Article processing charges reduced to $99 on SAGE Open humanities and social sciences “mega journal”

Back in May of last year I posted about SAGE Publication’s open access multidisciplinary humanities and social sciences “mega journal” called SAGE Open (eISSN 2158-2440). The journal, launched in May 2011, is operated using a producer-side revenue model, where authors (or their sponsors) are charged an article processing fee (APC) once a submitted manuscript has been accepted for publication. The format for SAGE Open is similar to PLOS ONE, the multidisciplinary open access science “mega journal” published by the non-profit open access publisher Public Library of Science (PLOS).

I just learned (thanks to Richard Poynder for the tip) that SAGE has reduced the APC levied for published articles in SAGE Open to $99. (Here is a link to the SAGE press release.) This charge is reduced dramatically from the standard fee of $695, and down significantly from the “introductory rate” of $395 that was previously in force. I confirmed the price change on the Manuscript Submission page of the journal site.

According to the press release, this decision follows from the results of a survey conducted by SAGE indicating that

more than 70% of accepted authors had personally paid the article processing charge (APC) to enable their research to be published in SAGE Open. Author declarations further show that less than 15% of all articles published across SAGE’s Humanities and Social Sciences portfolio in 2012 had allocated funding.

In a post on the SAGE Connection blog, Bob Howard, Vice President, US Journals at SAGE is asked about the impact this announcement will have on the type of research published in SAGE Open.

SAGE is committed to the publication of high quality, peer reviewed research, and this will not be compromised by a change in price. All SAGE Open articles will receive the same high quality peer review, copy editing, typesetting and electronic delivery that have been present since the journal launched in 2011, maintaining the quality you would expect of SAGE as a leading independent publisher for the social sciences.

Howard recognizes that demand for open access is increasing, and SAGE apparently views it as an astute investment move to be a player in this publishing space. His expectation, however, is still heavily weighted on subscription journals.

We view this change as an investment in the future of OA publishing in the social sciences, and we will continue to adapt to our evolving landscape in order to better support HSS scholars. …

While we expect much of social science research to continue to be published in traditional subscription journals, and that remains SAGE’s core business, open access publishing and the demand for it is increasing.

According to the news release, “SAGE Open has received more than 1400 manuscripts, and more than 160 articles published” since it was launched in 2011. That works out to roughly an 11% acceptance rate, and roughly $64,000 in revenue since launch (assuming all accepted articles were charged the $395 introductory rate). Neither the press release nor the blog post gave any indication if SAGE Open is or was designed to be financially self-supporting. It is at least provocative to consider the implications of Howard’s “no compromise” claim in the face of an 86% per article decrease in revenue (assuming the standard rate of $695). How much does it really cost SAGE to publish an open access journal article on its platform? A volume proposition might make it sustainable. Clearly, the aggressive pricing is designed to make this venue more attractive to scholars.

It appears the space for open access journal publishing for humanities and social science scholars is (at last!) starting to heat up, especially in view of Dr. Martin Paul Eve’s recent proposal that interested parties get together to launch a non-profit PLOS-style mega journal for the humanities and social sciences.

First library published open access issue of New Theology Review launched today!

Back in June I interviewed Melody McMahon, director of the Paul Bechtold Library at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, Illinois following her announcement that the library was assuming publishing responsibility for the institution’s journal, New Theology Review. In addition to becoming the publisher, McMahon would be assuming the role as the journal’s co-editor.

Accompanying the announcement was the news that this long-running print and subscription-based journal (published since 1988) would be converted to online only and going open access.

When I spoke with Ms. McMahon in June she indicated that the first issue of the newly reconstituted New Theology Review (ISSN: 0896-4297) would be released in September. Well, that day has arrived! The journal is now live on its newly designed website newtheologyreview.com. There are also plans in the works to digitize back issues and upload them to the journal’s issue archive.

I encourage you to check out the site, and please drop Melody and the other members of the Editorial Board a note of congratulations to show your support for this wonderful effort.

