The “predatory publisher” category raises more questions than answers. Just like “academic fraud”, it tends to validate a black & white world in which rules and norms are clear-cut and universally shared through time, disciplines and countries. There is now an extensive literature presenting lists, criteria and even automatic detection for such publishers or their journals, most of it being written without questioning the label “predatory”1. More interestingly, there are a few papers describing the point of view of authors publishing in such vilified outputs, showing both the deceptions performed by the publisher and the good faith of most authors2.
Such results could be downplayed on the grounds of the authors’ peripheral position or the low power of the studies. On the opposite, everyday stories show that separating the wheat from the chaff is rather complex because a huge and diverse “grey zone” exists, even for scholars well versed in the arcane of publishing. This post aims to describe such an example by making the story personal rather than abstract, using testimonies, personal opinions and statements. In this world, the choice to review, write or edit for a given journal or publisher remains tricky, based on existing alternatives, personal ethics and situated decisions
“You are invited”: a not-so-classical email
It’s become an almost daily ritual: an invitation to present at a conference, to submit a paper to a journal, or even to join an editorial committee, sent by people you don’t know, with a vague personalisation of the message through your name and the reproduction of the title of an article you’ve written, with no relevance to the issuing conference or journal. On August, 9th 2023, I received one of these messages, entitled: “[Publications] (ISSN 2304-6775) Invitation to Serve as an Editorial Board Member”. It caught my attention for three reasons: firstly, it’s the time of year with the lowest e-mail volume; secondly, there was an apparent MDPI account in the copy of the mailing; and thirdly, I know this journal, some of its articles I found relevant or enlighting, and others cite some of my work (which is not a sign of quality but could explain this invitation). So let’s read it again:
We would like to invite you to join the Editorial Board of Publications (ISSN 2304-6775, https://www.mdpi.com/journal/publications). Publications is open access and peer-reviewed, covering all aspects of scholarly publishing and communication. You can find the proposed scope of the journal here: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/publications/about/. Publications is abstracted and indexed by Scopus, ESCI, DOAJ.
This presentation is not typical of « predatory » emails that begin by flattering the recipient of the message, emphasising the importance of their work and what they can contribute to the journal, and at the same time inviting them to join the editorial board and submit a manuscript.
Editorial Board Members will be responsible for final decisions on manuscripts in their field of expertise and may be invited to review manuscripts. The initial term lasts for 2 years, and entails: • Pre-screening and making decisions on new submissions related to your research interests; • Providing input or feedback regarding journal policies; • Helping to promote the journal among your peers or at conferences; • Attending Board Meetings to suggest journal development strategies; • Reviewing manuscripts. • Helping to attract suitable expert authors.
The job description for editorial board members is typical of a journal owned by a commercial publisher: in a nutshell, you run the journal, you promote it without being the decision-maker on its policies and, of course, without compensation except in what many colleagues name a prestige economy.((For example, Tennant, Jonathan P., et al. “Ten hot topics around scholarly publishing.” Publications 7.2 (2019): 34.https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7020034))
Some consider this an intolerable exploitation of the scientific community, and petitions have regularly called for people to refuse to accept these positions, the most famous remaining The Cost of Knowledge. Others are comfortable with it, believing, for example, that the division between the scientific work carried out by the committee members and the publisher’s production and distribution tasks is a good compromise3
If you accept our invitation, please provide your contact information and a list of keywords reflecting your expertise, in accordance with the entry examples at https://www.mdpi.com/journal/publications/editors/. If possible, please also send, for our records, a CV or an official website with your biographical data (including a list of your publications). If this is of interest, but comes at an inopportune time, you may have a recommendation for a senior expert to serve as an Editorial Board member. If you have any questions, suggestions or recommendations, please let us know.
This detailed procedure is another hint to add in the direction of a genuine invitation for a position in the committee of a standard commercial publisher journal, which is rarely considered as a “grey zone” output. Nevertheless, there is another surprising piece of information about the ‘benefits’ attached to the position of editorial board member. I don’t know if it is a standard practice in APC-based journals4. Yet this three-line paragraph looks extremely problematic to me for three cumulative reasons. Once again, others could consider it completely benign, due to shared ethics and practices, which would prevent everything that follows.
Additionally, you are welcome to publish with the journal—this will be free of charge once accepted for publication. The term for the Editorial Board membership lasts for two years and can be renewed.
Firstly, it encourages members of the editorial committee to publish in their journal, which puts them in a conflict of interest, even if they do not manage the fate of their manuscript. Secondly, this incentive is redoubled in monetary terms, since APCs are waved, an ‘APC ring’5 between an editorial board member and authors who can not or do not wish to pay an APC that invites them in the byline, is favored. Finally, this policy for editorial board members is not public, unlike the ‘discounting’ policy for timely reviewers detailed on the MDPI Publications website.
This paragraph alone could have made me cringe and refuse the invitation. But it also comes from a journal and a publisher who is piling up the greyish stories.
When I have discussed with colleagues these and other issues around MDPI practices, I find that credible researchers tell me that there are some excellent journals published by MDPI. It seems unfortunate that, in seeking rapid growth via the mechanism of Special Issues, the publisher has risked its reputation by giving editorial responsibility to numerous guest editors without adequate oversight, and encouraged quantity over quality.((https://deevybee.blogspot.com/2024/09/now-you-see-it-now-you-dont-strange.html))
On the geopolitical consequences of that position, see Taşkın, Zehra, Franciszek Krawczyk, and Emanuel Kulczycki. “Are papers published in predatory journals worthless? A geopolitical dimension revealed by content-based analysis of citations.” Quantitative Science Studies 4.1 (2023): 44-67, https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00242 [↩]
This is a theoretical division, actual tasks performed are another story see on the Diamond journals case, Dufour, Quentin, David Pontille, and Didier Torny. “Supporting Diamond Open Access journals.” Nordic Journal of Library and Information Studies 4.2 (2023): 35-55., 10.7146/njlis.v4i2.140344 [↩]
To my knowledge there is no data on these policies towards editors, except on the question of paid editorial board members, especially in biomedicine [↩]
Teixeira da Silva, Jaime A. “The Conceptual ‘APC Ring’: Is There a Risk of APC-Driven Guest Authorship, and Is a Change in the Culture of the APC Needed?.” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 55.3 (2024): 404-425.https://doi.org/10.3138/jsp-2023-0060 [↩]
Imagine that you are a young researcher in Germany, having started your thesis in September 2018. For the last 5 years, you have had no legal access to articles published by the world’s largest publisher, Elsevier. Your institution has saved hundreds of thousands or even millions of euros, but you don’t really know where that money has gone. By contrast, on a day-to-day basis, then as a PhD student, now as a post-doc, you tinker with your access by writing to authors, asking your colleagues abroad if they can send you this article, requesting your library to buy that crucial paper, scanning preprints, using the unpaywall button or, late at night from home, typing the full combination of letters and signs to reach the platform whose name you must never utter or write.
To my knowledge, this divorce between a major publisher and a national consortium, DEAL, folowed by a reconciliation, has been the longest for a very rich country,. This post analyses how the separation happened, what is known of a long period of divorce in which no German institution had a subscription to ScienceDirect, and finally moving on to the reconciliation agreement published on September 6th, 2023 and validated in January 2024.
From harsh talks to full divorce (2016-2018)
Indeed, it was not for the lack of money that DEAL did not sign with Elsevier, but because the conditions of a signing were not met. By contrast, reading DEAL’s agreement with Springer-Nature, analysed at length 3 years ago, shows what was expected: an agreement including subscription and open access publication, all at a cost deemed reasonable by the German consortium. So how did they get to a “no deal”? As often when trying to rest on past information with institutional sites and changing policies, I shall say that most documents cited below have disappeared from the DEAL website and, therefore are captures made by the Internet archive.
