How to profit by providing free access

Thomas Walker (Learned Publishing, 2002: 15(4), 279–84) has proposed a very interesting model for increasing revenues for scholarly publishers while at the same time making articles freely available online. This is quite appealing on the face of it. Unfortunately, his model is firmly grounded on the assumption that there will always be a healthy print subscription market for scholarly journals and that this mode of dissemination will continue to cover the major costs associated with scholarly publishing, even if the contents of a journal are freely available online. The costs recovered from authors for making the PDF free online is only the (admittedly small) incremental cost for creating a PDF file from the print production process and posting it online. It is quite easy to come up with a reasonable fee to cover this cost and perhaps even generate a small profit. But the costs for publishing a journal today are really dominated by the labour used in peer review and in preparing the formatted journal. What happens when essentially all papers become freely available online and libraries realize they can cancel their paper subscriptions? What would the cost per author per published paper have to be then to cover all of the costs involved? In a broader context, many journals are international in scope and contain papers from authors who may not be able to afford the even the modest incremental charges. This would in effect create a two-tiered system further dividing the haves and the have-nots. The bottom line is that the plan works well for a small operation and during a transition period in which there is still a healthy (albeit diminishing) market for the paper journals. Just based on Walker’s numbers in his article, one can see that his model is untenable in the long-term. For the Entomological Society of America (ESA), the total budget is $700,000, and with authors of half of the papers paying immediate free Web access (IFWA), ESA only brings in $31,000. So if all authors were to pay, IFWA would bring in only $62,000, more than a factor 10 less than the full $700,000 needed. For the Florida Entomological Society (FES), the numbers were $10,800 for 100% compliance to cover operations of $55,000 if subscriptions were to disappear. Scaling this up to an operation the size of the American Physical Society makes the shortfall even more dramatic. Thus, it would appear that IFWA is a path fraught with risk for a large publisher, and one untenable in the long-term for any publisher. A more reasonable approach might be to work with the authors’ institutions to pay for the full cost of publishing an article in order that it might be freely disseminated. This would, however, only be a partial solution because it is unlikely that all authors could pay, and we should not create a system in which papers from wealthy institutions get a wider circulation than those from poorer institutions.