A few Religious Studies articles showing up in SAGE Open open access “mega journal”; reviewers being solicited

The other day I received an email from a librarian colleague who is also a scholar in New Testament. He considers himself an “under-employed Ph.D.,” by which I gather means having the academic credentials but not a full teaching position. I don’t know the circumstances of his situation, but I do know he is not alone. Professorships in Biblical Studies are notoriously difficult to come by.

His email was interesting on a number of levels. He was asking, as someone who is trying to establish himself “as a competent scholar,” why he should consider open access instead of trying to get his articles accepted in “well-known and prestigious journal[s].” He was also curious about copyright issues with open access.

These are important questions that I want to follow-up with in a subsequent post. In this post, however, I want to write about the specific situation that prompted his questions. A couple of weeks ago he received an unsolicited invitation from SAGE Publications to be a reviewer for their new open access journal, SAGE Open. He had never heard of SAGE Open. He wanted to know what this was all about.

What is SAGE Open?

The model for SAGE Open appears to be PLoS ONE, a multidisciplinary open access science “mega journal” (particularly for the life-sciences and medicine) published by Public Library of Science, the now renowned non-profit open access science journal publisher.

SAGE has had a program in place for some time which enables authors to pay a fee to make their articles open access, particularly to comply with mandated archiving policies by funding agencies. But this is SAGE’s first foray into open access journal publishing. SAGE Open (started in 2011) is seeking to do and be for the humanities and social/behavioral sciences what PLoS ONE is and does for the sciences.

The “mega journal” approach differs from “traditional” discipline-specific journals (even in electronic format) in a number of significant ways. First, as already noted, it is intentionally and broadly multidisciplinary (browse SAGE Open’s subject coverage here, which to my initial surprise includes Religion and Religious Studies). SAGE, again following PLoS, is promoting this as a strength of the journal: “[B]y not restricting papers to a narrow discipline, SAGE Open facilitates the discovery of the connections between papers, whether within or between disciplines” (from the SAGE Open “About the journal” page).

Second, unlike what most scholars are used to, the SAGE Open mega journal is not organized as a limited collection of articles (typically with other editorial or review content) gathered into issues and then released at some specified (periodic) time interval (quarterly, bi-annually, etc). In SAGE Open, research articles are published continuously as they are submitted, peer-reviewed, and accepted for publication. The journal leverages the inherent strengths of online dissemination on their web platform (the journal is online only), which is not hampered by the practical limitations of space or distribution imposed by the print journal archetype. SAGE Open has an ISSN (2158-2440), but the published article is really the major currency of the title. Because articles are published continuously, this speeds up the overall publication process. The timeframe from submission to acceptance to publication can now be measured in weeks instead of months (or even years).

Finally, SAGE differs from PLoS in being a for-profit commercial publisher, but is similar to PLoS (and Springer, another major for-profit open access publisher) in covering the costs of making SAGE Open open access by charging article processing fees in lieu of subscription or pay-for-view fees to would-be readers. PLoS ONE currently charges a $1,350 fee for each article accepted for publication. SAGE Open charges $695 per article, but currently has a “special introductory rate of $395.” The article fee pays for peer-review, copyediting and typesetting, archiving, “global distribution” on SAGE’s online journal platform, and branding/marketing by “a world-leading social science publisher.” Authors retain their copyrights under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC-BY 3.0).

A few Religious Studies articles showing up in SAGE Open

I had visited the SAGE Open site for a cursory glance a while back. But after my colleague’s inquiry I was prompted to take a closer look. I know that SAGE publishes a number of journals in Theology and Biblical Studies. But why would a New Testament Biblical Studies scholar be invited to review for a broad multidisciplinary humanities and social science journal? When I browsed the subjects I was surprised to discover an entry for Religious Studies, and a link to three articles. Not a lot. But it’s a start.

Editorial structure, peer-review and journal development

I contacted the Biblical Studies and Theology Publisher at SAGE to inquire about the relationship between SAGE’s traditional journal offerings and Religious Studies coverage in SAGE Open. She is not currently directly involved in this open access effort. However, she was kind enough to explain how SAGE Open intends to function editorially to include subject coverage in Religion.