“At Elsevier, serving research is our paramount goal. We have therefore chosen to continue providing access to Elsevier journals for dozens of German institutions that cancelled their individual subscriptions at the end of 2016. They did so anticipating that a new Germany-wide license agreement would be in place by January this year, which we regret so far has not been achievable. We strongly believe that access to high-quality research is important for German science. The continuing access for the affected institutions will be in place while good-faith discussions about a nationwide contract carry on. This reflects our support for German research and our expectation that an agreement can be reached.”1
I hope one day some colleagues will systematically study the rhetoric of big publishers PR. Anyway, the one above is typical of a service industry which makes believe its aims are totally aligned with the ones of its clients. Imagine the reverse situation, where DEAL would state : “at DEAL, assuring service providers profit is our paramount goal…”. Back to our main topic: the unconditionnal reconnection decided by Elsevier is not something unusual: at the same time, it happened for example for Taiwanese institutions in a similar situation2. But Elsevier hopes for a soon-to-be new German agreement would not be fulfilled. Indeed, after these back and forths, the negociations stalled, leading to a full divorce by mid-2018, as stated by the German Rectors Conference, which had “no choice”:
“The excessive demands put forward by Elsevier have left us with no choice but to suspend negotiations between the publisher and the DEAL project set up by the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany.” That was the verdict of the lead negotiator and spokesperson for the DEAL Project Steering Committee, Prof Dr Horst Hippler, the President of the German Rectors’ Conference, speaking in Bonn, where the last discussion took place this week.”3
At this point, we shall note that all cited documents are written in English, while negociations surely happened in German. DEAL had the clear intention of making its moves very public and widelly known beyond the Federal German space and Mitteleuropa.
Learning to work without simple legal access (2019-2022)
So Elsevier pulled the plug in July 2018 and everything went quiet after almost two years of turmoil. That was not a given: you could think that protest letters, petitions or lobbying from unsatisfied lay researchers would multiply as a whole nation of scientists were cut from at least a fifth of the published literature. To lift the veil on the actual frustrations and losses resulting from the switch-off, it was… Elsevier, which commissioned a survey in the summer of 2019, the summary results of which can still be seen on the pages of one news agency.
“Most German researchers agree that losing access to ScienceDirect made their research activities less efficient (61%) and delayed the production of the research output (54%). High-quality research further required access to current, international research results. However, the survey shows that 49% of the scientists surveyed believed that the lack of access to new research findings leads researchers to miss current developments or to become aware of them only with a delay. 44% of respondents fear that this will have a negative impact on the quality of their research. All in all, 84% of researchers surveyed think ScienceDirect was important or somewhat important while 76% supported or strongly supported the restoration of full access to ScienceDirect in Germany.“
Of course, no raw data has been published and the study itself has not been shared beyond this PR. Nevertheless, in the body of the text, Elsevier mentions another ‘independent’ study carried out by the University of Münster. Like the previous one, this is not an actual academic study, but a library survey, published only on their blog, in German. Despite its limitations (size, a single institution), it presents some interesting, and most probably unique, results on the representations of German researchers one year after the cut. In particular, the following graph should be highlighted:
Extract form Münster Univeristät Survey, which results are presented here (in German).
The orange answers indicate respondents’ agreement, and the statements have been ranked in descending order of positive responses. They show a mixed picture in terms of opinions, both across the population as a whole and for many respondents themselves. from one question to the other. Though the vast majority, namely two-thirds (66%), agreed with the statement “I need more time to get the literature” and 58% thought that the right thing to do was to put pressure on Elsevier to give in, also the option with the fewest disagreeing votes (5%). That does not imply support for the shutoff: in fact, 55% agreed that “No deal is no option – negotiations should be resumed as soon as possible”, and 46% that the lack of access was “a serious competitive disadvantage”.
While 43% agreed that “Elsevier as a profit-orientated company would only harm science”, and only 11% disagreed, only 29% would “refrain from writing or review articles for Elsevier journals” against 40% who would still perform it. After some questions on the importance of Elsevier journals and the use of spared funds, the last question shows another divisive view on the resuming of negotiations, with only 16% in favour of it – which of course was not addressed in the Elsevier PR mentioned.
These two surveys are the only public manifestations of a debate in Germany during this period. If opinions remain relatively unpublic, what about practices? Does the impossibility of immediate legal reading actually have an impact on the way German academics write, their choice to publish in Elsevier journals or their productivity? To my knowledge and through the extensive use of Matilda, only two academic articles have addressed these issues The first is counterfactual, in that it looks at the behaviour of affiliated authors in Germany in chemistry for Springer and Wiley with which DEAL has signed an agreement. Published in 2021 in economics, it only considers the first year of the agreement (2020), in comparison with the previous period and with a control group with no agreement of this type. Nevertheless, the authors are already measuring some effect :
“researchers’ submission behavior in the field of chemistry has changed to some degree, as eligible researchers have increased their publications in Wiley and Springer Nature journals at the cost of other journals. While the effect is not overly large yet, it is statistically significant, and it may increase over time, as the agreements become even more well-known among scientists. Hence, journals covered by the DEAL agreements appear to have a competitive advantage in attracting authors”.4
If agreements signed raise attractivity, then unsigned ones shoud diminish it. The second one deals with the latter by considering the evolution of publication and referencing activities of the whole population of German authors in Elsevier journals, with no control group. Published in 2023 in scientometrics, it is based on more than 400,000 articles and more than 33M references:
“We also observe year-on-year decreases in the proportion of citations, although the decrease is smaller. We conclude that negotiations with Elsevier and access restrictions have led to some reduced willingness to publish in Elsevier journals, but that researchers are not strongly affected in their ability to cite Elsevier articles, implying that researchers use other methods to access scientific literature.”5
The two studies therefore show that the structure of publications is affected by the agreements; whether signed or not, but only marginally, at least over a short period. Furthermore, reading seems to be remarkably unaffected by the lack of legal and rapid access to the literature. To enable simple and legal reading, It is likely that other internal work has been produced by the consortium or that self-support systems have been put in place, similar to what the Swedish libraries deployed during their own breakup with Elsevier6. Beyond this study, there is anecdotal evidence, given by colleagues, but also an interview of a member of the negociation team, Dr. Bernhard Mittermaier, head of Forschungszentrum Jülich’s Central Library, which tends to show that they were following the rate of publications:
“The option to publish with Elsevier was not affected. Some scientists, however, asked me whether a publishing boycott would make sense in view of the fact that many editors from Germany – including Prof. Wolfgang Marquardt – had discontinued their work for the publisher with reference to the stalled DEAL negotiations. In fact, Elsevier’s share of all Jülich publications decreased from 26 % in 2018 to 18 % in 2022. Across Germany, there was a decline from 19 to 15 %. This may also be a reason why Elsevier returned to the negotiating table.”
In the end, it is reasonable to consider that German researchers have adapted to a life without ScienceDirect over the long term, still reading articles published by Elsevier, but publishing less in journals disseminated by it . What the French and British did not dare to attempt after lengthy negotiations, the Germans did, with very substantial savings and a diminished dependance to the biggest commercial publisher. But what happens afterwards, when the time comes for one or other of them to consider recontracting?
Dealing again… on different terms (2023-2024)
2023 began, as in previous years, without ScienceDirect for German researchers. Im Westen nichts Neues, as a fellow economist lamented :
In fact, Elsevier had returned to the negotiating table in autumn 2022 and, after a four-year drought, seemed ready to make concessions that would have been unthinkable four years earlier. The negotiations took place behind closed doors, until the sudden announcement of their success at the beginning of September 2023, followed by the publication of the contract itself. Let’s dive into it, as DEAL has always been transparent on their agreements (nice PDF, full text and monetary information,…), published under a CC-BY-ND license7.
We will not delve into the details of the usual characteristics of this type of agreement (definition of the parties, services expected, users authorised to read, corresponding author limitations, etc.), but will instead focus on the most central elements and on some unique features compared to the bodies of agreements analysed elsewhere.8. This agreement is a “classic” Read & Publish, which includes in its core payment articles published in hybrid journals, but not articles in full open access journals, for which the fee is simply reduced by 15% or 20%. It also includes a back catalogue upgrade for all institutions, at a total cost of €10m. It is a “pay as you publish” agreement, with a PAR fee for each article, depending whether they are in a “regular journal” (2,500 €) or a Cell Press/The Lancet journal (6,450€), with an inflation rate of 3% and 4% respectively9.
This payment model has two consequences that are quite specific to this agreement. Firstly, with the exception of the back catalog, institutions have no front money to commit. Whereas in the past some agreements offered “tokens” or “waivers” for publication, the opposite is now true: you only start to pay after publication. Secondly, this provision would encourage free riding: as withalmost all agreements of this type, the corresponding author is offered, as a priority, to publish in open access under the CC-BY licence, but he or she can refuse. There is also a provision in the contract that prevents this refusal to publish in open access from being organised by counting all the publications:
“For the avoidance of doubt, the applicable PAR fee for Core Hybrid journals for the year of the acceptance date will be applied to both open access and subscription articles in these journals and to subscription articles published in Cell Press and The Lancet journals.”
