Scholarly Communication for Librarians: catalogued and in circulation!

My book Scholarly Communication for Librarians is now catalogued at SFU Library - and, even better, on loan!

Research Brief: Library savings from full flip to open access via article processing fees: about two-thirds savings

Based on data supplied by Mark Ware in the recently released report for the Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers Association (STM) An overview of scientific and scholarly journals publishing, I calculate that library savings from a full flip from subscriptions to open access via article processing fees, at the PLoS One rate of $1,350 would be at least 64%. For the avoidance of doubt, that's about a two-thirds discount. This is presented as an illustration that open access is a wise choice economically, and not just from an access perspective; it is not meant as an endorsement of PLoS One or the article processing fee approach. The majority of OA journals do not charge article processing fees.

In brief, Ware estimates annual STM revenue at $8 billion per year, and quotes Bjork et al on an estimated total peer-reviewed journal article production of 1.5 million articles per year. This is an average of $5,333 revenue for STM for each scholarly article produced in a year. Compare this with the PLoS One article processing fee of $1,350 per article. Factoring in about 70% of STM revenues coming from library sources, the resulting global savings for libraries are 64%. See here for figures.

Other ways of expressing this: PLoS One costs about a fourth of the average revenue per article for STM, or PLoS One is four times as efficient as the average traditional STM journal.

There are many limitations to this brief study. Most of these limitations are reasons why library savings would be greater than 64%. Examples of variables not taken into account:

STM revenue does not take into account non-STM revenue, for journals in the humanities and social sciences and smaller publishers that are not part of STM. The article count, however, is for all disciplines. A higher total revenue would result in a higher average per-article revenue with the current subscription system, which in turn would mean higher library savings with a flip to open access via article processing fees.

This scenario does not take into account non-library revenue for article processing fees, such as authors who can tap into research grant funds for this purpose.

This scenario assumes an average article processing fee of about $1,350 U.S. With an average of $1,535 (BMC standard article processing charge), library savings are still at least 60%. See here for figures.

These figures do not take into account publishers who would like to receive more revenue than standard PLoS One or BMC rates on a routine basis. While libraries would still see savings at article processing fee rates of $3,000 as some publishers are charging - the two-thirds savings scenario comes from supporting high-quality but affordable open access publishers - not just any article processing fee that any publisher might like to charge.

This post is an early sharing of data to be developed for a fuller study in the near future, and part of the Transitioning to Open Access series. Thanks to Andrew Waller for checking some of the math.

Dramatic Growth of Open Access: September 30, 2009

This issue of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access features a few key quotable numbers to illustrate the growth and current extent of open access: more than 4,000 fully open access, peer reviewed journals in DOAJ, growing by 2 titles per day; close to 1,500 open access repositories listed in OpenDOAR, adding a new repository every business day; over 30 million free publications through Scientific Commons, growing by more than 20 thousands items per day; more than 20% of the world's medical literature is freely available 2 years after publication, and close to 10% is freely available immediately on publication; 1 more journal decides to submit all or most content to PMC every business day, and growth of open access journals in PMC is one new journal every other business day. The number of open access mandate policies is well over a hundred, and growing rapidly - but also likely understated. If you have a policy, please be sure to register with ROARMAP. This quarter saw some minor setbacks. Most notable (but still small) is a decrease in free content through Highwire Press.

Dramatic Growth quotables

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

• Over 4,000 fully open access, peer reviewed scholarly journals

• Adding 2 titles per day

OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories)

• About 1,500 open access repositories worldwide

• Adding 1 new repository every business day

Scientific Commons

• 30 million scientific publications free online

• Added 8 million publications in the last year

• Growing by more than 20,000 publications per day

PubMedCentral

• 20% of world's medical literature freely available 2 years after publication

• Close to 10% of world's medical literature freely available immediately on publication

• 1 new journal chooses to submit all or most content to PMC every business day

• 1 more medical journal becomes fully open access in PMC every other business day

PLoS ONE may soon become the world's largest scholarly journal. As reported this quarter on IJPE, based on Peter Binfield's presentation at ELPUB 2009, PLoS ONE is already among the very largest of the world's academic journals, and, if current trends continue, will become THE world's largest journal sometime in 2010. PLoS ONE is one of the journals published by the high prestige, not-for-profit publisherPublic Library of Science.

Milestones this quarter

• Scientific Commons exceeds 30 million publications

• PubMedCentral internal researchers' self-archiving rates now exceed 50% (for publications within past 3 years, and overall)

Thanks, PMC Staff! Also thanks for the neat "Free full text" tab, no doubt very handy for searchers, which also makes it much easier to collect data for the dramatic growth of open access.

Selected Details


Directory of Open Access Journals

• 4,361 journals

• Strong year (added 693 journals), slow quarter (109 titles). Note that additions to DOAJ are not the same as the total number of open access journals, but rather likely to reflect staffing / workflow issues. For example, this quarter covers summer months and the first OASPA conference, which Lund University, home of DOAJ, helped to host. Slow growth this quarterly is very likely to reflect such variables as vacation schedules and possibly staff secondments to help with the conference.

• Strong growth in number of journals searchable at article level (32% annual increase, now 1,664 titles)

• Strong growth in articles searchable at article level (59% increase, now at 315,407)

PubMedCentral

• # journals actively participating in PMC 671

• # journals in PMC with immediate free access 517

• # journals in PMC with all articles open access 396

Open Access Mandate Policies (from ROARMAP)

• Departmental 14

• Funder 41

• Institutional 43

• Thesis 33

• Total 131

• Proposed Mandates 15

IF YOU HAVE AN OPEN ACCESS POLICY, please register with ROARMAP. The ROARMAP numbers are likely understated, for example many people have pointed out that the number of thesis deposit policies is likely much higher than what is reported in ROARMAP. Registering helps with the numbers, but more importantly, a link to your policy can be most helpful for others still developing their own policies.