The SAGE Open managing editor (working with a team out of SAGE’s office in the United States) recruits an external academic editor for every article submitted, in consultation with subject editors within SAGE. The article editor will be a reputable academic, working in a field related to the subject of the article. The article editor is then responsible for the peer review process, and will recruit two academic reviewers for each article. This ensures that the decision-making process for articles is independent of SAGE and conducted by academic experts. There is an academic board in place, whose capacity is advisory. Their names are listed here. The pool of article editors and peer reviewers is much wider, representing a diversity of subject areas. That pool is growing all the time, in parallel with submissions. The aim is to provide a forum for sound research, and naturally we hope that the individual subject categories within SAGE Open will grow and become a place that people interested in specific disciplines will recognize for quality.

The peer review process is designed to evaluate the scientific and research methods of each article for validity; the article editor accepts articles solely on the basis of the research and not on the basis of thematic significance. In other words, if the scholarship behind the research is sound, the article is accepted. This approach allows readers greater access and gives them the power to determine the significance of each article through SAGE Open’s interactive comments feature and article-level usage metrics.

I asked her if SAGE has plans to develop any dedicated open access journals in Biblical Studies, Theology or Religion. Her response was understandably vague and noncommittal.

In terms of future direction, I’m not in a position to define SAGE’s strategy here, other than to say that we see SAGE Open as an important part of our portfolio, alongside our other journals, books and digital products. SAGE monitors market developments closely and, like any successful business, we aim to move with the times and adapt our approaches accordingly. We remain open to exploring different models and channels of publication, where such developments are strategically sustainable and contribute to the quality and depth of our portfolio. If you have thoughts on possible future ventures for SAGE then I would love to hear about them!

Her reply suggests that SAGE Open is serving as SAGE’s demonstration that it is on-board with open access. Her response also answered my question about my colleague’s invitation. Subject editors and reviewers, once secured, are paired with authors as their articles are submitted. So, if my colleague accepts the invitation, he will be placed in a large multidisciplinary pool of academic experts on-call to review articles matching their subject expertise. Again, different from traditional discipline-based journals that intentionally seek articles from within a relatively narrow scope, with SAGE Open, the articles that are submitted and are subsequently accepted for publication drive subject area development from within the journal’s broad scope.

Because of this, there is really no reason why a scholar in New Testament couldn’t submit an article for inclusion in SAGE Open. When this happens, a subject editor would be chosen to shepherd this article through the submission process. My colleague might be called upon to review this article based on his subject expertise. Then, if the article is accepted for publication, the subject coverage within SAGE Open simply expands (or the granularity is refined) to accommodate. Fascinating.

This model has been very successful for PLoS in the life sciences (where I understand hundreds of articles are submitted each week). I can see SAGE making a go of this for the social/behavioral sciences. It is harder to say how this model will function in the humanities, where discipline focused publishing is a hallmark of scholarship. The journal is still very young. To get things going, SAGE is selling authors its publishing expertise, a seat on its well-developed and interactive online platform, and its brand reputation. Readers discover articles through search engines and indexes, or they can subscribe to email alerts or RSS feeds from SAGE Open’s site.

Why did you decide to publish your article in SAGE Open?: A response from one author

I was curious how the authors of the three Religious Studies articles currently available in SAGE Open first learned about the journal, and why they decided to submit their article to SAGE Open. So I emailed them. I received one response.

This author heard about the journal through a bulk email sent from a subject editor at SAGE. This author provided an extensive explanation for deciding to publish in SAGE Open, but it came down to the peer-review and article selection process.

When I received the invitation to submit to SAGE Open I initially ignored it; I get such automatic invitations from pay (or “page charge”) journals all the time. However, when I got a repeat email on March 12, 2011, I decided to look closer into their mission, and I read the following sentence, “As such, it evaluates the scientific and research methods of each article for validity and accepts articles solely on the basis of the research.” In plain words, the promise was if the research was sound it would be accepted, regardless of whether it fit the mold of [conventional or preconceived] solution strategies. Ergo, I submitted the manuscript.

