La Manna, M.

Albanian

UCL Discovery

Paths to change in economics publishing and something ELSSSManfredi La MannaReader in EconomicsUniversity of St Andrewspaper prepared forUniversity of London Scholarly Communication Advocacy EventUniversity of London10thApril 2002BeveridgeHall, Senate Housewww.elsss.org.uk2www.elsss.org.ukIntroduction1. Three examples of academic-driven alternative journals2. General lessons3. Practical suggestions4. A challenge3www.elsss.org.uk￿Online-only￿Direct competitor to extravagantly expensive Elsevier’s Economics Letters￿Free￿Apr-Dec 2001: published 56 articles (compared to 180 in Economics Letters over same period)￿Impressive 20-day submission/acceptance lagNew solutions to an old problem: experiences from economics4www.elsss.org.ukAdvantages and limitations of free journalsAdvantages￿Open access￿Speed ￿Lack of financial pressures ￿can engage in “war of attrition”(provided credibility is maintained)Limitations￿perceived as lower-quality than established rival￿not a substitute for high-priced rival￿irregular frequency ￿no citations statistics ￿zero impact￿no added value￿doubts about “staying power”5www.elsss.org.ukThe bepressexperiment￿Commercial venture￿“Authors and Reviewers account”: $1,000 submission fee (or commit to review three papers)￿Submissions are quality-ratedFrontiers in ... (top-ranked)Advances in ...  (high-ranked)Contributions in ... (middle-ranked)Topics in ... (low-ranked)6www.elsss.org.ukbepress-continued2 (0)Topics1 by Ed. Board4 (2)Contributions4 (3) by Ed. Board5 (4)Advances0FrontiersCommentsNumber of articles publishedType of JournalJournal of Theoretical Economics7www.elsss.org.ukbepress-continued3 (0)Topics4 (2)Contributions2 by Ed. Board2 by Editors10 (9)Advances0FrontiersCommentsNumber of articles publishedType of JournalJournal of Macroeconomics8www.elsss.org.ukELSSSHypothesis: create conditions for viable and credible alternatives to specific, named, high-priced journals and let academics decide.Over 1,000 economists worldwide have subscribed to the ELSSS initiative.Institutional and/or financial support from Royal Economic Society, U. of St Andrews, Scottish Enterprise Fife, CHUDE, CURL, SCURL, etc.9www.elsss.org.ukThe ELSSS recipe1.Refereeing:reward high-calibre referees for prompt return of comprehensive reports. Compensate referees also in novel ways.2. Editing:reward editors with stipends that attract and retain world-class economists. Streamline submission management, making the editor’s job easier and more rewarding.3. Value to authors: shorten the submission-to-acceptance lag; catalogue journals in the main citation databases. More innovative online format;  natural platform for scientific debate.4. Value to readers: unique and novel format(s) adapted to a range of readers . Range of functionalities appropriate to the target readership. 10www.elsss.org.ukThe ELSSS recipe -contd5. Value to libraries: without the active support of U&R Libraries ELSSS project will fail. But why should budget-constrained libraries wish to subscribe to a new portfolio of journals?First, by notsubscribing to ELSSS journals libraries would be depriving staff and students of access to first-rate research and debate.Secondly, subscription to ELSSS journals carries long-term benefits over and above access to quality research; the greatest benefit is in terms of the effects on ELSSS’ competitors. 11www.elsss.org.ukThree experiencesFlexibilityEffect on serials crisisBusiness modelElectronic sophisticationLibrarians’ supportAcademic grassrootsupportCommercial supportInstitutional supportHighMediumLowPotentially strongNegligibleNegligibleAggressiveOriginalBasicHighModerateLowGrowingLocalLocalStrongMediumMediumNoneHighNoneHighHighModerateELSSSbepressEcon. Bullet12www.elsss.org.ukWhat to do –AcademicsFor direct, head-to-head alternatives to be successful it is crucial:1. to mobilise the relevant community of consumers and producers of journals;2. to obtain the backing of associations and learned societies;3. to create wider awareness by launching a media campaign;4. to obtain institutional support from the academic home of theproject;5. to set out clear and credible criteria committing the new publication(s) to high-quality research output6. to match and indeed better the features offered by for-profit journals;7. to forge and sustain links with both individual librarians and libraries associations …13www.elsss.org.ukWhat to do –LibrariansMomentous change for U&R librarians: from administrators to reformers of the publication mechanism. Some random suggestions:￿Publicise widely cancellations of high-priced journals, both to strengthen the resolve of fellow librarians and to send a signal(a) to authors, referees, and editors that “their” over-priced journal is losing readership and impact and (b) to the editors, publishers,and would-be authors in