The article recently published in Nature entitled “Open-access journal hits rocky time,” seems to suggest that the author-pays business model is not financially sustainable. Their argument is based on an analysis of the finances of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), which has recently raised the publication charges in its two main journals. While it is clear that PLoS will be dependent on external funding, at least for the next few years, it is certainly not the case that the author-pays business model is inherently unsustainable.

Based on our experience as a publisher of both subscription-based journals and author-pays open access journals, I would not only argue that the author-pays publishing model is sustainable, but also that it has many economic advantages over the subscription model. Even though our open access journal collection is only a few years old, we have already achieved profitability for the collection as a whole. Moreover, using a business model based on publication charges has enabled us to expand our publishing program in a much more sustainable way than we were able to using a subscription model.

To understand why Hindawi adopted a business model based on publication charges, one must look at the fundamental differences between these two models. In an author-pays model, a publisher’s revenues are directly proportional to the number of articles published. This enables us to expand our publishing operation while ensuring financial sustainability, since an increase in the number of published articles provides a proportional increase in revenue.

In contrast, an increase in the number of articles published in a subscription-based journal does not necessarily lead to a proportional increase in the journal’s revenue. If there is an expansion in the size of a subscription-based journal, a publisher must raise the subscription price of the journal in order to cover their costs. However, raising a journal’s subscription price most often leads to cancellations, since libraries have a fixed amount of money to spend on journals, so an increase in price does not provide a proportional increase in subscription revenues.

If the author-pays model is in fact financially sustainable, one may wonder why the Public Library of Science has had to increase their publication charges. The answer to this is that the price increase is reflective of the costs of publication in general, not of the author-pays business model in particular. In fact, if one looks at the total cost to the academic community, by adding up the subscription revenues from all subscribers, it is clear that PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine are significantly less expensive than most comparable subscription-based journals, even after their recent increase in publication charges.

Nonetheless, some people may look at the financial statements from the Public Library of Science and conclude that they will not achieve financial sustainability without external sources of funding, even with the new publication charges. It is possible that this is true, but it is important to understand that PLoS is not only a publisher but also an advocacy organization working to raise awareness about open access. Since advocacy organizations are almost always dependent on external funding, it should not come as a surprise that PLoS cannot fund their extensive advocacy activities without charitable contributions.

Opponents of open access publishing will most likely use the financial information that is available about the Public Library of Science to defend their stance that the author-pays business model in unsustainable. However, drawing conclusions about a business model based on the financial records of a single non-profit organization, whose stated purpose is that of an advocacy organization, seems like a rather weak argument. It is much more telling to look at a commercial publisher like Hindawi and ask why we would employ an author-pays business model, since our main objective, like that of all commercial enterprises, is financial success.

Paul Peters
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
Paul.peters@hindawi.com

As scientists we want our research results to be widely read and used. For breakthrough results, that is best accomplished by publishing in top journals with a huge subscription base and media relations activities, such as Nature or NEJM. Considering their young age, PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine is moving amazingly fast towards this top tier of journals. For more narrowly focused research, I see no reason to publish it in a traditional journal with a limited subscription base rather than in an open access journal that anyone can read. Why hide the research behind a subscription wall? Most open access journals do not charge author fees. When we do have to pay this fee from our grants, the charge is conceptually no different from the reprint charges that we used to pay during the old pre-electronic days, in order to send paper copies to colleagues without subscription access. I just wish there were open access journals in all scientific fields and their sub-specialties so that open access was always an option.

Martin Kulldorff
Harvard Medical School and
Harvard Pilgrim Health Care

I generally think that the Nature piece misrepresents many of the issues relating to Open Access publishing and of the costs of publishing. To say that PLoS faces a "looming financial crisis" simply because it has not broken even in the time line that the Nature reporter thinks they should have is disingenuous. My reading of the data presented in the article is that PLoS is a start up organization that has not figured out exactly what its costs of doing business are. That is a far cry from a looming crisis.

In addition, I personally think that the "break even" issue is not the critical issue here. The real issue to me is that scientific and medical research should be freely available for it to most benefit humankind. That the system for Open Access publishing is still being worked out is a minor detail in a bigger picture.

