University of California, Santa Barbara From the SelectedWorks of Ted C Bergstrom October 2014 COST EFFECTIVENESS OF OPEN ACCESS PUBLICATIONS Contact Start Your Own Notify Me Author SelectedWorks of New Work Available at: http://works.bepress.com/ted_bergstrom/122 COST EFFECTIVENESS OF OPEN ACCESS PUBLICATIONS JEVIN D. WEST, THEODORE BERGSTROM and CARL T. BERGSTROM∗ Open access publishing has been proposed as one possible solution to the serials crisis—the rapidly growing subscription prices in scholarly journal publishing. How- ever, open access publishing can present economic pitfalls as well, such as excessive article processing charges. We discuss the decision that an author faces when choos- ing to submit to an open access journal. We develop an interactive tool to help authors compare among alternative open access venues and thereby get the most for their article processing charges. (JEL I2, C1, A1) I. INTRODUCTION author-pay model is not without its own pricing perils. Some commercial publishers levy article Institutional subscription prices of academic processing charges as high as $3,000 for pub- journals continue to increase more rapidly than lishing a single article. A number of “preda- library budgets (Kyrillidou 2012). Journals tory” open access publishers operate like van- produced by for-profit publishers typically ity presses, charging authors substantial fees in cost libraries about three times as much as exchange for the thinnest veneer of editorial over- comparable journals produced by nonprofit pub- sight (Beall 2012; 2014). lishers (Bergstrom and Bergstrom 2004a, 2006; On the positive side, the structure of the Bergstrom and McAfee 2013). As a result, library market for open access publications offers the budgets are badly strained while for-profit pub- potential for a more competitive marketplace lishers are able to extract large profits from the than that for subscription-based publication university community. Open access publishing (Bergstrom and Bergstrom 2004b). The reason is has been widely heralded as a potential solution straightforward: authors, when deciding where to to this so-called “serials crisis” (Willinsky 2009; publish, can substitute one journal for another in Young 2009; Suber 2014). order to get the best deal. This is not the case for But open access publishing is no panacea. libraries deciding what journals to subscribe to. Firstly, while author-pay open access contin- Because open access publications are substitutes, ues to grow (Björk et al. 2010; Laakso et al. authors can afford to comparison shop, seeking 2011), it is unclear that open access publish- out only the very best deals and patronizing these ing will quickly—or ever—come to dominate exclusively. Should authors do so, publishers the market for scholarly publishing (McCabe would be forced to compete aggressively on and Snyder 2010; Shieber 2009). Second, the price, much as they have already started to com- pete on other factors such as time-to-publication. ∗The authors are the founders of the Eigenfactor Project. The result would be better deals for the academic The open access cost effectiveness tools described here are community. Our aim of this article is to describe freely available at http://www.eigenfactor.org/openaccess/. and deploy an online tool that makes it easy This work was supported in part by National Science Foun- dation Grant SBE-0915005 to C.T.B. for scholarly authors to engage in this kind of West: Assistant Professor, Information School, University of comparison shopping. Washington, Seattle, WA 98195. Phone (206) 543-2646, Fax (206) 616-3152, E-mail [email protected] Bergstrom, T.: Professor, Department of Economics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106. Phone (805) 893-3744, Fax (805) 893-8830, E-mail [email protected] ABBREVIATIONS Bergstrom, C. T.: Professor, Department of Biology, Univer- sity of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195. Phone (206) 685- DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals 3487, Fax (206) 543-3041, E-mail [email protected] JCR: Thomson-Reuters Journal Citation Reports 1 Economic Inquiry doi:10.1111/ecin.12117 (ISSN 0095-2583) © 2014 Western Economic Association International 2 ECONOMIC INQUIRY II. THE AUTHOR’S PERSPECTIVE FIGURE 1 Comparing Journals Academic journals require one or more rev- enue streams to cover their costs. There are three basic sources of revenue to which a pub- Article Influence lisher can turn: (1) authors, (2) readers, and (3) E sponsors. Publishers regularly employ each of B these sources, sometimes in combination. For A example, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America C requires authors to pay page charges, and also D charges subscription fees to university libraries. The PLoS family of journals imposes article pro- article processing charges cessing charges, and has received grant fund- ing from agencies including the Sloan foundation Notes: With all else equal, authors will prefer journals and the MacArthur foundation. Authors may be with higher Article Influence scores to