Guest Post - Missing Revenue in the Global Flip: Getting the Open Access Math Right - The Scholarly Kitchen

"One obvious impact of the recent OSTP memo calling for zero embargo public access policies for articles resulting from research funded by US Federal agencies is that it will increase the speed at which publishers commit to an Open Access (OA) future. While the US policy differs from Plan S in that it purports to be “agnostic” toward business models, the end result, the flipping of hybrid/subscription journals to fully-OA, may be the same.

Whether driven by funders, governments, publishers, institutions, a genuine belief in an open future, or some other motivating factor, the so-called “Global Flip,” will require major changes to the fundamental economics of journal publishing for it to be sustainable. In order to succeed in a flip, a holistic approach is needed, especially to ensure the survival of high-quality society-published journals on which both corporate and academic researchers rely. Unfortunately, much of what has been written about OA from the funder perspective looks at the journal market as comprised exclusively of two binary revenue inputs: APCs and institutional (academic) subscriptions. The thinking is that if we can somehow manage to flip the institutional subscription revenues to OA models, the market will sustain itself....

As one strongly pro-OA executive at a large publishing company told me, “When looking at what we will flip and when, we take a holistic look at all sources of revenues.” There are too many revenue sources to consider in one article, such as member subscriptions, advertising, photocopying, and individual article sales. I will focus on three revenue sources missing from the flip discussions and which are especially relevant to biomedical — emphasis on “medical” — publishing: corporate subscriptions, reprints, and permissions. I focus on biomedical because this field has both the highest uptake of OA, and because it benefits greatly from the revenue sources missing from the global OA conversation...."