There’s a great article by Joseph Esposito in the current issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing, “Open Access 2.0: Access to Scholarly Publications Moves to a New Phase” (found via the always informative Scholarly Kitchen blog). This article is required reading for anyone interested in the future of science publication, as it takes a hard look at the economic models available. Esposito argues that the problem with many of the current open access offerings is that they’re trying to replicate what’s already offered by established journals, rather than playing to the real strengths of open access, and that there’s certainly room in the market for many different types of offerings.
—article continues—
A few points that particularly resonate:
1) Attention is the scarce commodity we’re all struggling with now:
“A service that winnows through the huge outpouring of information and says (with authority), Pay attention to this; pay less attention to that; and as for that other thing, ignore it entirely—such a service is well worth paying for. The name of that service is publishing.”
2) In choosing your business model, you must know who your customer really is:
“…publishing is a service for readers, open access a service for authors. They both work best when the beneficiaries of the services pay for the benefits they receive…There is a paradox here: for open-access activity to be economically sustainable, the customer to be satisfied is the author, not the readers who receive the content at no cost to themselves.”
3) Libraries that serve as repositories for papers may be facing an economic crisis:
“Many of the current open-access services have not yet figured out their economics. Academic libraries, for example, in providing open-access repository services for faculty, often fail to charge either the individual researcher or the researcher’s department for the service, unlike the print shop in our example above. Instead, the service is provided free of charge by the library, though obviously the cost becomes part of the library’s (growing) overhead. Such services fall into the trap of thinking they can operate without capital.”
4) He suggest the future of the PLOS journals lies in limiting their editorial overhead:
“It is interesting to speculate whether PLoS will eventually take the next step: stop reviewing papers prior to publication, but provide robust software tools to encourage comments on already published documents—post-publication peer review. “
Interesting stuff, I’m sure many will disagree with his conclusions, but it’s nice to see someone talking hard numbers and economics, rather than focusing solely on the idealism that drives much of the open access movement.
Bench Marks 
June 24, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Great! Another really interesting blog to add to my aggregator! I will go read it in detail but I wanted to respond to what you have written.
Points 1 and 2 are just spot on for any sort of discussion. Filtering and servicing the customer are the two most important things a journal can do. open-source do not compete here. I think that they will be complimentary.
These new tools are obviously disruptive to scientific publishing and it will take a little time for all the wrinkles to work themselves out.
I always figured open-access scaled better than traditional because the costs and revenues are better known up front since the authors pay. Have ten time more acceptable papers then you have ten times more authors who have paid and ten times more published papers stored on servers you can buy with your ten-fold more money. They are not restricted to increasing subscriptions 10-fold, find 10 times more subscribers or ads as traditional publishers might.
Of course, accurately determining and distributing the costs is the key and something I don’t think open access has fully done. But in some settings I could see libraries helping somewhat.
I think there will be fewer journals overall but the total amount spent will be about the same, just consolidated differently between those that service authors and those that service readers.
June 24, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Ohh. I had another thought or two based on points 1 and 2.
First, I view both approaches as publishing – one is a traditional model and the other is open access model.
Second, I might differ about the traditional ones being focussed on the reader. They are focussed on the subscriber. For many journals, I can not afford to be a subscriber. Sometimes only libraries can afford to be a subscriber. As a reader, I have to walk to a library or pay sometimes lots of money (e.g. $65) for an article.
While journals that are pseudo-open access (the association-based ones that provide access after 6-12 months) are much friendlier to readers. I can get an article for $5 or so.
These journals actually service the reader rather than the subscriber. And they do a pretty good job with the authors, who often happen to be members of the association doing the publishing. This amalgamation of authors, members, subscribers and readers all working with a pseudo open access model may the the way things shake out for much of scientific publishing.