Minor setbacks this quarter
PubMedCentral fully open access journals: despite strong annual growth, the number of fully OA journals participating in PMC dropped by 2 this quarter.
Highwire Free: the number of free articles has dropped since last year by over 4,000.
CARL Metadata Harvester: strong annual growth is offset by a loss of about 600 items this quarter (weeding project, perhaps?).

The Dramatic Growth of Open Access Dataverse (spreadsheets for download - thanks to Harvard)

Google docs for viewing (full)
Google docs for viewing (show growth)

Definitions:
Day = calendar day (total / 365 days per year)
Business day = calendar days - 104 (weekends), total / 261

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

PLoS article-level metrics: substantial value add for authors

Public Library of Science (PLoS) recently introduced article-level metrics.

The PLoS article-level metrics are a substantial value-add for authors, including a range of download statistics, citations and social bookmarking data, and more. As an author, I would love to see this kind of service!

It is interesting that a publisher with top-ranking journals on traditional metrics (impact factor) is also a publisher innovating in the area of metrics of far greater relevance, which say soon make impact factors irrelevant in the near future.

One service that I, as an author, would like to see for the future, is a means of combining statistics from institutional and disciplinary repositories with the publisher's statistics. This is a development that could be pursed either by publishers or by repositories.

The data available from PLoS (from the PLoS website) includes:
Article usage statistics - HTML pageviews, PDF downloads and XML downloads
Citations from the scholarly literature – currently from PubMed Central, Scopus and CrossRef
Social bookmarks - currently from CiteULike and Connotea
Comments – left by readers of each article
Notes – left by readers of each article
Blog posts – aggregated from Postgenomic, Nature Blogs, and Bloglines
Ratings – left by readers of each article

More information is available at:
http://article-level-metrics.plos.org/

Mass digitization of books: Open Content Alliance is the right approach

With the Google Books lawsuit settlement likely to be decided within days, here is my take on this topic.

Libraries in recent years have been undertaking mass digitization projects, following two different approaches: working with Google to digitize the whole library's collection, including copyrighted works, or working with the Open Content Alliance under OCA principles, which include respecting the rights of content owners, and widest possible access, such as full open access for works in the public domain.

The Open Content Alliance is the right approach. Despite laudable motivations of participating libraries and Google (to expand access to the written word and preserve these books), the Google Books approach of taking works that belong to others (whether content owners or, in the case of public domain works, all of us), is just plain wrong. The impact of the proposed Google Book Settlement would mean basically a monopoly on digital books for one company, and a significant loss to the public domain. Those involved in the class action lawsuit do not represent all authors and publishers, only themselves.

Here is hoping that the Court will reject the Google Book Settlement, and that the libraries involved will abandon this approach and join the Open Content Alliance instead.

Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity: a key step in transition to OA

The Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE) calls on universities to make a commitment to providing equity to open access journals. This is a key step in the transition to open access. I highly recommend joining COPE to every library, and university. Even if significant (or even any) funding is not immediately available, this is an important philosophical commitment to make, one that makes it possible to raise the question of whether such support should receive equal priority at budget time.

One of the reasons that this is a key step is simply the recognition of the role that universities play (through libraries) as support for scholarly communication. This has never been a standard commercial transaction, where one side produces goods and services that are then purchased by the other side. Rather, university faculty write, peer review, and often edit scholarly articles; much of the work is done on time and in office space provided by universities. This system is currently subsidized through library subscriptions. Shifting support so that open access journals receive equitable treatment is only fair.

My hopes for COPE are growth: I encourage every library and university to join. Also, I would like to see COPE someday move beyond support for article processing fees to include wholesale support for open access journals, hosting and support services, and more.

Congratulations and thanks to all of the initial signatories of COPE: Cornell, Harvard, Dartmouth, MIT, and the University of California at Berkeley.

Taylor and Francis first half results 2009: academic information revenue up 25%, and, are shareholders more interested in OA than T & F?

Informa, the owner of Taylor and Francis, has published their first half results for 2009 - see the Informa Investors Page.

Highlights: academic publishing revenues and profits are up in the first half of 2009. Informa's Peter Rigby sees open access as not a bother for HSS, less relevant to a company like Informa than to a pure STM publisher. At least one shareholder is wondering whether Informa will push harder to move to an OA business model.

Details

From the presentation powerpoint:

Publishing – Academic Information
Resilient performance
• Revenue increase of 25% (organic 4%)
• Adjusted operating profit increase of 45% (organic 4%)

Overall operating profit margin for informa was 23%, reflecting both strong performance in academic publishing and weak performance in events.

Notes from the webcast Q and A session

Interesting question (see the end of the Q and A session) about "pushing harder into an open access business model". According to Informa's Peter Rigby, OA is less relevant to HSS and hence Informa as a mixed HSS/STM publisher; Informa is allowing post-peer-review self-archiving and has an open choice option, so is doing just fine.

Another question related to whether Informa is doing anything about the cost in the area of academic information. No need, says Peter Rigby, as the sector is doing strong. This is an excellent illustration of the inelasticity of this market. Taylor & Francis is growing in profits in spite of a worldwide financial crisis. No reason to look for efficiencies!

This post is part of the transitioning to open access series.