Communications - February 2010

For example, I can easily imagine these publishers soon offering universities special deals with reduced author fees in exchange for exclusive rights to the publications of that university, jeopardizing academic freedom.

the Role of Professional societies

Can we get out of this situation? Can we escape both the escalating subscription fees of commercial editors and the dangerous author fees of prominent Open Access publishers? It is important to understand that the scientific community is largely at fault: we sit on the editorial boards of the very journals published at exorbitant prices by commercial publishers,f and we submit our best articles to these journals.

The problem with the subscription model is not the model but the fees. Rob Kirby, of the UC Berkeley Math Department, has compared the cost-per-page of various mathematics journals, computed as the subscription price divided by the number of pages published annually.g In 1997, they ranged from $0.07 to $1.53. The cost per 10,000 characters, which better accounts for differences among journal formats, ranged from 30 cents to $3. Consistently, the cheaper journals are published by universities and societies; the most expensive ones by commercial publishers. In 2003, Donald Knuth, editor of Journal of Algorithms, wrote a long letterh to his editorial board explaining that the price per page of the journal had more than doubled since it had been acquired by Elsevier, while it had stayed stable over the previous period, when it was published by Academic Press. This led to a mass resignation of the board and the rebirth of the journal as ACM Transactions on Algorithms. Another well-known example is the Journal of Machine Learning Research, which became its own Open Access publisher for similar reasons. A number of journals have joined this trend,i but f I am an associate editor of an Elsevier-pub-lished journal.

open Access is a
valuable goal, but the
scientific community
is overly naive about
the whole business of
scientific publishing.

few have turned to Open Access.

So, am I against Open Access? No. I think it is a noble goal, an achievable goal. But this goal should not blind us to the point of making a bad system even worse, of hurting research in the name of making its results freely available to everyone.

First, scientific publications can be affordable. The pricing of the ACM Digital Library is extremely low, even compared to other societies and nonprofit organizations. This is still not enough. The pricing model is adequate for the academic and industry audience but not for dissemination toward the public at large. As shown by the success of online stores such as iTunes, low-pricing can translate into large volumes. Commercial publishers charge non-subscribers up to $30 to download a single paper; ACM charges $15. What if it were 99 cents? While I am not saying that scientific publishing is a mass market like music, I do believe this would dramatically reduce the barrier to non-subscribers, in particular the general public, without significantly affecting the revenues from subscriptions.

Second, much of this debate has
focused on cost. But free access is, to
paraphrase the Free Software Move-
ment, as much about free beer as it is
about free speech. Many publishers,
including ACM, allow their authors to
publish copies of their articles on their
personal Web page or on their institu-
tional repository.j But the transfer of
j See section 2. 5 of the ACM copyright policy,
http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/
copyright_policy, and the SHERPA/ROMEO
list of publishers’ copyright and self-archiving
policies, http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/
copyright is seen by some as a serious
hindrance to open access, as it deprives
authors from distribution rights. While
copyright transfer offers authors pro-
tection (such as against plagiarism)
and services (such as authorization to
reprint), I believe switching to a licens-
ing model such as Creative Commons
could be beneficial.

conclusion

Open Access is a valuable goal, but the scientific community is overly naive about the whole business of scientific publishing. Societies and nonprofit organizations need to continue to lead the way to improve the dissemination of research results, but the scientific community at large must support them against the business-centric views of commercial publishers. Author fees are not a solution. Worse, they jeopardize the ecological balance of the research incentive structure. Finally, nonprofit publishers should take advantage of their unique position to experiment with sustainable evolutions of their publishing models.

Michel Beaudouin-Lafon ( mbl@lri.fr) is a professor of computer science at Université Paris-Sud (France) and head of the Laboratory for computer Science (Lri). he is also a former member of the acM council and the acM Publications board.