I was surprised that Paul Guinnessy's
story "Stakeholders Weigh Costs of Open-Access Publishing" (PHYSICS TODAY, August 2007, page 29) didn't mention page charges as an alternative to open-access author charges. A number of society-published
journals, Physical Review Letters and the Journal of Chemical Physics among them,
continue to balance reasonable page charges with reasonable subscription rates. The American
Physical Society was forced to discontinue that model in the face of competition with commercially
published journals that have no page charges but very high subscription rates. Even without page
charges, the American Institute of Physics and APS continue to offer journals—for example,
Physical Review—at a very reasonable subscription rate compared with commercial
counterpart Nuclear Physics. Costs to subscribing institutions are a concern, but isn't
the primary issue the cost of commercially published journals and their associated portfolio
pricing deals (for example, access to all of a publisher's journals)?
I share David Stern's concern
about the possible loss of quality that may accompany widespread open access. Open access is primarily
driven by the needs of the medical community and its patients. Shouldn't open-access experiments
be conducted and refined there first, before we attempt to impose it on all of science and technology?
The discussion about
stakeholders and open-access publishing is a great one, weighing points pro and con, but I
believe that it misses the underlying problem with having organizations formed around the intent
to profit from the publishing of scientific research. We, as scientists, must decide if a refereed
paper that is locked in a vault is as valuable as one that is not refereed but is accessible to everyone
on the internet. It is no wonder that authors who avoided the pay-for-play trap have found their
citation numbers increasing dramatically. Search engines could locate the papers and present
them to people with an interest, and those people could read them without having to pay. I find it
difficult to see how it would go unnoticed that freely available papers would get read more frequently
than ones that have to be paid for. But then people are making money on all the papers that are behind
closed doors.
Money aside, the real problem
from my perspective is that I can no longer find papers at all. The end result of their being locked
up by services that want money is that since I don't have a budget for purchasing papers, I don't get
to read them. That work has become dead to the community. Can the scientific community afford to
allow a large portion of its work to be locked away? Will science continue to develop, or will it wither
under the oppressive need to generate a revenue stream?
As a footnote to
the article on open-access publishing, let me point out that among the main beneficiaries of such
publishing are people like me, trained and interested in physics but not directly involved or institutionally
affiliated. Such "outsiders" are openly discriminated against by the preprint arXiv at Cornell
University. We are denied the option to contribute unless vigorously endorsed by a member of the
academic in-group. Does physics benefit from maintaining a person's lifelong interest in the
subject, and if so, what is being done by the American Physical Society and the American Institute
of Physics to foster such interest in the broader community?
Recently I had wanted to
consult a one-page comment that had appeared in the American Journal of Physics 18 years
ago. I could have gone to my local university's physics department library and copied the page for
10 cents. However, being 82 and lazy, I preferred to go online to the AIP website, where I discovered
that the page I wanted was available for downloading at a price of $19. Oddly enough, I paid this.
I might have gotten a discount if I could have remembered my "membership number," whatever that
is.
But I wonder how such a pricing
policy squares with some of the declaratory words emanating from AIP. For instance, the fine print
in the front of every PHYSICS TODAY issue states that AIP "serves physics and related fields . . .
with programs, services, and publications—information that matters." Well, if the information
matters at all, why not make it available to the public at a reasonable price? How does the current
AIP policy promote the diffusion—among the American taxpayers who are supposed to support
ever-growing federal physics investments—of knowledge of physics? Simply put, what is
not-for-profit about charging $19 for a one-page download of 18-year-old material?
[Editor's note: We invited Fred Dylla, executive director and CEO of the American Institute of Physics, to respond to Thomas Phipps.]
Dylla replies to Phipps:
It does seem inappropriate to pay $19 for a one-page download of an 18-year-old article. But one
has to dig below the surface to understand the economics of scientific journal publishing as a context
for the pricing of such journal products by nonprofit publishers.
The American Institute
of Physics (AIP) publishes several of the most highly cited and subscribed-to physics journals
(for example, Applied Physics Letters and the Journal of Applied Physics), and
also provides publishing services for many of its member societies, including the American Physical
Society and the American Association of Physics Teachers, publisher of the American Journal
of Physics.
Producing a high-quality,
peer-reviewed archival journal such as AJP involves significant costs, including those
for a reliable online platform that has made AJP and other member-society journals available
to a much wider audience than did the former print-only subscriptions. AIP has also made major investments
to digitize and make available electronically journal issues that were published in print long
before the industry made the transition to digital. Those real costs are recovered, by and large,
through institutional subscriptions paid by libraries and research institutions. The cost of
producing one typical article is between $1500 and $3000. Considering the average journal subscriber
base, a $20 price for a nonsubscriber to download an article is not out of line.
AIP's online platform,
Scitation, already provides free access to full abstracts, index terms, and search capabilities
for more than a million articles. Our journal prices are significantly lower than those for similar
journals produced by commercial publishers, and we invest the modest return in outreach services
such as lay-language translations of important research results, subsidized programs for students,
and subsidized student and member-society subscriptions for PHYSICS TODAY.
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