Who Will Pay For Open Access?

babble123 writes "IEEE is thinking about providing everyone with free access to its publication database (which has saved many a grad student from a trip to the library). The problem is, where will they get the money to fund the journals if not from subscriptions? In this article, they discuss one proposed alternative, 'author-pays,' but they certainly aren't enthusiastic about it, and I don't blame them. And yet, the money has to come from somewhere. Any better ideas?"

Comments

Emergent Solution

[philipkd]

Why don't they just make it available on the net and see what happens.

The net has a reputation for novel ways of propogating data. Maybe servers will be donated. Perhaps a company would sponsor the service. Perhaps bittorrents would work. Perhaps they would be uploaded into sourceforge. Perhaps one could rely on Google caches. Maybe power users, like universities, could mirror their database.

Seriously, put it online, see what the public does.

Re:Emergent Solution

[mishmash]

They could charge a premium rate for current and "advance publication" material. Older material could be made available for free - funded by the purchase of the newly released papers.

Government ?

[makapuf]

I know I have a European bias toward this, but why couldn't the ? I mean, given the huge funds invested in private research (ahem colossal military budget), I am sure this would really be a drop in the bucket but will have great effects.

I mean, why not just put it under a military budget or academia ?

Eliminate paper, and simplify

[Anonymous Cowdog]

I'm a IEEE member and they send me so much paper it's downright embarassing. For an organization that should be leading the way into the future, I don't know why they insist on littering my mailbox with so much newsprint and so many envelopes stuffed with important notices about the myriad of ways to spend hundreds of dollars on different stingily selected slices of content.

I worked on a project once where we cooperated with a science journal. They told us that 80% of their costs were in production and distribution of paper. If they could do everything electronically, they could have eliminated that 80%. So my suggestion would be that IEEE do exactly that. Eliminate the paper. It's not like they are going to have to spend more to ramp up a web site with electronic versions of the content, because they already have that entire framework in place. If anything, their current web site is too complicated, and could be simplified (and made cheaper to operate) by eliminating a lot of the built-in toll booths.

Use the moderator / meta-moderator model

[Skapare]

In order to gain access to publish, require the authors to participate (no pay) in the peer review process much like moderators on Slashdot (but more formalized). Then have a meta peer review process to back that up. You get free peer reviewing by requiring authors to do some of that to continue to publish. But unlike Slashdot, the mod points would go to verified degreed people in academic or other research areas who would be selected first early access to do the reviews. When an article is submitted, distribute it to randonly selected reviewers. Then if it's not completely shot down, follow up with more review cycles until the reviewer sample size gives a good ranking.

Do the actual distribution via BitTorrent, with the article in the clear, but cryptographically signed by the prestigious journal. The journal's web site would have the abstracts, links, and public key.

It's not totally paid for this way, but the cost of distribution gets covered, and peer reviewers come free.

Re:Use the moderator / meta-moderator model

[misterpies]

I used to work for a journal. Reviewing a paper is not like moderating a slashdot comment. It's an in-depth editing process that takes a lot of time. Firstly, most papers are on very specialised subjects. You can't randomly distribute it to a reviewer - it's quite possible that there will only be a small number of people out there qualified to review it, and half of those are probably working on the same problem so you can't send it to them in case they nick all the ideas and then reject the paper. (Oh yes, scientists will do that) Once you've found some decent reviewers, it's not a question of the reviewer reading it in 5 minutes and marking it +1 insightful. It will probably take them a few days to read and understand the paper properly. Then they need to consider whether it makes sense and, just as important, whether what it reports is worth publishing. (Someone reviewing a paper for Nature or Science is going to have a very different view on whether it should be accepted than someone reviewing it for the Journal of Pointless Periwinkle Research.) If the paper seems good enough on those grounds, then the reviewer will still usually suggest a raft of changes to make it better. The review then has to go back to the author so that the author can make the changes. When that's done, it goes out to review again, & so on until finally the reviewers think it's ready to publish. It's true that the reviewer generally does all this work for free (and peer reviewing can be one of the biggest demands on a scientist's time). But someone has to choose the reviewers and act as go-between (since for obvious reasons, the identity of the reviewers and the authors are kept secret from one another); most importantly that go-between needs to act as a fair referee and realise where a reviewer is making unreasonable demands or being too easy and so find more reviewers. Someone has to perform those little tasks like sub-editing (which can be a major task with a paper submitted in English by a group of Japanese researchers - and let's face it, most american scientists aren't great writers either). Then there's those little matters of layout, style and consistency that are necessary in a professional product. And finally, people still like paper journals. It's a lot easier to read a long paper on paper, the diagrams are better quality than most office printers can manage, and some people just prefer it. And paper journals add a new layer of costs - not just the cost of paper and ink but typesetting, delivery etc. As for cost, if journals seem massively expensive compared to consumer magazines, remember that most of the cost of consumer magazines is paid for by advertisers, not subscribers. And when people complain about paying $10,000s for a journal - that's usually for access to be shared between hundreds if not thousands of subscribers at that lab or university. Per-reader costs are comparatively low.