I view this issue much like I view the National Parks here in the US. The National Park Servive is still exploring ways to get parks to come as close to breaking even as possible. This is done through entrance and camping fees and various other revenue generating systems. But few would argue that Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon and Yosemite should be turned over to developers simply because it costs a bit more to manage them that is brought in by fees. That is not to say the managers of the parks should not continue to explore ways to recover their costs and reduce their expenses. But the parks benefit the entire country. I believe Open Access publishing is similar - the benefits are to all of society. And if it takes a little bit if supplemental money to provide that benefit I am OK with that (although the post by Paul Peters suggests that it will not require extra funds in the long run). That money could easily be provided if one took the funds being used to pay the high fees of many journals and redistributed them to Open Access journals. That way the literature would be available and no extra taxpayer money would be spent. In fact, most likely, taxpayer money would be saved by doing this.

Jonathan Eisen
jaeisen@ucdavis.edu
http://phylogenomics.blogspot.com

I appreciate both journals such as the PLoS series and Nature/Science etc., and we publish in both. Certainly, even a $2,500 publication fee is still a bargain compared to most other journals, including those run by academic organizations.

As a matter of fact, higher publication charges for all journals might make authors think twice about publishing marginal results that only clutter the literature. If publication charges would lead to authors publishing again more complete stories, I would not be sad at all.

As a follow up to Deltef's comments. PLoS journals and many other Open Access journals allow you to publish complete stories because most do not have arbitrary restrictions on the lengths of papers. I have been involved in dozens of publications associated with genome sequences, many in Nature and Science and now many in PLoS journals. For papers in Nature or Science we almost always had to make the stories incomplete because of page restrictions. For PLoS journals, we could tell the whole story. Note - PLoS does not encourage run on papers - they just allow one to include the material that is scientifically relevant.

Compare and contrast our genome papers in PLoS journals:

Sharpshooter symbionts

Life in hot carbon monoxide

Wolbachia

With those published in Science or Nature (I only publish in Open Access journals if I have a choice but for these I was a middle middle author):

Dehalococcoides

Geobacter

Silicibacter

Based on this difference alone I prefer to publish in PLoS journals every time. Note that this may in fact make it more expensive for PLoS to publish those papers and thus I wam more than willing to pay for that cost.

Personally I find it ironic that a publisher conforming to a reader-pays model will permit me to freely read an opinion that implies the looming demise of an open access publisher. Let me freely offer a different opinion. I work hard (and for free) to make open access publishing a reality. My motivation is simple – achieve the widest possible dissemination of scientific results. While a noble cause, clearly there are financial realities that must be dealt with. When I visit the PLoS offices in Europe and the USA I am struck by the energy and dedication that one often sees in a start up company. They are not motivated by potential financial gain, but to share knowledge. Of course many start ups fail and are lost without a trace. If PLoS fails it will not be without a trace since they have already contributed significantly to a movement that has changed scientific publishing forever. Witness the many reader-pays journals that have now moved to a hybrid mode of offering open and closed content and the enthusiasm many authors and readers have for open access publishing. This is just the beginning, not the end as the article suggests. The Internet is the printing press of the modern age and as yet only beginning to be utilized. PLoS One as a high throughput publishing option, the development of free software tools to facilitate publishing and integration of open access journal content with the data from which it was derived [1] are examples which may yet balance the books. I remain optimistic, but excuse me as I must now get back to managing an increasing flow of papers through our PLoS journal.

[1] P.E. Bourne 2005 In the Future will a Biological Database Really be Different from a Biological Journal? PLoS Comp. Biol. 1(3) e34 (open access).

Philip E. Bourne PhD
Editor in Chief PLoS Computational Biology

I have published in Nature and refereed for Nature, but I'm also on the PLoS Biology editorial board and an open-access supporter, so the artcle “Open-access journal hits rocky time” made me see red. Yes, PLoS needs external support still. But so does Nature, in the form of manuscript reviews that we do for free while the publisher profits from the papers that we have worked to improve. It would be interesting to compare the amount of support PLoS is getting against the value of all the anonymous "pro bono" work that the scientific community does for Nature Publishing Group.

As a patient advocate in the United States who closely follows the emerging scientific literature in breast cancer, and helps to educate women with advanced and metastatic breast cancer about their treatment options, the open access movement has been more than welcome. Many advocates like myself have watched with dismay over the last fifteen years as one valuable journal after another has adopted a subscription-only policy.

