Financing Scientific Publications

PLoS ONE might be solvent in and of itself, but it's clearly not a traditionally reviewed journal in any sense. I think more journals will move to the open access model if PLoS can show that its flagship traditional journals, like PLoS Biology, can become solvent without outside support.

Open Access is great and all, but until it can be really financially sustainable, it sounds like the current US social security system, in that future authors pay to support the maintenance and publication of all past content. In other words, a ponzi scheme, where authors fees will always have to go up faster than inflation.

Righto! Traditional journal publication is embedded in patronage just as much as open access publication. To toot my own horn, I talk about this a bit in my paper "Toward a Post-Academic Science Policy," published in the open access International Journal of Communications Law and Policy 11 (2006). From the article:

Though they may seem a minor concern, page charges are worth considering because they cut to the heart of the textual economy of science in the postwar United States. This one distinctive practice illustrates the entire "peculiar social arrangement" of academic science (Ziman, 2000, p. 50), with money distributed and redistributed throughout the scientific community. Page charges are an understandable outcome of a grant-based patronage structure combined with high-cost publishing for a highly restricted audience. Through page charges and other mechanisms, the state subsidizes the publication of scientific journals. Such subsidies may have helped journals maintain high production costs. Certainly they did not drive costs down. Yet if the cost of scientific publishing can seem astronomical, the actual increase in published work represents a triumph of government funding for science -- as long as that funding is sustained. Through page charges, scientific publishing is insulated from economic reality, just as academic science attempts to create a space for the unfettered support of inquiry itself. Around the ivory tower of Mertonian academic science, grant money flows like a moat.

Many of the plos journal publish paper copies, but their circulation is much lower than the big traditional journals (ie, Science, Nature, Cell). See here.

Paper copies of PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine have been discontinued - too expensive and unnecessary. They were a PR tool in the very beginning, used to show the brand new journals to others who are unaccustomed to the online-only publishing. Those early copies are now collectors' items and I am happy to say that I have two copies.

It is not very complicated.
I do not have enough money to pay Plos.

Ian Findlay, see PLoS Biology Editorial and Publishing Policies, item #2.

Varmus claims that PLoS Biology will be solvent in 2-3 years. We will see if this convinces the other players to head towards the open access model.

Ian,

I have 2 points for you.
1) As PhilipJ has suggested, PLoS offers rate reductions for labs who have less money.
2) Depending on your use of color figures, the cost to publish in Cell can go upto a couple of thousand dollars.

As apalazzo points out, subscription journals are not clearly any cheaper to publish in than open-access ones.

But there's another effect: I work in a research institute, not a university. We're certainly not short of funding, but it is a small place by comparison with even a community college and we just don't have the number of researchers to motivate subscribing to any but the most general and high-profile publications (if the expected readership is 1 or 2, you can't motivate taking out an expensive subscription).

So, for a lot of papers we don't really have immediate access. The publishers seem to expect that we buy the individual paper. But any kind of purchase becomes a hassle - approvals are needed, books need to be kept, quite possibly does the secretary need to register and set up an account of some sort at the publisher website. And you're probably looking for the paper because you're writing something and need it just about right now, not in two weeks when all the wheels have finished turning. Often we can get around it by downloading it - or another paper - from the authors' webpage, or we can find another group that's got the same information.

We do have subscriptions to some online resources, but they are also a hassle. We need to use specific computers set up to access the databases instead of sitting at your desk. It's so easy to just plug the paper name and authors into Google Scholar and see if you can't get the same or similar paper directly.

The end result is that tightly controlled smaller, specialized journals are losing references here. People tend to refer to open-access stuff not from ideology, but because it's, well, accessible. We've also had a dustup here on Science Blogs where a blogger was stopped from discussing the details of a paper when the publisher forbade the redisplay of a figure from the paper. So for places like science blogs that highlight and propagate interesting papers, open access is also far preferable. And since being referenced is important when it comes to publishing research, all else (= approx. impact factor) being equal, publishing in an Open Access journal is the better option for authors.