Speaking of “pay (or ‘page charge’) journals,” I asked: “Did you pay the article-processing fee yourself, or did you have a sponsor (supporting agency, academic department, etc.)? Did you think the fee was a fair amount? Do you think the article-processing fee approach is a sustainable business model for open access?” The author responded:

I paid it myself. There was an introductory, discounted price of $195 fee (the regular price was $695). I believe the former is reasonable to be paid by the author. The latter would probably require assistance from a sponsor.

The author felt, however, that page charges “seem to be antithetical to the purpose of open access.”

I then asked if the author would share article-level metrics. “Is your article being discovered and read?”

According to Publish or Perish (which parses Google Scholar), it has not yet been cited. A Google search shows it has been discussed on one listserv and has been mentioned on two blogs. There was one inaccurate, off-the-wall comment on SAGE Open’s site, which allows readers to post comments after the journal. It is probably just too soon to tell if the article is being discovered and read.

Finally, despite reservations about article processing fees, the author was positive about recommending SAGE Open to other scholars, including scholars in Religious Studies disciplines.

I don’t know whether this author’s recommendation will inspire the confidence of my librarian/New Testament scholar colleague to review articles or submit his own for publication in SAGE Open. But at least we now both have a better understanding of what the “mega journal” concept is all about.

The library as open access publisher: Meet Igitur publishing

I first encountered Igitur publishing while profiling the new religious studies open access journal Religion and Gender back in December. Igitur publishing is a service of the Library at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. I’ve been meaning to follow-up with Igitur, not only because I wanted to learn more about open access from the publisher side, but also because the idea of “library as publisher” has been really gaining traction in recent years (see, for example, this report just released in mid-March). I am very pleased for this opportunity to sit down (via email) with publishing consultant, Dr. Inge Werner.

Omega Alpha (OA): Dr. Werner, thank you so much for your willingness to speak with me a bit about Igitur publishing. We have been trying to arrange this conversation for a couple of months. I know you have been very busy preparing a launch of three new open access journals (more on this below). Can you tell me what “Igitur” means? It’s Latin, right? How is the name significant to your publishing efforts?

Werner: ”Igitur” means ‘thus,’ or ‘therefore’ in Latin. The word stems from a Medieval student song called “Gaudeamus Igitur.” [OA: I found a reference to it in Wikipedia, complete with lyrics.] The name was chosen long before I came to work in the University Library, so I’m not quite sure what the reference implies. I like to think of it in terms of the self-evidence with which the Library aims to facilitate the university faculties and their communities of academics. At this point, “Igitur” has become synonymous with the Open Access activities of Utrecht University Library.

OA: How long have you been at it?

Werner: Do you mean me personally, or the Library as publisher?

OA: Both.

Werner: I started working in the Library after receiving a PhD in Renaissance Studies in 2009. I had been wanting to work in publishing for a long time. I was lucky to be able to start as journal coordinator for the Library’s open access journals. In the meantime my position has evolved to being team leader and publishing consultant in the team that works on the open access e-journals.

The Library has been at it since 1997, when the first Utrecht ejournal was started, the Electronic Journal of Comparative Law (EJCL).

OA: 1997 was still in the relative early days of the public Internet. The Open Access movement, as such, hadn’t even formally begun. I found this excerpt by the Editor, Sjef van Erp, from the very first issue of EJCL, which nicely captures many of the benefits of open access as we would enumerate them today:

One of the advantages – perhaps the main advantage – is that [electronic publishing] uses a new medium (the Internet) for the dissemination of ideas, which makes it possible to reach a readership to a degree which could hardly be imagined only ten years ago. Anyone connected to the Internet can read what is published there. Another advantage is that publication can be done at low cost by e.g. university computer services. It thus leads to a new type of ‘university presses’, and takes the publication of academic writings back to the place where the ideas emanate from. What academic authors most of all want is to be read by their peers, students and others interested in the results of their intellectual endeavours. Being read is, at the end of the day, the ‘profit’ they make and desire. (emphasis added)

Werner:  What I like about the concept of the University, or University Library as publisher is the fact that scholars or societies retain the intellectual ownership of their endeavours and their journal. A traditional publisher would want a journal to fit into a portfolio, while scholars often have a very strong and keen eye for a particular niche in their field, a topic that they would want to see addressed in a journal. This, for instance, is how Religion and Gender started. Dr. Adriaan van Klinken and Prof. Anne-Marie Korte came to talk with us and chose to publish with a library partly because it would give them the opportunity to form the journal according to their own needs.

