Open access goes to market? | Research Libraries UK

"It has long been acknowledged that the journal subscription market is deeply flawed and fails to act as a rational market should. Back in 2002 one of the main conclusions of an investigation by the Office of Fair Trading was that ‘there is evidence to suggest that the market for STM journals may not be working well’. This was followed in 2006 by a study commissioned by the European Commission that found a market that was ‘very far away from the ‘ideal perfectly competitive private market’ that has been celebrated ever since Adam Smith (1776)’. These were conclusions that came as no surprise to any university librarian. Interestingly, the OFT decided not to intervene in the market as in 2002 the implications of the move online were not clear and it was possible that new market forces could be brought to bear in an electronic environment, so remedying any market problems. This has certainly long been the hope of many open access advocates (myself included) – that a side benefit of giving wider access will be resulting business models that focus on the services that publishers offer rather than rents for access to information. Twelve years after the OFT investigation, are new, functioning markets emerging? RLUK, together with a consortium of others, commissioned Professors Bo-Christer Bjork and David Solomon to investigate the possibilities of markets for open access article processing charges (APC). Their report, published recently, outlines what for librarians is a familiar, and chilling, possibility: 'One could speculate what the APC market would look like if it worked on similar terms as the subscription market. Under such a model, we posit that individually paid APCs would be very expensive (as is the subscription model with an estimated cost of 5,000 per article). Consequently those publishers who controlled big portfolios of APC funded OA journals would make bundled deals with universities and funders, which would result in seemingly lower APCs per article if they committed to paying the publisher a fixed sum per annum, a sort of APC 'subscription'. The price differential when compared to individually paid APCs would be large enough to effectively push universities to predominantly pay for APCs via these deals, and thus tie up their earmarked APC funds. Such deals would also streamline the administrative effort to pay APCs which further increases their attractiveness. This would result in a loss of transparency and would be very detrimental to smaller OA publishers and innovative companies wishing to break into the market.' In their analysis Bjork and Solomon identify the great growth in Gold open access over the past decade – an increase in 20% annually.  About 1-in-10 of all articles indexed in Scopus were published in full OA journals. The largest growth recently is in ‘mega-journals’ on the PLoS One model. (And I was struck to hear recently from one RLUK member that the number one journal their researchers publish in, in terms of number of papers, is PLoS One.) But there is also a massive increase in the number of ‘traditional’ publishers offering hybrid options. These hybrid journals have seen little uptake to date – only 1% of papers indexed by Scopus are OA in hybrids.  Bjork and Solomon’s analysis of the level of APCs gives an indication of why this might be. The average APC from a born-digital ‘non-subscription’ publisher is $1,418, for an OA journal from a ‘subscription’ publisher $2,097, and for a hybrid journal $2,727. In a fully functioning market it should be a no-brainer for an author who wants to (or is required to) publish in Gold OA to go for the born-digital option at almost half the price (all things being equal). However, looking at APC data that Wellcome, Cambridge and others have released recently, it is clear that many authors are opting to publish in the more expensive, hybrid journals. In some cases it will be clear that these are the most appropriate journals for the research to be published in.  But is it the case that these expensive, hybrid journals are really, on average, two times better (however we define ‘better’) than the born-OA alternatives? It may be that just as the disconnect between readers and journal prices contributed to the serials crisis then so might a disconnect between authors and APC prices lead to an ‘APC crisis’. Bjork and Solomon propose three scenarios by which funders could begin to ensure that APCs do not spiral out of control ..."