So, despite the diminishing share of articles observed during the absence of agreement and the lack of front money, Elsevier has a certain guarantee of revenue as 18, 19% or 20% of the German research production will end in one of its disseminated journals. In exchange, the company had to accept very harsh conditions on the data generated by German users. A full page (section 7.6) is dedicated to Data Privacy in the agreement, with reminders of legal provisions derived from the GDOR European regulation. DEAL and Elsevier will co-supervise the whole data processing, the latter refraining from using any personal data without the consent of users. On this point, a loophole was anticipated by forbidding any general opt-in device: German colleagues will be able to fully use ScienceDirect without signing any consent. Of course, all data will be stored in one of the Member States of the European Union. The matter is so sensitive that a future workshop is planned during the first year of the contract, where part of the IP addresses would be automatically erased when IPs are not located in professional settings.
Without doubt, Elsevier’s transformation into a data company and the growing controversy surrounding its new business models on reselling user data10 has been closely observed in a country so keen on privacy. Still, despite these worries, DEAL signed the deal and did not include any fines in case these limits would be trespassed11. But what about the signing of German iHER nstitutions?
Conclusion : which savings, for which uses?
In fact, there was still a little uncertainty when the agreement was unveiled, as a four-month period was about to begin during which the institutions would each have to indicate whether they would sign the agreement. It could only be ratified if at least 70% of the institutions approved it, and fees were lower if 90% did. On 15 January 2024, DEAL announced that this second threshold had been exceeded as “nearly all of Germany’s major universities and research institutions are now participating“. Elsevier has now joined Wiley & Springer in the DEAL family, with very similar agreements focused on hybrid open access. But what does it mean from the point of view of German HER institutions? Let’s go back to Dr. Bernhard Mittermaier’s interview, who talks about his own instiution costs and the global German ones:
“Taken together, Jülich institutes will now save around € 100,000 per year on fees for hybrid open access that were previously paid to Elsevier. For Forschungszentrum Jülich as a company, the costs for Elsevier will even decrease by about 40 % than was the case under the former agreement, assuming publication figures remain the same. This corresponds to about € 300,000 per year that can be saved compared to 2018, the last year of our previous agreement with Elsevier. Elsevier’s fees per article are now much lower than they were in 2018 and similar to those charged by Wiley and Springer Nature.”Compared to 2023, however, when hybrid open access, document delivery, and pay-per-view each cost around € 100,000, additional expenditure of € 200,000 will now be incurred.
Let’s try to do the math (which does not add up), based on that paragraph in the following table, with three references, the last year of the former (local) agreement, the shut-off period and the first year of the new agreement.
Expenditures/Year
2018
2021
2024
Total
600,000€ 500,000€
100,000€
300,000€
Forschungszentrum Jülich Elsevier expendures.
The previous total cost is 500K if you follow the 40% reduction and 600K€ if you add the total savings mentioned. Whatever the case, the new deal is far below the older ones, in which German institutions were known for paying “much more” than similar institutions in Netherlands or France. Let’s now project the costs nationally:
Year
pre-2018
2021
2024
Expenitures
70M-100M€ in mostly reading agreements
5-10 M€ max in Hybrid OA publishing?
30-40M€ in P&R agreement
Extimated Elsevier revenue for Germany
The first figure was never made public, but I have heard estimiations in between these two markings, The second one is very maximalistic as OpenAPC counts between, 1M€ and 1,3M€ for Elsevier in Germany for the years 2020 to 2022. The thrid one is based on the number of expected publications and the different fees defined in the agreement. So the savings have been huge during the shutdown and Elsevier lost probably at least 300M€ before resuming negiotiations. And despite losing probably around 50% of its 2018 revenue, the company prefered to sign rather than leaving almost all the money on the table.
While, for example, French institutions have made a major commitment to using some of the resources saved for OA initiatives and by replenishing the National Open Science Fund, this does not seem to be the case in Germany. The national research funder DFG has recently announced the launch of a Diamond OA publishing platform… with a maximum budget of 1.5M€ per year. I let you figure out what it would have been with just 30% of the money spared. So the German HER institutionswon won a lot, Elsevier stalled, but the dependence from big commercial publishers has not been halted, or even reinforced.
Schiermeier, Q., Mega, E. Scientists in Germany, Peru and Taiwan to lose access to Elsevier journals. Nature541, 13 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2016.21223 [↩]
Haucap, J., Moshgbar, N., & Schmal, W. B. (2021). The impact of the German ‘DEAL’ on competition in the academic publishing market. Managerial and Decision Economics, 42(8), 2027–2049. https://doi.org/10. 1002/mde.3493 [↩]
Olsson, Lisa, et al. “Cancelling with the worlds largest scholarly publisher: lessons from the Swedish experience of having no access to Elsevier.” Insights-The UKSG Journal 33 (2020). 10.1629/uksg.507 [↩]
Elsevier B.V., & MPDL Services gGmbH, Max Planck Society (2023). Projekt DEAL – Elsevier Publish and Read Agreement. doi:10.17617/2.3523659 [↩]
Quentin Dufour, David Pontille, Didier Torny. Contracter à l’heure de la publication en accès ouvert. Une analyse systématique des accords transformants. [Rapport de recherche] 206 150, CNRS; Comité pour la science ouverte. 2021, pp.81. ⟨halshs-03203560⟩ [↩]
I won’t get here into some society journals excluded from the agreement, either because they won’t go hybrid or because they thought they won’t get paid enough by Elsevier. On the specific question of learned societies journals in such deals, see The Brief https://www.ce-strategy.com/the-brief/out-of-reach/ [↩]
Didier Torny. From paywall builders to data tracking moguls or… How the big publishers have put on a new super vilain costume. Politics of technoscientific futures, EASST, Jul 2022, Madrid, Spain. ⟨hal-03885480⟩ [↩]
The starting point for this post is an article from Scholarly Kitchen in which, once again, the sustainability of Diamond journals and here the Subscribe to Open model, is questioned. This leads the author, Rick Anderson, to define sustainability:
“It’s a concept that gets invoked in many different contexts to mean a range of different things, but in this context its meaning is both basic and simple: a publisher’s business model is sustainable if it’s able to be sustained over time. […] What determines sustainability? For an ongoing and open-ended project like publishing, the baseline determinant of sustainability is simple: recurring, reliable revenue.”
This definition is interesting, though it stands on a muddy ground: how do we define “recurring reliable revenue”? What is the timeframe to judge reliability? My post will argue that there is no such thing as a stable business model, at least for a long time. Moreover, if Anderson is right to question the S20 future, the same questions should be asked to much-lightly considered “stable models”, starting with subscriptions.
Our present is not the continuation of the past: the short history of subscriptions
Over the three and a half centuries of scientific publication in journals, the economic relations between publishers of scientific outputs and their readers were far from stable. It was probably not until after the Second World War that the main relationships became those between publishers and academic libraries, on a national or international scale, not as part of a gift or exchange economy, but rather as a commodity.
As the number and budget of libraries increased and the number of published journals grew fast, a short golden age of subscriptions for journal producers, and notably commercial ones, began1. But by the 1970s, as budgets stagnated, harsh competition for libraries money was the first signal of what was later referred to as the serial crisis. This decades-long relationship, based on the sale of subscriptions and paper issues for each journal, has been profoundly transformed by the digitalization of journals.
In the late 1990s, three major events took place in the contractual relationship between libraries and scientific publishers. Firstly, in a relatively short period of time after the inception of the World Wide Web, the largest publishers put online not only their entire contemporary catalogue, but also part of their archival material. Secondly, publishers have been offering access to packages or bundles, not on a title-by-title basis, but to a long list or even all of their journals. Thirdly, to make this offer attractive, they favoured the emergence of library consortia which, by adding their singular needs, could constitute clients interested in this new plethoric offer. The combination of these three events gave rise to a new form of standard economic agreement, the “big deal”2.
As a result, the subscription business model has been changed from an audience-centered model – libraries purchase what readers want, title by title – to a model centered on the size of the publisher – libraries buy the most extensive offerings, leading to a much stronger oligopolization through buyouts of publishers and change of publishers for scholarly societies, very visible twenty years later.