The PLoS journals, PubMed Central and the open access movement have been beacons in that gathering darkness. This is not a small matter for advocates like myself, who do not have institutional and academic access to the journals that we follow, nor personal resources to pay for multiple subscriptions. If we wish to read anything more than abstracts of uneven quality, we are reduced to paying exorbitant per-article prices, begging authors for reprints, visiting medical libraries open to the public, or arranging time-consuming and sometimes costly interlibrary loans. To me, it has always seemed unconscionable that research paid for in whole or in part with public funds, using patients who give so unselfishly for the advancement of medicine and science, should be unavailable to those very patients and to the public.

That a prestigious journal like Nature should all but gloat at the unremarkable start-up struggles of the Public Library of Science feels unseemly to me. I would think that even at a subscriber-supported journal, there would be those who believe in open access to the biomedical literature. And when did philanthropic support become a sign of weakness? Perhaps your editorial focus ought to be on ways to liberate scientific knowledge from the marketplace.

Musa Mayer
Patient Advocate
AdvancedBC.org

We at the Public Library of Science would like to express our gratitude to all of you who have expressed their support in response to this obviously slanted and self-serving article. We would also like to thank Mr. Butler for inadvertently helping to further galvanize that support.

To assure everyone, the Public Library of Science continues to thrive and our base of support grows stronger every day. We are working hard to make open access a reality for everyone. As aptly stated by Phil above, the most exciting days of open access are yet to come. Please visit our website at www.plos.org to stay in touch with the latest developments and post to our blog.

Stephen M. Borostyan
Chief Financial Officer
Public Library of Science

Having read the news story and several of the reactions on the net I would say that your colleagues at Nature Genetics blog, without participating directly in this discussion, provided one of the most interesting arguments.

When considering the costs of a PLOS article as compared with Nature, why not look at how many public dollars are being spent on subscriptions to Nature?

It might be interesting to compare the per-article cost of this indirect public subsidy with the PLOS charges. My guess is that PLOS costs would be lower: restricting access costs money!

Other things to keep in mind: PLOS is a new organization in more than one sense - a brand new publishing outfit working on a brand new model. As PLOS grows, there will be efficiencies from the gaining of expertise as well as economies of scale. There could be more ad revenue, too, as the PLOS products are proven and the ad-revenue impact of those impressive impact factors kicks in.

When considering the average per-article cost, we also need to keep in mind that PLOS is competing at the very top end of scientific publishing. Publishers with more modest services are likely to be able to provide high quality service at lesser cost. Please note that lesser service does not equate with lower academic quality; some of the factors in high-quality publishing are expenditures which are cosmetic in nature.

Is there any reason why my comments on this debate -- "Open Access First; Then, Only If/When Necessary: Open Access Publication" -- now posted twice, have not appeared? I have blogged them, but Nature's unwillingness to run them in context is puzzling. Explanation?

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

The fact that the PLoS is not breaking even at this stage is not surprising. There seems to be a consensus in the publishing world that new journals - at least in the traditional subscription model - take about seven years to reach break-even. I personally think it’s more like 10 years; if ever. And here we are talking not just of new journals, but of new journals published in a new publishing model. The PLoS has done remarkably well, given all that.

But even if the top two PLoS journals don’t reach break-even, that’s not the end of the story. There is a well-known phenomenon in business that’s know as ‘loss-leaders’. It is quite conceivable that these two PLoS journals fulfil that role, pushing the PLoS brand reputation to great heights, and then enabling the organisation to capitalise on that brand with smaller, subordinate journals (’specialist’ or ‘community’ titles), which do make the surplus needed to sustain not only themselves but also the flagship loss-leaders.

Apologies for the delay in your comments appearing on this thread. Nature staff have been excluded from the office for the past few days due to a fire in the adjacent premises. As you can see in the notes on posting, comments are reviewed by staff before being posted (for relevance, not specific content), and this process has been hit by the events of the past few days. Please rest assured that Nature is not censoring this blog!

In Nature News, published online on June 20th, Declan Butler described the financial problems that online publications are facing. As a medical researcher who has spent my entire career working in developing countries, I am worried that an outstanding initiative such as online publications has not received the financial support needed for their consolidation.

