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Funding Strategies and Open Acess

Thomas Nadelhoffer

In an earlier post, I
made a plea for suggestions and perhaps assistance when it comes to a new open
access, online journal I am hoping to launch sometime next year (see here).  I got some helpful feedback and some generous
offers of assistance. For that, I am thankful. Now, I would like to discuss
what I take to be the primary hurdle facing Philosophical
Exchanges as well as any other open access philosophy journals—namely, funding.
To date, most open access journals (both within and outside philosophy) have tried one of the three basic strategies for
addressing the funding problem:

  • Charge a publication fee to anyone who
    publishes in the journal.
  • Charge a submission fee to anyone who submits to the journal.
  • Requesting voluntary donations to submit
    to (or publish in) the journal.

Just to give you a sense for how problematic the
first  model can be, consider Frontiers in Human Neuroscience—which is a very well-respected, open access, online journal. The
publication fees for research articles run anywhere from $1,500 to $2,900. Clearly this is
suboptimal. After all, lots of state
universities and colleges (including my own) don't have the money to regularly
spend $2,000 publishing fees anytime a faculty member gets an article
published in one of these journals. So, this kind of arrangement privileges (in some sense at least) folks
at top R1s, while pricing people who work at less well-endowed institutions out
of the publication market. Obviously, this is an ironic state of affairs for an
open access journal—namely, in order to be open access for readers, access to
publish has to be inadvertently denied to any researchers who don’t have the stout publishing fees to pony up. So, in effect, most researchers will get priced out of the open access journals if the first model is adopted and the prices are this high.  The open access movement
can and should do better than this (or so it seems to me).

I think the same problem arises
when it comes to the second aforementioned option—namely, relying on submission
fees (which are typically far more modest than publication fees). The problem here is once again fairness and
equal access. Graduate students, adjuncts, and other non-tenured faculty may
not have the money to pay even modest submission fees (especially if open
access philosophy journals become more prominent). So, this, too, is not an
optimal model. For instance, the top open access philosophy journal—Philosophers’ Imprint—tried
to start collecting submission fees a few years ago (once the start-up funding
for the journal ran out). It sparked an interesting debate here on Leiter Reports. Since then, Philosophers’ Imprint has changed its
policy and adopted the third model mentioned above instead—namely, a voluntary
donation approach. On this model, when people submit a paper (or have a paper
accepted), they are invited to make a voluntary donation.

I personally think this is the
best model—but it precariously depends on voluntary donations!  This seems like a perfect place for a tragedy
of the commons. I’d be curious to hear whether the donations are covering the
costs of the journal. As David Velleman (Co-Editor of Philosophers’ Imprint)
pointed out in the last discussion thread here about these issues, there are no free lunches
in this world and open access journals are no different. Perhaps he can say a
bit more in this thread concerning how the policy is working out. In my eyes, if
it isn’t a workable model, open access philosophy is in trouble.

I have lots more to say about
these issues, but first I wanted to hear what others think.  If you’d like me to say more about what I
think it will cost me to run an open access journal like Philosophical Exchanges here at College of Charleston, I will be
happy to do so in the discussion threads. 
But for now, I wanted to share a salient anecdote instead (in closing).

Just the
other day, I submitted an article to a traditional journal. I was given the “option”
of publishing it open access (contingent upon acceptance) rather than having it
locked away forever behind a corporate-academic pay wall. That sounded like a great
idea. But the $1,200 price tag was too rich for my blood. In my eyes, this case
highlights how odd our current arrangement is when it comes to our published
work (i.e., our life’s work). We give our work away to institutions that don’t
compensate us.  In exchange, they profit
from our work by trying to fleece our libraries while at the same time
massively curtailing how many people have access to our work. In exchange, we get the "prestige" of having participated in the process by having our work appear behind the veil. Surely we can do better. But how is it to be done? Thoughts?

p.s. I will be moderating
comments, so please be patient.  Signed
comments are preferred.

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25 responses to “Funding Strategies and Open Acess”

  1. Jamie Dreier

    There is another model: JESP is sponsored by USC Law, USC Arts & Letters, and the USC Annenberg Center.
    I know, nice work if you can get it. But I do believe the long-run solution will be for universities to fund open access journals. Universities will benefit, saving money on subscriptions, so it's just a matter of figuring out how to solve the collective action problem.

