9</a></strong></span> In return, library members are given a seat on
    the library budget board, which makes quarterly decisions on journal admission through an online
    platform. Library participants are also prominently acknowledged during the submission process
    and, should the institution wish, in a standalone press release on the homepage.</p><p>So far, the model is on track to work. While there are challenges ahead – the
    anticipated and dreaded year two and three drop-off, for instance – if we and our
    participating libraries can ride out the launch period, we should have an ongoing basis for a
    transition. With the offer for societies to come aboard our model, we hope also to see direct
    cancellations for participating libraries allowing them to support OA without the additional
    financial burden inherent in other models for transition. We hope you will join us.<span class="xref"><strong><a href="#B10">10</a></strong></span></p></div><div><h2>Competing interests</h2><p>As openly stated in the article, the author is co-founder of The Library of Humanities.</p></div></div><div id="back" class="bm"><hr class="part-rule"/><div id="references"><h2>References</h2><ol><li id="B1"><strong>Eve, M P</strong> 2014 Some of the material in this article is reworked In: <em>Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future</em>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316161012" target="_blank">http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316161012</a> (accessed 13 January 2015).</li><li id="B2">arXiv, ‘FAQ’, ‘What is the revenue model for
      ArXiv?’.   <a href="http://arxiv.org/help/support/faq#3B" target="_blank">http://arxiv.org/help/support/faq#3B</a> (accessed 30 January 2015).</li><li id="B3">arXiv, ‘FAQ’.  ref. 2.</li><li id="B4">arXiv ‘FAQ’, ‘Is the tier model fair? What about
      free-riders?’.   <a href="http://arxiv.org/help/support/faq" target="_blank">http://arxiv.org/help/support/faq</a> (accessed 12 February 2015).</li><li id="B5"><strong>Kennison, R</strong> and <strong>Norberg, L</strong> 2014 A Scalable and Sustainable Approach to Open Access Publishing and Archiving for
      Humanities and Social Sciences, April 11 2014: 3. (K|N Consultants)
        <a href="http://knconsultants.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/OA_Proposal_White_Paper_Final.pdf" target="_blank">http://knconsultants.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/OA_Proposal_White_Paper_Final.pdf</a>
      (accessed 13 January 2015). Author’s note: It is unclear, at least to me, how US-centric
      Kennison and Norberg’s proposal might be.</li><li id="B6"><strong>Look, H</strong> and <strong>Pinter, F</strong> 2010 ‘Open Access and Humanities and Social Science Monograph
      Publishing’. <em>New Review of Academic Librarianship</em> 16(1): 95.DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2010.512244" target="_blank">http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2010.512244</a> (accessed 13 January 2015).</li><li id="B7"><strong>Thatcher, S G</strong> 2011 ‘Back to the Future: Old Models for New Challenges’. <em>Against the Grain</em> February 201123(1): 38–43. </li><li id="B8"><strong>Johns, A</strong> 1998 The Nature of the Book. Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, p. 450.  <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo3645773.html" target="_blank">http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo3645773.html</a>
      (accessed 21 January 2015).</li><li id="B9"><strong>Eve, M P</strong> 2014 ‘All That Glisters: Investigating Collective Funding Mechanisms for Gold
      Open Access in Humanities Disciplines’. <em>Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication</em> 2(3)DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1131" target="_blank">http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1131</a> (accessed 13 January 2015).</li><li id="B10">The Open Library of Humanities.   <a href="https://www.openlibhums.org" target="_blank">https://www.openlibhums.org</a> (accessed 21 January 2015).</li></ol></div></div><div id="article-level-0-end-metadata" class="fm"> </div></div><!-- ends #xml-article -->
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