OA: How are Igitur’s publishing efforts funded?

Werner: Initially, our publishing operation was funded entirely from budgets for innovation from within the Library. At this point, editorial boards and/or their societies pay for starting up and pay yearly amounts for support (and for extra services such as typesetting and print). However, a large part of what we do is still funded from within the Library for ideological reasons—to support OA publishing and stimulate transitions to OA.

OA: So it’s part institutional subsidy and part library budget. It speaks highly of your library’s commitment to open access that you would fund some of the publishing costs from your own budget.

I would be interested to know more about how the Utrecht University Library came upon the idea of promoting open access to the degree that you became a publisher. What was the catalyst? Have European academic libraries experienced the same “journals crisis” that U.S. libraries have regarding increasingly expensive subscriptions?

Werner: Most research and university libraries have been involved in OA since day one. Here in Europe as well as in the U.S. the journal crisis has led to a search for new ways to make scientific output available online.

Utrecht University Library has been developing open access services since 2000 in an innovative unit called Igitur, Publishing & Archiving Services. Two well-functioning open access services have now emerged from this unit. The first is the institutional repository for Utrecht academics called Igitur Archive (the ‘green road’ in OA-speak), and the second the journal publishing service (‘gold road’) called Igitur publishing, the service I am working for.

OA: I believe that if more scholars in religion and theology are going to contribute to and even start new open access journals, they will need encouragement and support from the libraries at their institutions. What advice would you give to libraries that might want to get involved in open access?

Werner: The task of a university library is to support scientific communication, to distribute scientific information, to stimulate knowledge exchange by providing access and, finally, to support archiving and permanent preservation and findability of academic output. This is precisely what we do when we help scholars publish their research. The library’s expertise in online distribution of knowledge (findability and visability) is only one example. Through our archive and persistent identifiers for every published article we make sure the journal content is preserved in a sustainable way.

Speaking from the perspective of (journal) publishing as a relatively new task for libraries, I can only account for the fact that libraries are traditionally strong in services that are very useful in publishing. Typical publisher’s services such as editing and typesetting can easily be outsourced, and as regards peer review, many editorial board are already used to organizing peer review themselves. The actual reviewing is always done by scholars themselves, as a free gift to the academic community and to the publisher who in the traditional model makes good money out of their work.

OA: Can you tell me a little more about the services Igitur provides to scholars who might want to start an OA journal?

Werner: My team is a small team dedicated to the publication of these journals. We support scientific editorial boards of peer reviewed journals who want to publish their journal in Open Access. We offer software to set up and run a journal (Open Journal Systems) and help people to get started and going. My publishing team consists of four people: a marketing consultant, a journal coordinator, a publishing assistant and myself—publishing consultant. We are supported by some highly qualified developers and the Library’s ICT [Information Technology] maintenance section. Also, our subject librarians are involved in working on the findability and visibility of the journals. Due to their very specific skills in online information management, they are able to optimize the way in which journals are indexed and work on search engine optimalization.

Thus (igitur, if you will), over 20 journals have taken the step to Open Access under the auspices of the Library. Some entirely new, such as Religion and Gender, some subscription-based, paper journals who start publishing an Open Access version on the side, or convert to e-only.

In the last months, for instance, we have been working for three old and renowned Dutch society journals in Humanities who are transitioning to Open Access. All three of them have received funding from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Recently, NWO has supported the start or transition of several journals in Humanities through an Incentive Fund Open Access.

On Friday, March 30, all three of them have published their first issue in Open Access. You can find their websites here:

• De Zeventiende Eeuw. Cultuur in de Nederlanden in interdisciplinair perspectief
• BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review
• Studium

OA: It is very exciting to see traditional subscription-based journals convert to open access. This appears to include the digitization of back issues on at least two of the journals. Is the plan to include a full-run archive for each of these titles?