    Reply
  2. Thomas Nadelhoffer

    Jamie,

    That's right. But it's a pretty serious investment that most colleges and universities (and funding agencies like the NEH) have been (and will likely continue to be) unwilling to make. If I remember correctly, Mark Schroeder suggested in a prior post on these issues that just the editorial assistant for JESP costs roughly $10,000 per year. I assume the editor of JESP also gets compensated somehow–e.g., a course release to run a journal here at my home institution would cost roughly $10,000. That's $20,000 per year for a single open access journal (that specializes in value theory). That's an arrangement most universities and colleges will be either unwilling or unable to go along with. So, while you're right that the best way forward is to have colleges and universities fund open access journals, I don't see any way of getting around the collective action problem you highlight. Moreover, as more fields move in the open access direction, the amount of resources needing to be invested in order to launch and maintain new journals will continue to mount–making it even harder to find funding for any particular journal. And until there is a critical mass of respectable, open access journals, libraries (and hence universities and colleges) won't be able to break free of the stranglehold of the traditional publishers. This really is a vicious circle.

    Another way to go would be trying to crowdfund some open access journals in philosophy. Yet another would involve paying for these journals via advertising revenue. Unsurprisingly neither one of these options is without its own problems. But no matter what we decide is the best way forward, it seems to me that more of us should be working together to solve precisely the collective action problem you've highlighted.

    Reply
  3. Dale Miller

    This is a very small point, but if you decide to go with the voluntary donations model then you might want to make the suggestion to readers in addition to those who submit articles. And, in that case, you might want to think about offering those who contribute enough some small reward for doing so. The Stanford Encyclopedia lets those who donate a certain amount access articles in a format that is nicer for printing. I've been a "Friend of the SEP" for the last few years, and while this isn't my primary reason for doing so, it may very well tip the balance in terms of my willing to kick in.

    Reply
  4. Timothy Fuller

    I'd draw a distinction between for-profit vs. non-profit open access journals. My understanding is that Frontiers is owned by Macmillan Publishers, which owns Nature Publishing Group, the partner of Frontiers. Perhaps publication fees wouldn't be so exorbitant if the Frontiers journals were on the non-profit model. IIRC, Frontiers also claims to have a sliding scale for publication fees, which if implemented by a non-profit journal could mitigate harm, and potentially serve as a superior alternative to the submission fee model. I get the sense you won't be running Philosophical Exchanges on a for-profit model, and if that's correct I'm curious if you've calculated an average per-article publication fee if that were the journal's sole/main source of funding. Is it anywhere in the ballpark of $1000+?

    Reply
  5. Dhananjay

    One part of the publishing process is already done on a highly distributed, purely volunteer and unpaid basis – refereeing. I understand that running a journal is more work than refereeing even quite a lot, but what I mean to suggest is that that work could be distributed amongst a number of largely autonomous co-editors.

    Another proposal: the APA could start funding open-access journals, as the LSA has recently started to do with Semantics & Pragmatics, which Kai von Fintel and David Beaver have turned from an experiment into a leading specialty journal in just six years (the data on citation from their first few years of operation – http://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/semantics-and-pragmatics – are very impressive). I believe MIT and UT are still contributing to their costs, but I don't know the exact breakdown of the figures. Here's a handout from a talk by von Fintel describing the journal's operations – http://celxj.org/downloads/OpenAccess/vonFintel-handout.pdf – that has a bit more detail.

    Reply
  6. Mark

    Paging Templeton…

    Reply
  7. curious onlooker

    Out of curiosity, what exactly are the costs involved for an online journal?

    I know that writers and editors volunteer their time (or do it as a requirement for their teaching jobs) and that bandwidth/storage are almost free these days (perhaps even actually free if readership is low enough). But as an outsider to the process I wonder what else is involved.

    Reply
  8. Elisa Freschi

    Suppose a university spends 2,000 E (or USD) to have each faculty member's paper published on an open access journal AND/OR 2,000 E (or USD) each year for the university library's subscription to a certain journal. Would not it make sense, from a purely economical point of view, for the university to finance some top-quality OA journals? It would only take a few faculty members publishing in them + some subscriptions to other journals less to make it a convenient business. If other universities would join, then, even more so.

    Reply
  9. David Robjant

    I'm strongly against charging for publication for access
    (because I want to read).

