We all know by now that traditional academic publishing is in an appalling mess. Locking publicly funded research behind a paywall is totally unacceptable, and happily our government understands this. The Finch Report has rightly mandated that research needs to be published as open access. So profiteering publishers, seeing the writing at the wall, are offering authors open-access options.
But corporations hooked on profit margins of 32-42% find it hard to present them up. For that reason, while the world’s leading open-access journal, PLOS ONE, is ready to be financially self-sustaining by charging an editorial processing fee (APC) of $1,350 (£865) (and offering no-questions-asked waivers to authors without APC funding), the legacy publishers charge significantly more for inferior products. Where PLOS ONE imposes no limits on manuscript length, selection of figures, use of colour etc., Elsevier’s nearly-open-access articles cost $3,000 despite being limited in some of these respects. Likewise, Springer’s Open Choice costs $3,000 and Taylor & Francis’s Open Select costs $2,950.
It is perhaps not surprising that the Finch Report’s financial estimates assumed average APCs of £1,500-£2,000, and that some academics are baulking at such prices.
Into that landscape come three exciting newcomers which are changing the market far more profoundly than the slow-moving incumbents yet realise. eLIFE is positioned as a highly selective and prestigious open-access alternative to Science and Nature. It published its first articles three months ago. PeerJ is a PLOS ONE-like mega-journal and it publishes its first articles today. Momentum has built further with the announcement of the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) last month, a PLOS-like initiative for the arts and social sciences.
All three of those new kids at the block are radically innovative, all are moving fast, and all are backed by some serious muscle. eLIFE is sponsored by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Max Planck Society and Wellcome Trust; therefore, it’s capable of waive all APCs while it establishes itself, and can achieve this indefinitely.
The academic steering committee of the OLH is full of heavy hitters, and well on track to do for the arts what PLOS did for the sciences. While the extent of its APC has not yet been set, it’s been established that nobody would be prevented from publishing there by loss of funds.
But it’s PeerJ that has the foremost interesting financial approach. It doesn’t exactly have an APC in any respect, instead charging a one-off fee for an entire life membership that provides the proper to publish repeatedly at no further cost. Membership plans start at $99, which lets you publish one paper a year, or $299 gets you an unlimited plan: publish anything you would like, any time you want. (All authors of multi-author papers needs to be members.)
Sounds crazy, right How can that be financially sustainable What sort of idiots would start one of these venture
I’ll let you know who: Pete Binfield, who was the editor-in-chief of PLOS ONE because it became the world’s biggest journal. There’s nobody on earth who knows more about what it takes to run a successful open-access mega-journal. His co-founder is Jason Hoyt, who built much of the phenomenally successful collaborative reference-manager Mendeley.
So they both have great track records. But might their enthusiasm have run away with them Did wishful thinking persuade them that this utopian approach can work What sort of idiot would put money into one of these business
I’ll inform you who: Internet guru Tim O’Reilly, who founded and runs O’Reilly Media, arguably the world’s most precious publisher of programming books, including open-access books. There is nobody on the earth who better understands methods to monetise free content.
But the strength of PeerJ goes much deeper than the founders and governing board. The members of the educational board, as an example, have five Nobel prizes between them. From top to bottom it is a quality organisation, and that dedication to quality is reflected within the way my very own manuscript have been handled.
I, with my colleague Matt Wedel, sent it on 3 December – the day PeerJ submissions opened. We were assigned a handling editor whose own research we greatly respect, and he sent the manuscript to 2 reviewers. We got an initial decision (“accept with moderate revisions”) not up to three weeks later, accompanied by two reviews, considered one of which was particularly helpful and detailed. Our revised manuscript was accepted, and we’ve since been through two pageproof cycles. All this has happened in time for publication today – only 10 weeks after initial submission. That’s by far the fastest any manuscript of mine has ever been handled. It isn’t unusual for the method to take greater than a year.
So now, the resulting paper is free to the realm, with all its high-resolution colour illustrations. Better of all, in a move towards increasing transparency, the peer reviews, our response letters and the handling editor’s comments are all online alongside the paper. Here’s good not just since it shows that no corners were cut, but additionally for the reason that reviewers can receive the credit they deserve for his or her contributions.
Legacy publishers haven’t noticed it yet, but their world is ending. PeerJ handled our paper in a fifth of the time an ordinary journal would have taken, for one thirtieth the price, producing a much more useful or even beautiful result, and with a clear peer-review process.
There is not any way the Elseviers and Springers can compete with that. While Elsevier remains seeking to work out what its “sponsored article” licence is, and whether it’s even going to be truly open access, PeerJ has appeared out of nowhere and eaten its lunch.
Traditional publishers didn’t take PLOS ONE seriously when it launched. By the point they’d finished sneering at it, it had overtaken all their journals for volume and most of them for impact. It feels like PeerJ goes to do the identical before they also have time to begin sneering. As a palaeontologist, the one conclusion i’m able to draw is that they have been out-evolved.