Percentage of papers published by the five major publishers, by discipline in the Natural and Medical Sciences, 1973–2013.3
For most publishers – including self-publishing learned societies – subscription has only been profitable for a short time and is not anymore. It is not sustainable, since it now implies the disappearance of their autonomy or at least dependence on increasingly powerful players, likely to act unilaterally on their revenues. And even for the largest publishers, the threat of non-renewal of Big Deals is growing stronger from 2010 onwards, whether through the sudden drop in financial resources (Greece) or through the choice to no longer pay for a service that does not meet the needs of libraries (United States) or open access demands (Germany, Sweden). It is in this context that Elsevier has started to brand itslef as a data company, while new publishers are trying to make a new model last, based on Article Processing Charges.
The future will not be similar to nowdays: charging authors to the breakdown point
Charging authors is not a recent business model, there have been many examples of vanity publishing, targeted towards academia or outside of it4. In the US, from the 1930s on , an alternative funding model had already thrived, as subscription revenues were considered too low. It targeted authors and their funders, was based on per-page charges, first in Physics, then in other STM disciplines.5 But it was with electronification that the idea of paying a lump sum for authors – as opposed to a multitude of varying services (colour charges, page charges, cover charges…) emerged, soon to be known as Article Processing Charges (APC). Some new publishers have entirely adopted this new model, sooner or later being bought by legacy Big Publishers, like BMC by Springer or Hindawi by Wiley. But other ones have quickly become themselves global Big Publishers.
Retrospective statistics of the leading academic publishers in 20216
On selected Clarivate sources7, MDPI and Frontiers are now in the top 6 in volume published while added, they were making less than a fifth of ACS, Sage or OUP a decade ago! From the point of view of these new big players, APCs are so sustainable that they create journals almost every week. For example, in 2021 MDPI launched 84 new journals and only acquired two existing titles. As Dan Brockington has shown in his comprehensive analysis of MDPI data, this growth also comes from the lowering of rejection rates:
“Now, some 45% of the MDPI journals I analysed, have rejection rates of below 40% (Table 2). Papers in these journals account for nearly 38% of revenues from publication fees (Table 3). Conversely, the journals with rejection rates of over 50% account for just over 25% of revenues. Measures of esteem, such as listing in the Web of Science, did not seem to make a difference to rejection rates. Average rejection rate for WoS listed journals was 42.7%, and for unlisted journals 41.6%.”8
The incentive for publishers to accept a manuscript in the APC model has been discussed for a decade, and its link to the growth of vanity presses now dubbed “predatory publishers” is well established. Above and beyond what is often portrayed as a potential threat to the whole scholarly communication system, the APC business model is not sustainable from the authors and research organizations’ point of view. A large literature has constantly shown the rise of APC prices through time, would it be for open access journals or for those relying on the hybrid model. Whether they would name it “prestige prices” or “market power”, researchers describe an ever-growing number of APC articles and a rise in individual prices.9
Proponents of market regulation will argue that each author will adjust his or her willingness-to-pay to the audience and the supposed quality of the journal, but instead we see the exclusion of authors for lack of funds or the sale of places in the byline to pay APCs. And of course, the quasi-absence of success for such a business model in underfunded disciplines, like most of HSS ones.
Sustainable for whom? The durability of Diamond journals
The two most visible business models for disseminating journal content are therefore both not only at the mercy of default by their funders, but are unsustainable for both readers and authors and their respective institutions. The fact that they constitute today’s largest expenditure items in scholarly communication should not be taken as evidence of sustainability through the capture of recurrent reliable revenue. In research worlds subject to severe budgetary constraints and increasing visibility of expenditure lines, they are in fact the most threatened in their foundation.
That being said, what are the alternatives? They are well known, and have been running in some corners of the global journal market for decades without any structural sustainability problems, despite being underfunded. Their landscape has been described in a comprehensive study, showing small-scale non-profit community-owned arhcipelagoes10. Far from APC-based megajournals and publishers with huge portfolios, this ecosystem is sustained by learned societies, universities, research organizations, some research funders, but also large-scale technical infrastructures, the most obvious being PKP’s Open Journal Systems.
At what point can we confidently say that OJS from @pkp is the most widely adopted scholarly publishing software in the world? And celebrate the sustainable growth of open infrastructure as the way to resolve structural barriers to equitable research _globally_.#opensciencepic.twitter.com/fFl1cfWWwp
While it is certain that more funding and more support from different institutions is needed11, thousands of journals – and dozen of dissemination platforms – have shown their reliability as they passed the test of time.
Yet, most don’t pass the “Anderson sustainability test” as they don’t rely on “revenue” but rather support and funding as they have not been comodified. Moreover, the support come from the exact same sources that pay, in a way or another, the “unsustainable publishing models” described above. So, they are obviously sustainable for authors and for readers, but also for these supporting institutions. Though they don’t have a unified business model12 -Subscribe to Open being the latest & adequate to already commidified journals, they seem to thrive, each of them at their low-scale, but with an agregated population still larger than APC journals. After almost three decades of existence, resisting to several “serial crises”, haven’t they earn the right not to be questionned on their sutainibility, but rather considered as one of the most secure ways to build a sustanaible scholarly communication system, allied with institutional archives?
Fyfe, Aileen. “From philanthropy to business: the economics of Royal Society journal publishing in the twentieth century.” Notes and Records (2022). Aileen Fyfe, Noah Moxham, Julie McDougall-Waters, and Camilla Mørk Røstvik , A History of Scientific Journals Publishing at the Royal Society, 1665-2015, UCL Press, 2022, chapter 14 [↩]
Frazier, Kenneth. “What’s the big deal?” The serials librarian 48.1-2 (2005): 49-59. [↩]
Larivière V, Haustein S, Mongeon P (2015) The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0127502. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502 [↩]
see for a detailed history on books, Timothy Laquintano, The Legacy of the Vanity Press and Digital Transitions, Volume 16, Issue 1, Summer 2013, https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0016.104 [↩]
On the American Chemical Society example, see Noel, M. (2020). Back to disciplines: exploring the stability of publication regimes in chemistry: the case of the Journal of the American Chemical Society (1879–2010). Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 7(1), 1-13; on the APS/AIP example, see Scheiding, T. (2009). Paying for knowledge one page at a time: The author fee in physics in twentieth-century America. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 39(2), 219-247. [↩]
see for example, Budzinski, O., Grebel, T., Wolling, J. et al. Drivers of article processing charges in open access. Scientometrics124, 2185–2206 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03578-3 [↩]
Bosman, Jeroen, Jan Erik Frantsvåg, Bianca Kramer, Pierre-Carl Langlais, and Vanessa Proudman. “The OA diamond journals study. Part 1: Findings.” (2021) 10.5281/zenodo.4558704 [↩]
see recommandations from the mentioned study, Becerril, Arianna, Lars Bjørnshauge, Jeroen Bosman, Jan Erik Frantsvåg, Bianca Kramer, Pierre-Carl Langlais, Pierre Mounier, Vanessa Proudman, Claire Redhead, and Didier Torny. “The OA Diamond Journals Study. Part 2: Recommendations.” (2021), https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4562790 [↩]
This diversity should be studied, as we will do it in the current European-funded Diamas project [↩]
If you ask the open access community what happened in October 2003, chances are they will cite the Berlin Declaration as an important moment of consolidation of international mobilisation. At the same time, however, there was a large-scale attempt to charge authors for the publication of their open access research. Indeed, this was the time when the publisher Biomedcentral announced the switch of all its journals to a then little known financial model: Article Processing Charges. Let’s take the example of two journals passing on this announcement when they discuss the price of the service:
Although some authors may consider US$525 expensive, it must be remembered that The Journal of Translational Medicine does not levy additional page or colour charges on top of this fee, which can easily exceed US$525. With the article being online only, any number of colour figures and photographs can be included, at no extra cost.
There is no remuneration of any kind provided to the Editors-in-Chief, to any members of the editorial board, or to peer reviewers; all of whose work is entirely voluntary. Although some authors may consider US$525 expensive, it must be remembered that Journal of Neuroinflammation does not levy any additional page or color charges on top of this fee. Because we are an online-only journal, any number of color figures, photographs, and ‘extra’ pages can be included at no extra cost. Such color and page charges, as assessed by more traditional journals, can easily exceed our flat US$525 per-article APC. Another common expense with traditional journals is the purchase of reprints for distribution, and the cost of these reprints is also frequently greater than our APCs. The Journal of Neuroinflammation provides free, publication-quality pdf files for distribution, in lieu of reprints.