One thing I've heard that's great about PLoS (and I think it's the main reason it's gotten such a good foothold in my university) is that it has a fast turnaround time for submissions, on the order of weeks instead of months. I think at large universities, where funding and subscription costs are less of an issue, this kind of factor matters a whole lot more.

A question on your reasoning here--if you're a scientist at a large university, you do indeed contribute from your grant money to the library's budget. But you're not the only ones contributing, as every other department on campus is also contributing. That money, as I understand it, is pooled and subscriptions are purchased as the librarians see fit. So clearly, the NIH are not alone in funding subscriptions to science journals, and conversely, in some situations, the NIH is funding subscriptions to non-science journals.

Also, do you have any up-to-date numbers on PLOS' finances? The last I saw was the big Nature investigation in June 2006 that showed PLOS was losing money, and was trending toward losing more and more money. PLOS has always been heavily dependent upon huge grants as they have yet to prove that their open access model (as currently constructed) is a viable business model. Have things changed? Or are the numbers given by the Cell editor much more realistic as far as keeping a journal in business?

As you point out, the funding agencies end up paying most of the publication cost either way. Which makes one wonder whether they've considered the possibility of cutting out the middle men altogether by hiring a team of editors, paying for the review process, and putting the result directly into PubMed Central.

Chunk Style,

This topic did come up at the conference on Friday. In most Universities (as far as I understand) the biomedical departments bring in much more money than all the other graduate departments. Thus in many universities much of the money that is skimmed off NIH grants goes to fund many non-biomedical journals ... in addition the university may use these funds for many other purposes. If we reallocate some of the funds away from libraries, in some cases non-biomedical departments may suffer, however I suspect that most universities have a vested interest to not let this happen.

Joe,

This idea of cutting out the middle man has been much talked about by many on the net. I must say that the journals do have some role to play.
1) They officiate the peer-review process.
2) Through their editors they help improve scientific manuscripts.
3) They pick out the "wheat from the chaff".
4) They provide a record of the manuscript (digital and/or print).

All this costs money. But is it all necessary? Many are arguing that point 4 is no longer needed. Most would argue that points 1-3 are important.

Interesting. So if open access becomes the way of publication of the future, science journals will continue along just fine, but scholarly journals in other areas will suffer (as will students in those areas) as NIH library funds will dry up.

And I still have a very hard time believing PLOS has gone from losing $5 million a year to solvency this quickly. What happens to journals that don't have massive donations available to make up the shortfall? Perhaps Cell's estimations of $15K per article is an underestimate.

Re: less money for libraries. It is a possibility, however this would only happen if the universities took significantly less money out of the NIH grants awarded to the life science labs.

Re: PLoS finances. As far as I know PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine are projected to break even in 2-3 years. They have recently increased their authorship fees from 2K to almost 3K. PLoS One, is currently breaking even. This is due to low production cost and high acceptance rates (i.e. lower costs associated with the peer-review process). You can ask Bora ... aka Coturnix, an employee of PLoS One.

One point you are not currently addressing are the issues around advertising and sponsorship of commercial journals by third parties. This is a substantial pot of money that has been an increasing portion of commercial journal's revenue streams. However the acceptance of these moneys is increasingly leading to questions concerning commercial journal's ability to remain impartial to the influences and needs of their advertisers. This is particularly so with journals concerned with medical and pharmaceutical research. However sponsorship or advertising could be a means of supporting journals like PLoS and advertising is seen as a increasingly important part of the business models of newspapers like the NY Times and Wall Street Journal. Could you comment on how such an arrangement might look like for the open journal community - would advertising be seen as a necessary evil to permit existance of the journal or would the community likely reject it as intrusion into the published research? Secondly, how might the open journals might deal with the issues of impartiality to these alternative sources of revenue?