Developing countries represent the major burden of disease, and I am deeply convinced that health research generated and performed in developing countries is crucial to improve this unequal situation. A major basis for the generation of research in developing countries is the availability of scientific literature.

I remember from my early years performing research in the 1970s the difficulties in obtaining scientific literature in our countries. During those scarce opportunities when we were able to visit the university libraries of developed countries, we were ecstatic to have access to such a large number of journals. Our return luggage was loaded with a heavy treasure of Xerox copies of a myriad of articles.

The current situation, where we have access to more and more literature via the internet represents a situation of more equity between the developed and developing worlds.

One basic component necessary to obtain change in the health situation of the developing world is to have strong institutions that are able to develop and perform research to identify feasible interventions focused on local priorities. One vital component of such a strength is the availability of scientific literature. Initiatives supporting global health improvements should be seen as one of the most profitable investments and should ensure the provision of scientific literature to every researcher in the developing world.

Institute for Clinical Effectiveness and Health Policy (IECS), Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Open Access First; Then, Only If/When Necessary: Open Access Publication

SUMMARY: Nature reports that Open Access (OA) journals are having trouble making ends meet. This is because institutional publication funds are currently tied up in subscription costs. What is urgently needed now is OA, to maximize research usage and impact. Immediate 100% OA can be reached via OA self-archiving mandates. If/when 100% OA self-archiving should ever generate institutional subscription cancellations, those same institutional windfall savings will be the natural way to pay for institutional OA publication costs. If/when there are signs that that is approaching, then would be the opportune time for journals to convert to OA publishing. Right now, there are no such signs, and it is OA that we need, urgently.

Re: Butler, Declan (2006) Open-access journal hits rocky times. Nature 20 June 2006 doi:10.1038/441914a (See also Declan's Blog)

Open Access (OA) itself is urgent, for research, researchers and the public that funds the research, because every day without OA means another day of needless loss in research usage and impact. But conversion to OA publishing is not urgent, indeed it is premature, while funds are already tied up in subscriptions.

What needs to be done now is for researchers, funders and institutions to mandate OA self-archiving -- i.e., require their researchers to deposit their published articles in their own OA Institutional Repositories, for the sake of maximizing the uptake, usage and impact of their research output. Self-archiving is a supplement to -- not a substitute for -- conventional subscription-based journal publishing.

If and when OA self-archiving should ever generate cancellation pressure on institutional journal subscriptions, then, and only then, need there be a conversion to OA Publishing. For then the institutional windfall savings from the cancellation of incoming subscriptions will be available to pay the costs of outgoing publication, which will be based on downsizing publishing to the essentials, such as peer review, cutting obsolete costs once the network of institutional repositories become the archivers and access-providers.

Right now, however, there is no sign of any cancellation pressure from self-archiving, even in the fields that have been practising it the longest (15 years in physics) and the subfields that already reached 100% OA some time ago. What is urgent now is to mandate OA self-archiving.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

I think this actually important and interesting finding for many

Why are always the BMC's and PLoS's of this world cited as posterchilds for the open access movement? In the light of hundreds of grass-roots open access journals which are not blessed with millions of venture capital or grants, they are the exception, not the rule.
I am citing from the article The Open Access Advantage:

There are hundreds of independent OA journals. Open access giants such as PLoS or Biomed Central are often mentioned as the representatives of the open access publishing movement, and it is quickly pointed out that the way they operate is not sustainable. What is often forgotten is that these publishers are not the only open access publishers (they were not even the first open access publishers - with publishers like BMJ, Medscape, or JMIR being the true pioneers), and they are certainly not typical representatives. The majority of open access journals operate using a lean publishing model, and many of them are financially sustainable. This journal [JMIR] is a living example that lean publishing models can create successful open access journals. In the light of growing concern and disgruntlement among editors with commercial open access giants such as BioMed Central, we wish to remind researchers that open source tools for publishing open access journals are readily available and have become increasingly sophisticated.

Being the publisher of a "lean" OA journal I can testify first hand that sustainable OA journals are possible, and can back this up with financial data for anybody who needs evidence. Certainly, as the revenue is tied to the number of articles published rather than readership/subscribers, the growth potential is limited and we are far away from the millions in profits successful STM journals can reap in. But as scientist-publisher I see the primary role of the journal not in making profits, but in being sustainable, and that goal is achievable.

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