Three elements emerge from these excerpts: firstly, their similarity indicates a copying of elements provided by BMC to justify this change in business model, the financing having previously had to rely on any source except the authors and in particular a support programme for research institutions; secondly, the price is related to the costs of making content and formats available free of charge to readers; and thirdly, the novelty of the payment for authors is minimised in favour of a continuous interpretation between page charges and article processing charges. Indeed, at least since the 1930s, in some disciplines, the authors’ contribution to publication costs – and not only to the cost of reprinting copies for personal circulation – has been documented. And a vast majority of science journals were still asking for such charges at the beginning of the 2010s1
This continuity is debatable, but the APC system put in place by BMC, like the one adopted at the official launch of PLOS Biology around the same time, is a partial legacy of these in print practices. As in the past, only accepted items are invoiced at a single “catalogue” price for defined services.
TO BE CONTINUED
Curb, Lisa A., and Charles I. Abramson. “An examination of author-paid charges in science journals.” Comprehensive Psychology 1 (2012): 01-17. [↩]
And yet another agreement! While it was celebrated over the ocean as “the largest OA deal ever signed in the US” or a “milestone” for OA, we Europeans are now used to these “groundbreaking” contracts announcements every other week. So much that I have already written one in March on the German Springer/DEAL and another one in May on the Faustian Elsevier/Dutch consortium. So all things come in threes, and for a good reason, as Californians give us some food for thought on the financial side of the agreement.
First of all, it should be noted that the contract between Springer Nature (SN) and the University of California (UC) has not yet been written, but that only the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was made public this week1. This publication derives from a clear commitment on the part of the universities to make the negotiation processes and the principles governing the choice of subscription, support or no deal transparent to the local academic communities, but also more broadly to all stakeholders interested in these issues.
As we are almost in the middle of the year, the fact that the agreement has been signed for the years 2020 to 2023 has a first important consequence: all the mechanisms necessary for the identification of authors, for the various payments and for monitoring will probably not be in place before the end of the year (SN is committed to this by 1 January 2021). In practice, UC will pay in 2020 an undisclosed amount name “UC 2020 spend” for a Read & Publish in which the Publish part will be free of charge. It is only over the next three years that mechanisms will appear, which combined originality is at the heart of this post.
The Muti-payer model. Getting authors and funders involved
One of the originalities of this contract with Springer is the adoption of a model first experimented in the UC/PLOS agreement, with the splitting of an APC into two distinct blocks: the first 1000 dollars which will be systematically paid by the university and the rest which will be paid by the authors if they have the possibility to do so. This mechanism smells like a device invented by economists, and it is one, a professor at UC Berkeley, who describes its purpose in The Scientist:
“In the US, there already were multiple funding sources—libraries paid for subscriptions, and when authors wanted to publish open access, they paid a surcharge on top of that out of their funds,” says MacKie-Mason. “The key thing here is that we’re integrating those into a single contract. That creates cost control for the institutions and the researchers [during the transition to open access], which is critical because the cost of scholarly publishing has been exploding.”
So the solution to the “new serial crisis” would be to imply authors as UC people have repeatedly stated2, but aren’t they already with classical “one shot APCs”? The idea to combine APC with institutionnal support in a contract is here pushed to the limit as we will see. In some “transformative agreements”, there is no way for a third party to understand who in the end pays what and from which source, especially in consortiia stteings. Here, it is quite the opposite as in the who MoU, a clear separation is made between two sources:
The UC – would it be California Digitaly Library or UC itself – takes in charge a 750,000$ reading fee, 1000$ for each APC and, as we will detail, more if authors can’t pay. All these will be counted apart in “UC Fully OA Spend”, “UC Hybrid Spend” and of course the reading fee.
The authors would pay the “APC remainder”, whoever is the original funder, and these sums play a very limited role into the contract, are not agregated under specific names.
So the splitting is not only made for each article, but for the total contract as “cost regulation” supported by Mackie-Manson but in fact only on the UC side, authors could spend whatever they wish on APC, and benefit from the UC participation. In consequence, as authors shall pay, they have the possibility to opt out of OA in hybrid journals, which is the default option. Consequently, the deal does not guarantee that all UC corresponding authors articles will be OA, but only those who wish so and, to some extent, that are ready to pay, favorable to hybrid journals, or APC gold open access supporters. The division and authors’ choice are highly visible in an exception in the contract. If, despite very short deadlines, SN was able to implement the entire workflow before the end of 2020, then it could start invoicing APCs. Under no circumstances would UC have anything to pay, but authors could be solicited:
Should Springer Nature implement the Multi-payer Model before January 1, 2021, Springer Nature may begin collecting the APC Remainder under the terms of the model […]. If the corresponding author does not have research funds available to cover the APC Remainder, then Springer Nature shall not collect an APC for those articles. No UC Fully OA or Hybrid Spend payments will be charged during this time (article 3.8.2).
It is hard to imagine a corresponding author who can get free APC deciding to pay, unless their grant is nearing completion and they cannot spend it otherwise. But this provision does indeed support the idea of two decoupled payers, as the rules applying to them may differ, the first (UC) not paying in 2020 before being obliged to contribute, the second remaining in a logic of choice throughout the contract. But what exactly are the amounts to be paid?
Price, Volume, Participation : an equation to determine an Hybrid bill
The price calculation formulas are not yet complete, since the agreement is not signed, but the foreseeable variations are known throughout the contract. For full OA journals, there will be a base price in 2020, with a maximum increase of 3.5% per year. This base price is certainly not the catalog price, since it is specified that ” If at any time during the agreement the then-current list price APC is lower than the APC to be charged under the agreement, the current, lower APC will be charged instead” (art. 3.3). The issue of prices and volumes is most complex when it comes to hybrids APC. First of all, unit pricing is almost constant with the same prices in 2020, 2021 and 2022, and a maximum increase of 2% in 2023. But while the paid volume published in full OA appears unlimited, the paid volume published in Hybrid journals is very constrained.
First the number of articles published in Hybrid by the corresponding authors in 2019 and 2020 is calculated, and the smallest of the values is taken, which becomes the Base article number. The minimum volume of articles is then simply defined as 85% of this number, over time. On the other hand, the maximum number depends on two variables: first, an “inflation” of the authorized volume, of 5% per year, then a calculation that depends on the effective participation of the authors in the publication scheme. Indeed, the parties expect that between 30% and 40% of the authors of articles will choose to publish in hybrid AO rather than revert to a paywalled publication. (orange curve) If the program is successful, more than 60% of the authors adhere, then the red curve defines the maximum number of articles; symmetrically, in case of failure – less than 30% – it is the yellow curve that defines this maximum number.
In a close fashion to the agreement with DEAL, Springer defines a volume control on Hybrid, which can lead up to a third more articles published than the current Hybrid APC. But the consequences of going over this limit are very different than the German counterpart : UC is not anymore paying its 1000$ above the maximum, but authors – if they chose so, must pay the APC remainder. On the other end, if the minimum is not reached, UC shall pay “the average hybrid APC for UC corresponding authors from the previous year for the number of articles necessary to bring the total to the minimum. In 2021, the average hybrid APC from 2019 ($3208) shall be used.” So Springer Nature is sure to have (almost) its money back and UC has a control mechanism which prevents a high rise of its Hybrid spend by volume control.
Hard capping the total costs. Will UC pay less in the end?
Until now, it seems that we analyse another “cost-neutral” agreement that in practice could absolutely become a high rise contract : APC individual price inflation, unlimited payment for full OA articles, controlled max rise of hybrid OA would contribute to a larger bill for UC. Then comes the most original point of the UC/SN contract : a hard cap on the sum of fluctuating bills. In fact, some agreements, typically the JISC ones, include a price control that says “we will pay this, period”. Of course, the trade off is most often a defined, limited volume. Here, as we read it in article 3.6.
In each year of the contract, the Total UC Spend shall be subject to a fee control mechanism, as set out below. All fee control mechanisms are computed in relation to the license fees paid by UC for Springer journals, Adis Journals, Palgrave journals, andacademic journals on nature.com in 2020 (“UC 2020 Spend”).