Right now most decisions are made through the peer-review process, although the editors do have quite a bit of power. There is an enormous incentive for journals to increase their "impact factor", and this would trump any concerns that advertisers may have. Science and Nature are full of ads but I have never heard of advertisers/sponsors having any influence on the peer-review process. Advertisers go to these journals precisely because everyone reads them due to their high impact factors. Many editorial boards are fiercely independent (for example see this entry) and publishers are well aware that scientists value this.

As for the PLoS journals, you should ask Coturnix. Currently, there are advertisements on the PLoS websites, but as far as I know not many people are concerned about how sponsors may impact publishing decisions.

Right now most decisions are made through the peer-review process, although the editors do have quite a bit of power.

I'd say that's a bit of an understatement. If you're talking about a Nature or a Nature Medicine I would think the editors have the most decision making power when it comes to what gets published - peer review seems more about quality control. What percentage of submissions to the big journals actually get sent to reviewers? I don't have the number but my guess is not too many. I'd also guess that at least a substantial proportion of these rejects are top-caliber science.

I agree that top-tier journals will have to keep publishing top-tier science to stay successful. But with so many submissions to choose from, I'd guess there's still a huge amount of latitude for editors to publish at their discretion - to satisfy advertisers or anyone else they choose - while still putting out high-power papers that attract a lot of attention. Am I wrong here?

When you think about who pays the publishers to produce all these journals, the answer is simple - the NIH.

Did it occur to you that there might be a certain number of publications - obviously a very small number and not of comparable quality - coming from places other than the US ? As far as I know, the NIH does very little funding in Europe, Asia, Australia.

Apart from that, I agree. Unfortunately, I can afford OA journals only on selective occasions. I am working in Europe (no NIH) and in a company (no grants anyway), so I usually have to pay for OA publications from private money.

>What percentage of submissions to the big journals actually get sent to reviewers?

Less than 50%, I believe.

>editors to publish at their discretion - to satisfy advertisers or anyone else they choose

I believe it is cynical and factually incorrect to suggest that editors (in ANY context, let alone scientific journals) select content to please advertisers.

Also, editors are not autocrats - they work in conjunction with reviewers and the scientific community they serve.

I agree with both points addressed by Biogeek. But as far as I know the percent of submissions that get reviewed at a journal like Cell, Nature or Science is less than 10%.

thanks Alex. I believe the percentage you are quoting (less than 10%) is low. A "floor" could probably be put on this number - I remember seeing in the odd editorial a mention of annual submission numbers, and it is simple enough to count how many are published each year...

But there is little point in quibbling over it - the fact is, C/N/S send out a considerably smaller proportion of their submissions than, say, a society journal that publishes a lot of papers, which are generally more specialized in nature.

For those interested in a more detailed view of PLoS' finances, I'd suggest reviewing the organization's Form 990 (required reporting to the IRS for nonprofits) via www.guidestar.org. The upshot, at least for 2006, is that PLoS had ~$1.5 million in operating (non-grant) revenue, with $6.3 million in expenses. This reporting was prior to the PLoS One launch, an effort that probably nets, on the generous side, ~$1.5 million annually. Add that, and PLoS, at current clip, needs ~$3 million in support aside from publication fees to operate -- and this has come from the Moore Foundation, Sandler Foundation, Gates Foundation, etc. This support is probably not sustainable in the same way that traditional print-subscription revenue is not sustainable. PLoS does have sustainability problems: If PLoS did not have grant revenue, it would have to double its publication fees (to ~$5K for PLoS Biology, for example), or it would have to cut its expenses in half and maintain its current output.

Most libraries subscribe to these smaller journals. Unlike Cell where something like 5% of all submitted articles make it through the review process, small journals have very high acceptance rates. (So less money is spent on the review process). She didn't say this (but I'm guessing) that under an author based system the smaller journals would be harder to keep afloat.