Electronic Scientific, Technical, and Medical Journal Publishing and Its Implications Report of a Symposium (2004) / Chapter Skim
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3 Publication Business Models and Revenue
3 Publication Business Models and Revenue
Pages 20-39
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From page 20... ...
They perform crucial functions by producing documents in different media, performing editorial and design work, marketing the material, and connecting readers to writers, and so forth. All of those functions involve costs.
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From page 21... ...
The discussion that follows looks at the major business models from several stakeholder perspectives. It begins with an overview of trends in the commercial STM journal publishing industry, followed by a perspective from the library community, which serves as the intermediary between STM publishers and the academic user community.
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Bundling will have the effect of greatly increasing the number of Reed publications available through particular libraries, at the expense of having less well positioned publishers lose those customers entirely. Downstream Value Migration We also should expect commercial publishers to seek so-called downstream value migration and to target competitors that for various reasons are thought to be vulnerable.
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From page 23... ...
From an economic point of view, copyright transfer to publishers is unnecessary for supporting publishing profits. The Shift to Web Services The most significant economic response to open access is likely to be in the creation of Web services, in the form of dynamic substitutes for the publication of fixed content in hard copy.
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From page 24... ...
Despite the apparent lack of elasticity in this market, the ability of libraries to continue to afford all research content, in the face of escalating STM journal prices, is certainly cause for concern. STM journal price increases and inelasticity have increased in the past 2 years as a result of two developments.
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is low. A recent informal survey conducted within the Association of Research Libraries suggested that nearly half of respondents expected cuts in some areas and the prospects were high for further budget reductions in the coming fiscal year.
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These projects represent a move away from libraries' traditional role of providing access to information toward facilitating production of information, and it may help libraries reconceive the relative position they have long held in the STM information sector. THE COMMERCIAL SUBSCRIPTION-BASED MODEL6 One fairly typical example of a commercial STM publisher based on a reader-pays model is John Wiley & Sons, Inc., which is a global, indepen 5Morgan Stanley Industry Report.
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From page 27... ...
Finally, Wiley constantly invests in new features and enhancements for its electronic publications. Some of the most recent ones include content alerts to apprise its audience of what is being published, delivery of content to mobile edition platforms, and publishing online in advance of print publication.
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Reconceptualizing the STM Publishing Business Model on the Internet Before the Internet, there was no choice but to charge users of scientific publications, because the most efficient way of making them available was by distribution in the print format. In the print environment, every potential user represented an incremental expense for the publisher, and any business model that did not take that into account was doomed to 7 This section is based on the remarks of panel participant Patrick Brown, professor of biochemistry at Stanford University and a cofounder of the Public Library of Science (PLoS)
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From page 29... ...
What had been an impossible ideal in the pre-Internet era -- to make the published information an open public resource -- is now possible, because the cost to the publisher no longer scales with the number of copies produced or with the number of potential readers of a publication. Accordingly, users are not restricted to a business model that charges per access or per copy.
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From page 30... ...
Advantages of the Open-Access Approach for Science The practical advantages of true open access are already very familiar to many researchers in the life sciences through two longstanding, amazingly successful open-access experiments -- GenBank and the Protein Data Bank. The success of the genome project, which is generally considered to be one of the great scientific achievements of recent times, is due in no small part to the fact that the world's entire library of published DNA sequences has been an open-access public resource for the past 20 years.
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From page 31... ...
The HHMI has agreed to provide budget supplements to its investigators, specifically to cover author charges for open-access publications. The PLoS will also produce printed editions of its journals for sale to institutions or individual subscribers at a price intended to recover only the cost of printing and distribution, everything downstream of producing the published digital document.
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The difficulty of convincing research funders to subsidize authors' page charges. According to statistics presented by Donald King of University of Pittsburgh, roughly one-third of STM journal articles are funded by the federal agencies, about a third of them are funded exclusively within the universities, and the rest by industry.
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The subvention of publishing costs by the payment of page charges and subvention for carrying color reproduction charges are examples of how some organizations have found an effective balance. They have done this even in a user-pays model, implementing certain charges that are passed on to the author, where the needs of the author are seen as unique, and something that the author would want to pay in order to benefit from a service.
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From page 34... ...
The motivation to pay an increment of less than 1 percent of the total research cost to make it much more valuable to the people who are supposed to be served by it is presumably the same for all three sectors that sponsor research. Author selectivity not dependent on a reader-pays model.
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From page 35... ...
Established publications may not need to worry about converting to a system based on author page charges, and the resulting open access would be better for the community they are supposed to be serving. The Effect of Different Publishing Business Models on the Long Term Preservation of Digital Journals The focus of publishers in electronic publishing is mainly on the actual production of the work and its dissemination on the Web.
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This is the societys' primary effort for ensuring continued availability of its archived publications. There appears to be a clear distinction between the perspective of the professional society as a publisher and the private commercial publisher.
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It might be best to view this approach as transitional, because ultimately the sensible thing would be for the research sponsors to cover the publication costs as an essential part of their mission of promoting and disseminating research. In the short term, it is probably necessary to catalyze the process.
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From page 38... ...
Advertising Revenues in Electronic Publishing Nearly 50 percent of one publisher's total costs are attributable to editorial, peer-review, and production processes, items other than printing, paper, and distribution. Although many STM journal publishers have no advertising revenues, advertising for some print journals underwrites more than 50 percent of the total cost of operation.
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The purpose of funding of research is not just to serve the immediate community of the grantees, it is the wider scientific community and the general public that should be much better served by the information. At the same time, according to Patrick Brown, when this issue has been raised with respect to NIH funding, many NIH grantees have objected if this were to come at the expense of a 1 percent cut in research funding.
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