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Impact of Requirement for Free Electronic Access

If you are anything like me, you will say about open access to journals, "that’s not interesting, and it’s not going to affect me!" I hope you are right, but I fear that open access will come and that it will have dramatic effects on the journals that we need for our professional development.

The concept of open access to papers published has received strong support from universities and research institutes in Europe and North America. The rationale for this is publicly stated essentially as a moral imperative—free exchange of human knowledge, particularly in the biomedical fields. Papers would be freely available either at the time of publication or within 6 months. On the surface this would seem eminently reasonable, although, parenthetically, it is not clear why scientific or other scholarly papers should be freely available, whereas newspapers, books, music, and patented materials are not. Other advantages include the greater readership and, hence, more citations for an individual researcher’s paper (Walport and Kiley, 2006). Many papers are not available to researchers, faculty, and students because libraries cannot afford to carry all journals. Explicit to open access is the absence of most copyright restrictions. There has been strong support for open access from the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda statement of 2003; http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm), major research institutes in Europe (Berlin declaration of 2005; http://oa.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html), liberal arts colleges and universities (Oberlin letter; www.oberlingroup.org/about/frpaa.pdf), and other US universities (Great Western Library Alliance, 2006; www.gwla.org/). Recently, the Wellcome Trust announced that "from October 2006 research papers partly or wholly funded by the Wellcome Trust must be made freely accessible via PubMed Central (PMC) as soon as possible, and in any event no later than six months after publication" (Walport and Kiley, 2006).

Let us consider for a moment the business model for Poultry Science or any other journal published by a professional society.

What are the costs for the journals?

1. Peer review, including licensing fees for Manuscript Central and staff support to end users;
   
2. Copyediting, figure processing, and composition;
   
3. Printing and mailing;
   
4. Maintenance of electronic copy (e.g., archiving and HighWire).
   

What are the sources of income to cover these costs?

1. Subscriptions from libraries;
   
2. Fees to authors, including submission fees (eliminated by Poultry Science), page charges, and reprints; and
   
3. Advertising (a minor source of income).
   

With open and free access, it is very likely that there would be a decline in the income to journals (and their parent professional societies) from libraries. University or institute librarians would follow a rational path. The only question is how rapid the decline?

There is, understandably, considerable concern by professional societies on the impact that free access would have on their ability to publish journals. Indeed, 65 professional societies have come together under the leadership of the American Physiological Society to form the DC Principles Coalition (http://www.dcprinciples.org/), and I am proud to say that the Poultry Science Association is one of them. The Coalition is looking for a middle ground to maximize access without the projected negative effect. It might be argued that if publication of a journal becomes a financial burden to the professional society, then ultimately the society will cease publication of the journal. The natural consequence of this is that the number of journals available to researchers would then decrease. The support for open access by colleges, universities, and research institutes is not without significant self-interest in that their libraries would be relieved of (or certainly could reduce) journal subscriptions, or what is sometimes referred to as institutional memberships of professional societies (a euphemism for subscriptions).

There could be a reduction in costs, with some proponents of open access acknowledging that "managing the peer-review process and copyediting the final manuscripts are value-added services that incur expenses"... "with costs coalescing around US$3000 per paper" (Walport and Kiley, 2006). To meet these costs, some funding agencies will be willing to provide for these expenses in their grants (Walport and Kiley, 2006). If the move to open access becomes a reality, are there other options to professional societies and their journals? It is possible to envision a business model to ensure that journals are financially sustainable or can "break even." Such a model could include the following:

• Increase page charges
  
• Impose an access fee to be paid by authors (author pays model)
  
• Increase sponsorship with more advertising
  
• Reduce copyediting and composition (and hence, quality)
  
• Offer more services to members and libraries that continue subscriptions (these could include electronic appendices to papers with raw data, color photos, or video).
  

Under the first 2 items, the authors pay more to publish. For many researchers, page charges are already a hardship. This situation is magnified for authors from developing countries. Do we risk pricing our journal out of the market? This is particularly a problem in the agricultural sciences where grants (e.g., USDA) are considerably smaller than those in the biomedical field (e.g., NIH). Moreover, industry funding is less available due to consolidation in the industry. Implicit in the move to open access is a transfer of costs from the library to the researcher (or research grants). It is not likely that colleges, universities, or research institutes will make the appropriate shifts in budget from the libraries to departmental budgets that might support the investigator’s increased costs.

The only safe prediction is that we are living in increasingly uncertain times. Journals will be examining mechanisms to increase income and reduce costs. Professional societies will be reconsidering the ways in which they have done business for decades.

	REFERENCES

TOP REFERENCES

 
Walport, M., and R. Kiley, 2006. Open access, UK PubMed Central and the Wellcome Trust. J. R. Soc. Med. 99:438–439.[Free Full Text]

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