So the starting “subscription” – ie Read & Publish – set price caps the whole price of the contract, once again in a very precise and shall I write, twisted way. Starting from the “UC 2020 spend”, in 2021 you can not exceed 95% of that sum: if it is the case, then UC gets some reading fee part, and if it is not enough, refunding from SN. So the max is clear and -5% compared to the starting year. But in 2022 and 2023, you can not exceed 98% of that sum ; if it is the case you get only the Reading fee back and nothing else. In other words, there is in fact no fixed maximum payment, and certainly not a garantuee that UC would pay less in 2022 and 2023 than in 2020, and as we don’t know what were the different bills, even more less than 20193. The UC part is very confident on the result as the associate executive director of the California Digital Library, Ivy Anderson, stated : “The new agreement is expected to save the system money overall, but the exact cost will depend on the number of articles UC researchers publish”.
Whatever the final outcome, and one can think, given the complexity of the provisions that the UC part has run many simulations on its final bill, there are three lessons to be learned from this MoU. First, in the absence of price transparency, it is difficult for outsiders to determine whether an agreement is really financially interesting or whether it mechanically leads, as with subscription formulas, to higher prices paid by higher education institutions. Secondly, this agreement builds a link between the payment of authors and that of the university: it therefore allows the direct inclusion of research funders, while ensuring traceability and monitoring of flows for each of the parties. It also contains incentives on the behaviour of authors, who would benefit from using the UC workflow to partially or totally reduce their own payment. But it is the ability to capture money from funders, third parties to the contract, that is striking, with certainly Coalition S members in mind.
Consequently, thirdly, it is the de facto guarantee of Springer’s revenues by encouraging new spending in the form of APC in subsidizing them. Making new provisions to turn the Nature journals into a hybrid goes in the same direction. In a similar way to “Pure Publish” agreements that goes with a discount on APC, the UC agreement is a transformative one as it explicitly changes universities from fund providers to fund collectors for publishers, with the hope of a diminishing or stable bill in exchange for that service.
We saw on the Dutch case that there could be quite significant differences between an MoU and the actual contract [↩]
See this piece on Impact of Social Sciences LSE Blog [↩]
I previously wrongly tweeted that they would pay less, as I thought the reference was UC 2019 spending [↩]
This post should not have come into existence. In fact, for a long time, “contracts” and “agreements” between publishers and higher education and research consortia have not only been proprietary texts, but filled with confidentiality clauses that prevented them to be disclosed. This culture of secrecy is still there, as the agreement between Springer and DEAL states this on its 45th page1.
” Disclosure of agreement It is Publisher’s position that the terms of this Agreement are proprietary, however the Parties have agreed in this case that the Agreement is placed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-ND 4.0 license and may be made public under this license. “
Indeed, the pursuit of transparency accompanying the open access movement has led in recent years to disclosing these contracts, highlighting the very large financial sums involved in accessing scientific literature2. But beyond the figures, the nature of the contracts and their concrete provisions are little discussed, outside of limited circles, notably in library & information sciences3.
The purpose of this post is therefore to propose a first analysis of the structure of this agreement before focusing on its financial part, the most original one, which is supposed to drive the transition to open access. But first we need to describe the two partners of the agreement. On the publisher side, we have Springer, or rather Springer Nature Customer Service Center GmbH. In practice, this means an entity that covers not only Springer and Nature publications, but also BioMed Central and Palgrave McMillan, i.e. more than 2,800 journals. On the customer side, it’s a bit more complicated: the negotiator is an intermediary, MPDL Services GmbH , which acts on behalf of the Projekt Deal, which is a consoritum initiated by the Alliance of German Science Organizations to negotiate nationwide transformative “publish and read” agreements with the largest commercial publishers of scholarly journals. The consortium structure therefore complicates the terms of the agreement with Eligible Institutions that can become Members with associated rights and duties.
Before entering into the agreement, it is important to add how much the writing itself shows the intensive interpretative work on its terms. As in any contract the key terms are of course defined: “eligible articles” “publishing services” or “open access license” among many others. But one also finds in the agreement no less than 18 occurrences of “For the avoidance of doubt” and 48 of “For clarity”, redundancies aimed at limiting the ambivalence of written proposals and injunctions and hints of the carefulness of both parties to limit the risks generated by the agreement.
From a simple preamble to a complex folded agreement
At first, things seem really simple, as the preamble states the common aim of the two organizations. In fact, they share the rise of Open Access publications in the BOAI meaning, with its known advantages and underline the scope of this agreement, compared to previous ones.
“The parties enter this contract with the goal to enable open access publishing of articles from German- funded researches in Springer Nature journals, to make these articles available to the public worldwide, and to provide access for German-funded researchers to most of Springer Nature content. At time of signing, the contract becomes the world’s largest transformative open access agreement, making it possible for over 13,000 articles annually from German-funded researchers to be made immediately available Open Access for use and reuse from the moment of publication, bringing the benefits of maximum visibility, increased usage and citations, and greater and broader impact to researchers across Germany.”
Yet, the summary of the agreement depicts a complex set of successive services, which highlights the concrete constraints of a “Publish and Read” agreement for such a large consortium. The actual starting date of the agreement is far away, since the institutions have in practice several months to adhere to the terms of the contract and to put in place the necessary infastructures to carry it out. It is only from August 2020 that centralized funding for open access publishing will really kick in. However, researchers from affiliated institutions can already access Springer content from now on. This paradox is resolved if one considers that the R&P agreement is in fact one contract which overlays four contracts between the parties, named as follows :
Fully Open Access Publishing
Hybrid Publishing
DEAL Journal Archives
Reading Access
Let’s start by looking at the last two, which are the simplest in financial terms. Reading access (p. 31-41) defines the conditions of access to Springer’s content, provides for cases in which this service is discontinued – in particular non-payment in connection with the other components, but does not itself contain any financial elements. Reading is therefore provided free of charge for researchers at the member institutions of the DEAL project, as this deal is really a “Publish & Read“. The “DEAL journal archives” (p. 27-30) is charged, but for a fixed sum of €3,75 million. It allows the “upgrading” of all the institutions on the journal legacy, a little over 3 million articles, and the constitution of a “dark archive” that can be used during and after the contract.
Still, there are some interesting articles in these parts, for example the fact that DEAL can tell Springer to cease reading access to Member institutions if these institutions fail to pay the DEAL operating entity (p. 32). We can also read that the English-language agreement is the one that prevails (p. 40) ; considering that both parties are German and that German Law in Heidelberg applies in case of disagreement, it is very intriguing. Finally, at the opposite of the philosophy of Open Access, there are very strong limitations to the uses of the Archive or current content : access, download and very strict usage in academic courses. In particular, text and data mining for a given Member institution should only be authorized after an addendum is signed (p. 34). It is therefore clear that the already closed content remains paywalled and that the transformational will only applies to future publications.
Controlled Gambling on future open access publishing
But how can this transformational aspect be translated into a contract? As we shall see, there is a form of gambling – with certain limits – carried out by both parties in the two contracts at the heart of the scheme, the Fully Open Access Publishing (p. 7-14) and the Hybrid Publishing (p. 15-26). The first has become quite standard – and very close to the contract signed by DEAL with Wiley at the beginning of 2019. It is a centralized payment system with corresponding author recognition and verification, sharing of metadata and financial reporting, all in exchange for some deduction on the price of APCs (p. 14).
“For the purposes of calculation of the APC Rates, the list price increases for any Article Processing Charges under these Product Terms will not exceed 3.5% per journal title per year (“Cap”); increases will be calculated based on the 2020 list price. For BMC and certain other Springer titles which are included in the Open Access Journals, Publisher will apply in addition to the Cap a 20% discount, the journals being eligible for such discount will be identified accordingly in the DEAL Journal List.“
Price control is therefore very limited: although the reduction on the ‘public price’ is not negligible, it can quickly be offset by the foreseeable inflation of full OA APC costs charged by Springer. On the one hand, price rise at the 3.5% limit is almost certain, given the “natural” evolution of APCs prices; on the other hand, the current APC price insensitivity pushes us to predict that the number of articles published in full OA APCs will increase4. But this is precisely Springer’s gamble in signing this type of deal, by quickly making up for the quantity of articles in exchange for a limited reduction in the unit price. And this gamble is all the bigger here, given that its other source of income, under the Hybrid Publishing agreement, may fall in 2021, 2022, or 2023.
