Academic journals vs. public good vs. money

Fizzing. Fizzing with ideas!

I'm just back from an excellent Arcadia seminar on "Re-engineering the scholarly journal", by Mark Patterson, Director of Publishing, Public Library of Science.

If you haven't seen PLoS, check it out, it's awesome. Just look at what they've done with their metadata - look at it! Lovely. https://www.plos.org/

Short version - PLoS is (among other things) an open access academic journal repository for science. That means two things:

1. The content is free

2. You can do whatever you like with the content, as long as you attribute it.

Now I have many things to say about open access academic content (nutshell: I think it's great). But I'm going to talk about business models. Something I don't like about journal publishing is the trajectory of cash.

There are Four players:

• Funding body
• Researcher
• Publisher
• Reader

The sequence goes like this:

1. Funding body given funding usually/often out of public funds (see also: the drug industry)
2. Grant request submitted by researcher
3. Grant request approved by funding body
4. Money handed over by funding body
5. Research done
6. Research submitted for publication to publisher
7. Publisher accepts for peer review
8. Peer review
9. Publisher publishes
10. Library (usually university affiliated) pays for subscription to content
11. Reader with library membership accesses content

OR (for the last two steps)

10. Reader pays for one-off access

11. Reader accesses content

Now this does my head in because of where the money changes hands. We start with public money (or, often enough that it counts), but we end with something that is not accessible to the public. Including the author!

The public can't use what they paid to create? That can't be right.

PLoS isn't like that, because PLoS doesn't charge for content. In PLoS, the public *can* use what they paid to create. But PLoS isn't a money sponge, it pays for itself - they're in 'surplus' (that's not-for-profit speak for 'profit') right now. How?

No really, how? How do you get in profit from not charging for content?

Well, they do it like this.

Consider those four players, in chronological reverse order this time:

• Reader
• Publisher
• Researcher
• Funding body

...now, who of these players have the most to gain from a single, individual piece of research hitting eyeballs? Who is the most fussed?

• Reader: Seriously not fussed, just wants good content
• Publisher: Semi-fussed, but only really cares about the aggregated eyeballs, not the individual articles
• Researcher: Moderately fussed, but is probably more fussed about the name of the journal (a rant for another day - this is not a sufficient value metric)
• Funding body: Pretty damn fussed.

Why is the funding body pretty damn fussed? Because the point of funding research is to have people read it. Without readers, the funding money is wasted. Results that are poorly disseminated may as well not exist.

What PLoS does is, they charge in accordance with fussedness. They charge the funding body.

Funding bodies pay for content to be published in PLoS. The cash-burden is thus neatly transferred from the end-user to the initiator. I'm not sure what it costs, but I do know that the funding bodies fork out. That means that the publisher can still generate a surplus/profit for their entirely necessary (and damn difficult) value-adding process of filtering, reviewing, aggregating, disseminating, and archiving, while the end-user can access what they did, after all, pay for, thereby increasing the sum total of knowledge in the universe.

What a great idea. Well done, PLoS. May you have many imitators.