Werner:  Yes, together with the societies publishing these three, we are working on the digitization and importing of their archives. The back-issues for BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review have already been imported in the journal’s Archive. Issues have been digitized from 1970 onwards and have been made freely available in full-text via the website at the moment of launch. Studium has several predecessors, uploading these three will be completed in the course of this year. Back-issues for De Zeventiende Eeuw are already online via the DBNL (the Digital Library of Dutch Literature) and will be transferred to the journal website in the course of 2012.

OA: Have you now developed a process that has proven to be effective for open access journal publishing? Would it be fairly easy for other institutions to replicate what you have done? Indeed, have you assisted other institutional/library publisher start-ups?

Werner: Every now and then we talk to other libraries, both in Holland and from abroad who have plans of starting a journal publishing service. In the Netherlands, for instance, the Library of the Free University in Amsterdam has launched several journals last year, and the Technical University of Delft is working on some this year.

OA: Do you have any final thoughts, or can you touch on pertinent issues I failed to mention?

Werner: At this point, when traditional publishers start to convert to open access models and hybrid models, you have Open Access and Open Access. The original OA is about stimulating worldwide knowledge exchange through free availability online. Copyright with the author and licenses (e.g., Creative Commons) that stimulate reuse are also an important part of that. OA, therefore, is not only about accessibiblity but also about licensing. Also, I have concerns about for-profit open access publishing. The financial side of OA is complicated as we are now in a process of transition. Commercial publishing is inevitable, also in an OA world. However, we do need to find a way to keep article processing charges (APCs) within normal proportions. The current situation, where some traditional publishers increase their profits every year while universities are coping with shrinking budgets and cutbacks is untenable.

OA: Before I let you go, can you speak briefly about the e-book side of Igitur publishing? I just downloaded Pieta van Beek’s The first female university student: Anna Maria van Schurman (1636). I’m finding it a very interesting read!

Werner: Pieta van Beek’s book is actually the last e-book we published in the Library. After that, we stopped publishing e-books and decided to focus on journal publishing. We do, however, notice that there remains a big demand in the Faculties for publishing books and booklets online, like conference proceedings, or Utrecht-based output, such as a collection of interviews with Utrecht professors. Hence, we are looking into possibilities of supporting online publishing via a printing on demand button in the Igitur Archive.

OA: Dr. Werner, thank you so much for your time. I will continue to watch developments at Igitur publishing with great interest.

Springer interested in developing open access journals in Religious Studies

In early February I received an email from the Senior Publishing Editor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Springer Science+Business Media. In the email, Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah indicated that Springer had recently decided to try to develop open access journals in Religious Studies and Philosophy. I replied to introduce myself and request more information.

Springer is a large international commercial publisher based in The Netherlands. It is perhaps known more for publishing in the sciences and medicine than in the humanities, much less religious studies. I was curious about both Springer’s entry into publishing in this discipline generally, and about the open access initiative in particular. Although it continues to publish a majority of its journals using a traditional subscription-based model, Springer has distinguished itself as a commercial publisher willing to be innovative in exploring alternatives to the traditional business model, including open access.

I spent some time browsing on Springer’s website and found 7 journal titles listed under “Religious Studies.” There are also 28 book titles currently listed, all published since 2009, with several additional titles forthcoming. Currently, there are no religious studies titles on the SpringerOpen open access journal platform.

This last observation suggested that the open access initiative must be very new. I didn’t realize how new until Ms. Goldstein-Sabbah emailed me back to say she had just been hired at the beginning of January (after seven and a half years at Brill) primarily to develop the field of religious studies at Springer. Ms. Goldstein-Sabbah confirmed that Springer’s involvement in religious studies publishing generally is fairly recent (within the last 10 years or so).

Springer started developing in religious studies as both an outgrowth of their very strong philosophy program (namely from philosophy of religion) and the acquisition of several small publishing houses which had various series and/or journals in religious studies. The journals were primarily acquired over the past ten years, although a few have been with Springer longer. Of course we are still interested in acquiring existing subscription model journals but we realize the market is changing and we want to provide what the market is asking for, namely open access, especially for new start up journals. As for the push to acquire books this is more recent, in the past five years more or less, however we now have several book series in religious studies and are publishing about 15-20 religious studies volumes a year with the hope of more to come in the future.