That is the biggest surprise of this Springer-DEAL agreement. Reading the announcement of the agreement on January 9, 2020, one would have thought that this part of the deal would once again be a copy of the Wiley agreement. Indeed, the fee5 of €2,750 for any research article in a hybrid journal published by Springer, signed without limit with Wiley, was communicated6. However, it is a very different expenditure scheme that was accepted by both parties (p. 25), represented in the following image.
For the year 2020, the amount is based on a “Reference Value » (RF) as the product of the number of articles estimated to be published by €2750, that is €26,125,0007. The RF does not move during the contract and so very much look like a “subscription price” from the point of view of Springer. Nevertheless, there is a complex real price paid that only partly takes into account the actual number of articles published. In 2020, the minimum invoice is the RF, if more articles are published, the price can go up to 5% more. In 2021, it is a minimum 95% of the RF and up to 10% more than the RF; then, 2022, it is 85% and up to 20% and finally, at DEAL’s option, for 2023, it is 75% and up to 30%.
On the upper side of the RF, from Springer’s point of view, the risk is to publish “too many” Hybrid OA articles. In such a situation, they would “miss” some revenue which would have hypothetically been generated by individual “Open Choice” APC. From DEAL’s point of view, it is litteraly an insurance against a growing cost generated by the capture of publications by Springer journals8.
“For the avoidance of doubt , Publisher will continue to publish Eligible articles even if the Upper Threshold is met or exceeded. Publisher will never charge any part of the Calculated Total PAR Fee exceeding the Upper Threshold, irrespective of the actual Calculated Total PAR Fee and/or number of Published Articles.”
If we now look on the other side of the RF, roles are reversed: the minimum invoice is an insurance for Springer if, for whatever reason, German authors don’t use the agreement to go on Hybrid OA, that it gets some value back now that reading is free of direct charge. From DEAL’s point of view, there is the risk to “pay for nothing” and it could be an incentive to push researchers to use Hybrid OA as it is “already charged”, rather than choosing the Full OA road, discounted but limitless as far as costs are concerned.
How transformative is the DEAL deal?
We can point to four potential or actual transformations from the agreement which runs until the end of 2022 with an option at the discretion of DEAL for 2023. First, obviously, it is the construction of a demanding workflow to regulate all the exchanges of authorship, institutionnal and financial information not only between Springer and DEAL, but also between DEAL operating entity and the Member institutions. Indeed, as with other Publish & Read type contracts, the sums actually paid by the research intensive institutions will be much higher than in the past. and conversely, more teaching or practice-oriented institutions would pay less. What is the cost of such a workflow for both entities? Is it easily scalable for other publishers/consoria? How would some institution react to their growing costs?
Second, this agreement raises the issue of researchers’ enrolment to open access publishing, even if the money does not seem to come from their own pockets or grants in this case9. Will they agree to publish in hybrid OA? Will they, on the other hand, remain insensitive to the total cost of APCs? Will they assume the position of correspondent author more than their foreign colleagues? What will be the associated institutional policies: more obligation to publish in open access or, on the contrary, a logic of individual choice? Answering these questions will make it possible to observe whether, indeed, open access is becoming the norm for German researchers in their publications at Springer.
Third, in direct connection with the previous transformation, the parties took calculated risks by signing this agreement. Springer may see its sales fall by between 15% and 20% in 2022 (APC discount at constant volume, minimum Hybrid Publishing price) in the event of failure with researchers, workflow problems or major disagreements within DEAL. Symmetrically, DEAL members risk a significant increase in the total price with a maximum of 20% Hybrid Publishing price and an explosion of full APC OA if production is moved to these journals. Transformative action at constant cost, because there is “enough money in the system”as OA2020 stated in 2015, is therefore not at all guaranteed.
Finally remains the question of the state of things at the end of the contract. If all goes well in their view, DEAL will validate the 2023 option, but what happens beyond that? And if they don’t, what will be their negotiating power? Will Springer be happy if both OA deals don’t have enough success to maintain their currents profits? Will the use of the “flagship journal” listed in the Wiley agreement to put some competition on Springer? Will Springer journals still be predominantly hybrid journals? Will the coalition S ultimatum on the lack of funding for APCs for this type of journals in 2024 be credible? There is nothing in the agreement to give answers to those questions, and in particular there is no commitment from Springer to flip its journals then. So, contrary to the recent ACM Open Model , this agreement does not constitute an irreversible transformation to open access. If things go south, subscriptions could be back at the very heart of the next agreement..
The agreement is availabe on the Projekt Deal dedcated webpage with its own DOI. Announced at the beginning of the year by both parties, the full agreement was discreetly added in mid-February. Thanks to Quentin Dufour for flagging this document [↩]
According to this presentation by the European University Association, more than one billion euros a year for its members, including 700 millions for journals [↩]
Typically the section “business models” of the Scholarly Kitchen website. [↩]
Technically, it is not an APC as stated in the FAQ page: “different from an Article Processing Charge (APC), the PAR fee, paid centrally by participating institutions for each article to appear under the DEAL agreement, covers the cost of the open access publishing services rendered and, to a lesser degree, reading access in Springer Nature subscription journals.” [↩]
In the Wiley deal, if I understood it correctly, the baseline payment is guaranted, unless it is shown that Wiley technically limits the actual publication of Hybrid OA ; but there is no max limit for the payment of €2,750. per article [↩]
I do not go into detail here about the type of article and in particular “Non Research Articles”, the price of which is €917 [↩]
Notably by the shift of corresponding author from a foreign researcher to a German one. [↩]
The actual source of money for APCs is not addressed at all in the contract, it is probably part of DEAL’s internal financial mechanics which are not public to my knowledge [↩]
For most of us, February 14th is Valentine’s Day; for open access activists and lovers, It is also the celebration of the BOAI anniversary. It was 18 years ago, they were sixteen, meeting in Budapest in December 2001. Far from agreeing on everything, yet they co-signed a landmark declaration published on February 14th, 2002. 18 years later, it is the coming of age for Open Access, a time to look at what has been changed, redifined, gained and missed. To start with, we have to remember that the BOAI really defined open access, as a virtually unlimited re-use of academic documents:
“By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited ((BOAI, 14th February 2002)).”
They also put together what was largely separated before, the soon named “green road” and “gold road”. Nevertheless, contrary to the popular belief, the supposed “original version” of the BOAI reproduced in lots of copies on the web, they were not calling them “self-archiving” and “open access journals”. Indeed, the reference above is not the true original version, but one slightly changed in the summer of 2002. The former one, which can be seen on the Web Archive, stated : “Open access to peer-reviewed journal literature is the goal. Self-archiving (I.) and a new generation of open-access alternative journals (II.)are the ways to attain this goal. So following BOAI, we will deal with this coming of age in two successive posts : this first one will focus on alternative journals, the second one on the triumph of organized archives over self-archiving.
A revolution with no defined business model
How are described these alternative journals? Why and how are they alternative and to what? The main answer is given in a long paragraph of the BOAI: it is our actual starting point, from which the history of these journals shall be analyzed. To ease the reading, we have divided it in three parts.
“Second, scholars need the means to launch a new generation of alternative journals committed to open access, and to help existing journals that elect to make the transition to open access.“
The two ways for journals to commit were already happening at the beginning of the century. On the one hand, very early electronic journals, often without publisher but what we now call a platform, didn’t go the subscription way and were established as free for readers. On the other, the 2001 PLOS letter/petition pushed publishers to change their ways and open their content, with lots of signees but few positive answers apart from BMC. So the BOAI reminds them that they could still “filp” to open access. But what does it mean exactly?
“Because journal articles should be disseminated as widely as possible, these new journals will no longer invoke copyright to restrict access to and use of the material they publish. Instead they will use copyright and other tools to ensure permanent open access to all the articles they publish. Because price is a barrier to access, these new journals will not charge subscription or access fees, and will turn to other methods for covering their expenses.”
The alternativeness doesn’t come from the way journals should be run (editorial boards, scope, peer review) but from their economic model. Journals are qualified as “alternative” because they shouldn’t anymore rely on the property of content and subscription as the main route to pay for journal expenses (and profit). More than that, they would have extra costs as they have to maintain open access through time. With the vanishing of current and future revenues, on what shall the new business model rest?