more academic-friendly publications that a new potential readership is opening up;￿Librarians ought to use their superior knowledge of academic publishing to get academics acquainted with the problems and thepossible solutionsin academic journal publishing. ￿Librarians and academics ought to lobby jointlytheir funding bodies so that special funds can be set up to kick-start credible and direct alternatives to high-priced journals.14www.elsss.org.ukA challengeTo an outsider, librarians and academics have been far too timid in their dealings with funding bodies. A more robust approach is required.Example: Pointing out the inconsistent approach to monopolistic behaviour taken by the UK Competition Commission in two recent Reports, one on the Reed Elsevier-Harcourt merger, the other on Banking for Small Businesses (BSB). Some questions for the Secretary of State of Trade and Industry.Why did the CC consider as “Excessive Profit “ the average return of 36%earned over the period  1998-2000 by the big four clearing banks on BSB activities but not Reed Elsevier’saverage operating margin for Scientific publishing of over 37%(approx. £244m p.a.) over the 1997-2001 period?15www.elsss.org.ukA challengeWhy did the CC regard the dominant market share of the big four and the lack of entry as extremely worrying, but in the case of scientific publishing, it allowed RE to consolidate its monopoly position by clearing its takeover of Harcourt, thereby increasing the concentration in the industry?Why did the CC observe that banks do not compete on price and that charges  bear little relation to cost, while failing torecognise that some of RE’s scientific publications are up to 10 timesmore expensive than equivalent publications by smaller publishers/societies and that its pricing policies have norelation whatsoever to costs?16www.elsss.org.ukA challengeWhy did the CC criticise the big four’s failure to publicise charges while RE is allowed to practise the most extreme form of price discrimination, in so far as it can negotiate in secret with individual Libraries, effectively extracting maximum profits from the public purse?Why did the CC recommend the unbundling of personal and business loans, whereas RE is currently allowed to engage in the most deleterious and anti-competitive forms of bundling, reaching the absurdity of forcing a leading single-faculty University (which specialises in the social sciences) to subscribe to hundreds of titles in Medicine, Physics, Astronomy, etc.?17www.elsss.org.ukA challengeWhy did the CC fail to quantify the cost to the competitiveness and the inventiveness of the UK due to the restraint to the flow of scientific knowledge imposed by the pricing policies of monopolistic scientific publishers while it measured the overcharge by the big four banks to the 3.5m small businesses in the UK ( £725m p.a.)?Will the Office of Fair Trading, which is currently undertaking an investigation  on The Market for Scientific Journals, ban the type of “bundling” practised by RE, which effectively prevents customers to substitute cheaper non-RE journals for expensive RE ones, in so far as the cost of the bundle is unaffected by individual cancellations, therefore forcing a potential entrant to compete against a zero-priced rival.18www.elsss.org.ukA modest proposalWhereas a comprehensive solution to the current deep and deepening crisis in scientific communication can only be worked out by a dynamic Task Force (on the line of the various initiatives  advocated by the Consortium of University Research Libraries), a good start could be provided by a modest windfall taxon the monopoly profit of the more rapacious scientific publishers. A 30% tax on the Scientific Publishing profits of one such company alone (Reed Elsevier) would reduce its rate of return to a more than healthy 25.9% and would yield over £70m p.a., which, if earmarked for initiatives such as ELSSS or the Public Library of Science, could introduce credible and viable competition in this vital but neglected market.19www.elsss.org.ukA final thoughtWarning: ELSSS provides a viable solution to the serials crisis in economics, but may notbe applicable other disciplines. Conversely, solutions that work in disciplines such as theoretical physics or medicine may not be exportable to other scientific fields.  One final word on open access: a common misconception about ELSSS (which funds the cost of high-qualitypeer review by means of subscription charges) is that it is incompatible with free access, as advocated by self-archiversand author-charges models.This charge does not apply to ELSSS, because its business model is based on sharingthe real and substantialcost of peer review across as many institutions as possible.

Paths to change in economics publishing and something ELSS

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