It appears that rather than converting their existing journals to open access, Springer’s open access initiative in religious studies is to get new journals started with this publishing model. I found Ms. Goldstein-Sabbah’s comment about the changing market interesting. My experience is that scholars in religion and theology have been fairly slow to embrace new mediums of scholarly communication. Although we may be finally moving past the print vs. electronic format debate, one reason I started this blog because knowledge of open access and its viability is not yet common among my scholar and library colleagues in religion and theology. Indeed, this effort has afforded me the opportunity to learn more about open access.

Ms. Goldstein-Sabbah is taking her reading from the broader world of scholarly communication, where the shift is definitely in evidence. Although developments are less clear in religious studies, it might help drive change in our discipline if more publishers like Springer took the initiative toward open access. To get things going, Ms. Goldstein-Sabbah’s approach is to concentrate on organizations rather than individual scholar authors.

Currently Springer does not have any OA journals in Religious Studies and Philosophy. However, given the success Springer has had with OA journals in the traditional STM [science, technology and medicine] market we are very keen to adopt similar initiatives. For the time being my model is to focus on agreements with societies, associations, and institutions which have funding and wish to develop an OA journal with a professional publisher. I am currently working with one society but we are at the preliminary discussion stage so I cannot give any details.

Coupled with the ease of online distribution, one of the primary benefits of open access journal publishing is that it eliminates the costs of publication (and burden for the profits) from the reader side.* Removing the cost barrier to access enhances exposure of a scholar’s research, which is the intent of scholarly communication. But those costs of publication (and profits that must accrue for a commercial enterprise) have to be recouped/generated somewhere. Some of this is accomplished through the efficiencies inherent in online distribution. Beyond this, Springer’s approach is to shift costs to the producer side.

Instead of charging users a fee to read the content, an article-processing charge (APC) is levied at the beginning of the process. This flat charge, which varies from journal to journal, covers the entire cost of the publication process. This includes peer-reviewing, editing, publishing, maintaining and archiving, and allows immediate access to the full text versions of the research articles. (from the SpringerOpen website)

This seems to working well in disciplines where funding for article publication can be built into research grants, especially where the potential economic spin-offs of research make such funding easier to justify. But what about an academic discipline like religious studies that does not typically enjoy this kind of funding? Can Springer’s approach scale downward? Ms. Goldstein-Sabbah is optimistic.

As we both know there is much less funding in Philosophy and Religious Studies. However, costs for developing an OA journal are much less than most people think, although it does vary based on the project size and scope. Most institutions wishing to develop OA journals will find it is actually less expensive to develop a proper OA journal in partnership with a publisher than on their own. In the long-term I believe that funding will swap from a subscription model to an OA model where institutions provide funding for OA fees, however this is many years off. In the meantime Springer wishes to be at the forefront of OA development and we are very keen to partner with institutions who have similar thinking. For the time being we see more growth and interest in the partnership model for OA. However, I do believe that in the future we could move towards the author pay model.

The SpringerOpen FAQ gives an idea of what an author or supporting organization would pay in article processing charges and what those charges pay for. The range is from $665 and $1,996 per published article, depending on the journal (there is a waiver for “low-income countries”).

As you probably guessed I can’t give you an exact figure for the APC range but I would suspect religious studies journals would be at on the low end of the spectrum. If the journal is done in conjunction with an organization’s then the APC would be discussed with the organization. Of course what would be interesting is if Springer sat down with organizations such as ATLA or AAR to discuss APC fees and how that would work in research or library budgets.

Without more information and a specific situation to draw upon it is hard to determine whether this is a manageable and sustainable figure. Ms. Goldstein-Sabbah’s last statement suggests that part of the move to open access involves a change in the way organizations conceptualize funding for the publication of their journal. For example, instead of association membership dues including the purchase of a journal subscription, access to the journal for both members and anyone else in the world who might be interested would be free, and dues would go to help build an article publication fund. Instead of libraries sustaining institutional subscriptions from their budgets, monies already in the system would be shifted to help their faculty get their articles published. And so on.