“There are many alternative sources of funds for this purpose, including the foundations and governments that fund research, the universities and laboratories that employ researchers, endowments set up by discipline or institution, friends of the cause of open access, profits from the sale of add-ons to the basic texts, funds freed up by the demise or cancellation of journals charging traditional subscription or access fees, or even contributions from the researchers themselves. There is no need to favor one of these solutions over the others for all disciplines or nations, and no need to stop looking for other, creative alternatives.“
This is probably the most important part of the whole BOAI declaration, besides the open acess definition. Three main points should be retained: firstly, the idea of a diversity of sources of income, in an optimistic vision of the means of financing a journal undoubtedly fuelled by the success of the open source software movement. Secondly, this diversity is reinforced by the final sentence which supports the absence of a “one best way” even when the exploration of possibilities would have fully taken place. Finally, thirdly, the idea of recourse to a payment by authors is tconceived as a last resort (“or even”). In other words, not only does the alternative economic model remained unclear and uncertain, but the paying author’s proposal was not considered a priority at all.
The stories of 11 pioneers
But with such vagueness, who then ventured to go on the alternative and how did they settle their journals once launched? On the George Soros site, funder of the BOAI meeting through the Open Society Institute, a very short list of 11 entities was then available, even if it was supposed to be only examples1.
So, a first way to fulfill the promise made by the title of this post is to investigate the trajectory of these 11 journals, or rather publication websites, so great is their diversity. We will treat them in groups, according to their destiny:
Still free of charge mathematicians & computer scientists journals: Algebraic & Geometric Topology and Geometry & Topology were respectively founded in 1997 and 2001, have always published open access articles and are still community-based journals, published by MSP, which puts a very strong anti-APC statement on its website. Document Mathematica is the first journal of the Elibm platform, founded in 1996, which acts as a repository for maths proceedings and journals, free of charge for readers and authors. JMLR was created in 2001 in an independance movement by 40 members of the editorial board of Machine Learning, then owned by Kluwer and is a always hard-to-believe from the outside $10 per article cost kind of journal – thanks to huge volunteer work, Latex, open source software, no fancy website and outsourced micropublishing for paper versions with no financial exchange.
Still owned by societies, but have switched to APC: The New Journal of physics founded in 1998, now published by IOP with an APC of 1630 €. It was a part of some “offset deals” (Austria, UK) and is still one of the journals of the SCOAP3 agreement. The Journal of Insect Science was supported by the University of Arizona, launched in 2001, it changed with the death of its editor-in-chief in 2014, owned by a society but published by Oxford with a 1176 € APC.
Bought by Springer platforms: Living Reviews in Relativity was founded in 1998 by a Max Planck institute, it published only reviews, which were “living” as authors could update them as new literature could be taken into account. It was sold to Springer in 2015, which kept the same formula with, remarkably, no APC . The trajectory of BioMedCentral is probably well-known to readers, let us just remind that it was founded in 2000, cosigned BOAI through Jan Velterop, its then director, was the first “big” publisher to bet on APC and was finally sold by its owner, Vitek Tracz, to Springer in 2008.
Popularizers of APC and inventors of the megajournal: PLOS didn’t really exist as a publishing place at the time of the BOAI. Its call/letter for Open Access the year before as almost only BMC responded positively. But they were already able to secure funds, cosigned BOAI through Michael Eisen and soon lauched PLOS Biology and then, in 2006, PLOS ONE which was the first megajournal, which climbed to more than 30,000 articles a year, invented new forms of peer review and supported article-level metrics againts journal-based metrics . It was also the launch of APC as a standard way to provide Open Access for large communities.
The Platform that used to promote open access among publishers: Highwire has never been a journal nor a platform-journal, but rather a hosting service which develops tools and software for publishers. Founded in 1995 and based at Standford University, it used to be the largest archive of free full-text science on Earth with more than 2,4 million articles. Bought by an equity fund in 2014 (a minority share is still owned by Stanford), this “free texts” webpage stopped its counting on the 25th March, 2015 and the webpage was not maintained after 2018.
Terminated by its learned society: Psycoloquy had been launched and supported by the American Psychological Association, with Stevan Harnad at its helm, who translated some of the features he developed in his previous journal, BBS, notably open peer commentary, into the electronic form. It stopped publishing new articles by 2002.
Other journals or platforms could have been indicated as examples in early 2002. One can notably think of Scielo which was already working very well in South America, Erudit was growing up in Quebec as well as Revues.org in France. But the BOAI was rather focused on STM and English-language journals, and the alternative journals of the BOAI are also located within a world already dominated by an oligopoly of big publishers that was to be changed or at least challenged. Despite these limitations, the 11 stories nevertheless show the diversity of actual trajectories, the adoption of economic models that had yet to be defined and implemented and the adoption of the alternative by some big publishers.
From Gold to Diamond: when the alternative remains alternative
Above and beyond these examples, what trends could be drawn from these last 18 years? We have to consider a wide range of moves from public policies, learned societies, universities & libraries, research funders and finally of course publishers in order to give a second answer to the titile of this post. Of course, the first evolution is the invention of a locution, soon after the BOAI : open access journal, which replaced the “alternative” ones.
Then, as with 4 of the 11 listed, we observed a massive rise of the APC model, from BMC and PLOS pioneers. The idea that authors would accept to pay to publish was not to be taken for granted, would it be in principle or in practice with questions about the accounting circuit, the actual source of funding (authors, labs, departments, universities…), the level of price, etc. And still in some disciplines, being forced to pay is putting a low-quality stamp on the output. The Wellcome Trust in the UK and the ERC programs in the European Union played a huge role in experimenting with the possibility of paying APC through grants, which made them a “normal cost”, especially in well-granted disciplines (biomedecine, physics…). The UK official public policy, after the Finch Report in 2012, also injected money to pay for APCs.
It not only fueled the growth of relatively new publishers – BMC, PLOS but also MDPI, Frontiers in, Hindawi – but pushed “traditional” big publishers to adopt APC and make their journals “hybrid”, with a “basic funding” by subscription and “extra funding” through APC. Springer began its “Open Choice Program” in 2007, which name deeply reflects the liberal-market vision of open access. These two evolutions led to very harsh critiques of the whole Gold OA project : on the one hand, it raised the question of the birth of predatory publishing through APC ; on the other hand, hybrids meant double dipping and the deepening of the serial crisis.
Hybrid journals were conceived as transition tools to open access, as the then director of SPARC Europe theorized them2 So these private and public policies of APC funding were conceived as a way to reach a tipping point after which the Open Access, now renamed full open access journal, would happen. How naive wrote Richard Poynder in a recent essay3! Some powerful actors came to the same conclusion, so they recently try to impose new radical changes in the funding of journals, most notably Max Planck Gesellschaft in 2015, then the now famous Coalition S, which aim is to accelerate the transition to open access by in fact killing the subscription model, having a CC-BY license to authors for content. Does this sound familiar?
So it seems to go full circle: almost twenty years later, trying to get rid of the traditional economic modela for journals and to do that, talking with big publishers in order to sign “transformative agreements”. Open access has gone mainstream, Elsevier even now present open access as a standard. If changes happened, it was more on the way journals were run, most notably open peer review4. But wait a minute, if the alternative has gone mainstream, where is the new alternative? In fact, the support and success of the APC modeal made the impression on a lot of commentors and actors that the Gold way was now the equivalent of an author-payor model. That led some activists to coin new names for “no APC journals”. Would it be Diamond or Platinium, it meant that it was also free for authors, and not only readers.
Scielo, Erudit, Open Edition were already mentioned, just as 5 of our 11 pioneers. But we could add Open Library of Humanities or Redalyc as “big platforms” for journals5. They are the majority, as no APC journals still represents more than 70% of entries in the DOAJ, their business models are diverse, from bricolage to strong institutional support, just like the BOAI predicted. So the alternative is still alternative, though it has vastly grown in the last 18 years. Getting to adulthood, we will see whether OA journals coexist into two genres, non-APC and APC, or whether one of them in not sustanaible in the long run. Unless, of course, the other open access road gets us into a post-journal world through preprint servers and open archives. To be continued…
this list didn’t evolve a lot in the next two years, Highwire and PLOS were removed, while two MDPI journals were added [↩]