lower, and they will charged upon publication of their work, upon arti- prefer journals with lower article processing charges to higher. Thus an author will prefer journal A to the more expensive and cle submission, or some combination of these. less prestigious journal D and likewise to any journal in the red Here we examine authors’ motivations for paying quadrant. Similarly, the author would prefer the less expensive such fees. and more prestigious journal E and likewise any journal in the green quadrant to journal A. How journal A compares with The competitive peer review system used by journals B and C depend on the author’s willingness to pay the majority of scholarly periodicals serves to extra article processing charges in exchange for extra prestige. certify the novelty, interest, and quality of aca- demic publications. Publication in a leading jour- readership translate into the number of schol- nal confers substantial prestige upon a scholarly arly citations that a article receives. With all of author, and authors are strongly motivated by this the usual caveats (Seglen 1997), we estimate incentive (Attema, Brouwer, and Van Exel 2014). this quantity using journal-level citation data. We A record of publication in the top tiers of the use the Article Influence® score1 —a measure of journal hierarchy has a critical impact on hir- per-article citations weighted by influence (West, ing, promotion, tenure, merit, salary, and funding Bergstrom, and Bergstrom 2010)—to estimate decisions. Moreover, to have a significant influ- the prestige and readership obtained from pub- ence on scholarly thought, one needs to be read lishing in a given venue.2 widely by one’s peers. Journals vary considerably Figure 1 compares the deals offered by five in readership; researchers often conscientiously different hypothetical journals. All else equal, follow the publications in top journals, while authors will prefer to publish in journals with turning to lower-tier journals only in pursuit of higher Article Influence scores, and with lower specific references. Of course prestige and read- article processing charges. ership are not independent of one another. Jour- To facilitate comparisons of this sort, we have nals become prestigious in part because they are deployed an interactive visualization that shows highly read, and prestigious journals are highly read in part because their prestige allows them to 1. A journal’s Article Influence score is a measure of attract the top papers in a field. journal prestige analogous to the Impact Factor. A jour- nal’s Article Influence is calculated as a journal’s Eigenfac- When an author (or more commonly, her tor score, divided by the number of papers published. The funders or home institution [Dallmeier-Tiessen journal’s Eigenfactor score, described in detail by West et al. et al. 2011]) pays open access article process- (2010), is a type of eigenvector centrality measure for the cita- ing charges, she is not only paying for the broad tion network in which journals represent nodes and citations represent directed links. accessibility to readers that results from open 2. Journals provide a different type of value to access publishing. She is also paying for the authors than they do to institutional subscribers. In prestige and the readership that she will gain exchange for article processing charges, an author buys the right to publish a single article in a journal, by publishing in that particular journal. When whereas in exchange for subscription fees, a librarian choosing among alternative venues, a sensible buys the right to carry all articles published in the jour- author would like to get as much as possible nal. Thus we use a per-article measure (Article Influence for her money. In order to quantify what an score) to quantify value to an author, whereas elsewhere (http://www.eigenfactor.org/costeffectiveness.php) we have author receives in exchange for her article pro- used a per volume measure (Eigenfactor score) to quantify cessing charges, we note that both prestige and value to a subscriber. WEST, BERGSTROM & BERGSTROM: COST EFFECTIVENESS 3 FIGURE 2 be made open access for a fee, often in the range A Screenshot of the Interactive Visualization, of $ (Pinfield 2010). It is more difficult to quantify which Can Be Found at the value of making one’s article open access in http://www.eigenfactor.org/openaccess/ a hybrid journal. On one hand, the prestige con- ferred by the journal is approximately the same whether one chooses to make one’s article open, or not. On the other, open access articles in hybrid journals will probably attract more readers and possibly additional citations (see Wagner 2010 for an overview of the controversy around open access citation advantage). We should note that publishing in an open access journal is not the only way to make an article freely available. Most academic journals allow immediate posting of a final refereed copy of an author’s article where search engines can find them on the author’s own website or in a freely available institutional archive.