I get the sense from Ms. Goldstein-Sabbah’s responses that it may be too early to know how this commercial open access model will work for religious studies. Still, Springer should be commended for its innovative thinking and leadership. I will be interested to see how this develops.
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* Another primary benefit of open access journal publishing, especially when the journal is self-published, is that authors retain greater control over their copyrights. As a commercial publisher, Springer is demonstrating leadership by allowing authors to retain their copyright though use of a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 2.0) License.

Richard Poynder interviews PLoS’s co-founder and open access advocate Michael Eisen

Earlier this week Richard Poynder posted an interview with Public Library of Science’s (PLoS) co-founder and open access advocate Michael Eisen. Eisen was one of the original signatories to the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative statement. Over the last twelve years, PLoS (founded in 2000) has transformed from an open access advocacy site to a successful open access life sciences publisher.

Michael Eisen recently wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times (January 10, 2012) vigorously opposing proposed House legislation known as the Research Works Act (H.R. 3699), which has generated significant backlash against commercial academic publishers that supported the legislation, and has spawned alternative proposed legislation in the Senate. (See also my “Not entirely off-topic: The Research Works Act”.)

Poynder is himself a strong open access advocate, but he didn’t give Eisen a free pass. In particular, Poynder was pretty hard on Eisen and PLoS for failing (as yet) to significantly bring down the cost of scholarly journal publishing. Lower cost is supposed to be one of the principal benefits of open access.

A common approach for covering the costs of open access publication is to charge authors/sponsors an article processing fee in lieu of reader subscriptions. But these fees can be quite high, and one wonders about the sustainability of this approach (even though institutional sponsors or grant funders often foot the bill). In response, Eisen insists that marginal costs will be reduced as the technological infrastructure is more fully implemented and as authors submit articles in publishing-ready formats. He did seem to admit that we’re not there yet.

The scale of scientific journal publishing—even open access scientific journal publishing—is dizzying for scholars in Religion and Theology. Nevertheless, this is an interesting and informative read that ranges over other open access topics such as the potential for an enlarged role for article self-archiving (so-called “Green OA” vs. journal-based “Gold OA”), and alternative models for peer-review.

Some dinosaurs survived as birds: Changes scholarly publishing must face if it wants to live in the online environment

There is a lot happening in the world of scholarly communication and open access that deserves attention, and relates in a “big picture” or instructional way to my specific interests in Religion and Theology on this blog. Although I prefer to write longer form posts, I’ve decided to expand into something new. When I come across an especially interesting article or blog post written by someone else, but one I don’t feel I can fully engage with at the moment, I will link to that piece citing a key excerpt, and maybe add a brief paragraph or two about why I think it is relevant and worth a read. I’ve created a new category for such posts called “The Hat Tip.”

To kick this off, I’ve linked to a wonderful interview that Richard Poynder over at “Open and Shut?” did with marine geologist turned scientific publisher, Jan Velterop. Velterop was a participant at the meeting convened in December 2001 that developed the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) and gave birth to the Open Access movement. This interview gives a fascinating insider’s look into the history of scientific publishing from the 1970′s to the present, encompassing Velterop’s experience with both traditional commercial publishers and open access initiatives.

During the course of the interview, Velterop drew on his marine geology background to offer a great analogy between the geological and evolutionary changes studied in his discipline with the dramatic changes the online environment is forcing upon scholarly publishing.

[T]he possibilities the Web offers have so radically changed the publishing environment that we have truly entered into a new era.

As a geologist I go so far as to say that I see analogies with the Permian-Triassic boundary and the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, when life on Earth changed dramatically due to fundamental and sudden changes in the environment.

Those boundary events, as they are known, resulted in mass extinctions, and that’s an unavoidable evolutionary consequence of sudden dramatic environmental changes.

But they also open up ecological niches for new, or hitherto less successful, forms of life…

The evolution of scientific communication will go on, without any doubt, and although that may not mean the total demise of the traditional models, these models will necessarily change. After all, some dinosaur lineages survived as well. We call them birds. And there are some very attractive ones. They are smaller than the dinosaurs they evolved from, though. Much smaller.