    I'm strongly against charging for publication
    (because I submit and publish, but as yet without having any academic institution to sponsor those publications).

    Under both headings, charging presents a curtailment of the pool of talent available to publication, and therefore of an impairment to the quality of the work published. This much is generally agreed. What follows? There is no such thing as a free lunch, but these public goods are *public* goods. How then to cut the Gordian knot of "the collective action problem" and get to the point where costs are more equitably distributed? Legislate to compel the establishment of not for profit philosophy journals (or history journals, etc.) at each any every one of a long list of institutions, list to be fixed by some metric of subject area productivity & consumption which applied in the past, so that no one is tempted to cut present courses to avoid the expense. This would allow elective specialisation within subject area both before and after the fact. With all the important institutions are doing it, the collective action problem is solved, and profit-taking is eliminated from journal publishing.

    Isn't this the sort of collective action problem for which people invented politics?

    Reply
  10. Franz Huber

    The publishing costs for a journal are about 10K dollars per year, depending on how much you publish and what format you publish in (pdf plus html versus html only, print plus online versus online only; compared to the costs for putting everything into pdf the costs for printing and shipping are negligible, and I personally think that we should avoid print journals for environmental reasons).

    Ergo works with MPublishing, a group of librarians at the University of Michigan Library supporting the open access movement. MPublishing charges only the costs they incur themselves, but the figures seem to be pretty robust: Springer tells me they can run a journal like Ergo for 10K Euros per year. (Compare this figure to the 3K that many publishers charge authors to make one single article open access.)

    Ergo is currently funded by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. Jonathan will say more about this and funding in general in his reply.

    The other costs for running a journal are personnel costs for copy-editing and editorial management. At Ergo we do this ourselves, and Jonathan and I each spend about 24 hours/week. We can only do this, though, because we can rely on 40 terrific editors, and many more referees, that handle all the real editorial work at no charge: http://www.ergophiljournal.org/editors.html

    Reply
  11. Landon Schurtz

    Supposing for a moment that the problem cannot be solved adequately (that is to say, there's no system we could implement whereby no one would suffer an undue burden), perhaps it would be useful to consider under which system those who are disadvantaged can most easily avoid the disadvantage, even illicitly.

    In the "classic" model, high fees are charged to university libraries, meaning not all libraries have access to all journals, and thus not all researchers have access to all articles cheaply/for free. To get around this, though, a researcher must only find someone who is willing to copy an article for her and/or share an access password.

    In the "submission fees" model, as noted above, even modest fees weigh heavily on students, adjuncts, and early-career researchers, and to "dodge" this problem requires that the student, adjunct, or early-career researcher find someone to loan or give him money to meet said fees.

    In the "publication fees" model, the same concern attaches, only moreso.

    The current model is far from ideal, but it bears noting that the bar to access is more easily overcome than the bar to submission or publication would be in one of the other models. I wonder if this might indicate that moving to one of the "open-access" models might actually be a net detriment to the profession. Or is it just that as someone with social capital (being a relatively well-liked, extroverted, white male) I more readily note the cost in real money, which, by contrast, I do not possess in abundance?

    Reply
  12. Thursday's Child

    I am interested in this topic, and delight at the thought that you have solution, but I must confess I have no idea what your solution is. One sentence in your proposed solution to the collective action problem is clearly mistyped:

    "Legislate to compel the establishment of not for profit philosophy journals (or history journals, etc.) at each any every one of a long list of institutions, list to be fixed by some metric of subject area productivity & consumption which applied in the past, so that no one is tempted to cut present courses to avoid the expense."

    Can you say what you mean in plain words?

    Reply
  13. David Robjant

    Legislate to compel the establishment of not for profit subject journals at a list of host institutions.

    (I suppose that part was reasonably clear. Because I also want to give some idea of how a list of host institutions might be drawn up, I really need a new sentence for this purpose.)

    The list of host institutions will be fixed by some identifier of activity which applied in the past, so that no institution is moved to reduce activity as a method of avoiding the expense of hosting a journal.

    (Is that clearer?)

    My main thought was that collective action problems can have political solutions, and that this is what political institutions are for.

    Political solutions have all kinds of pitfalls – including drafting clarity (Touché). Another risk, also run by other kinds of solution, is the unintended consequence. But I think the discussion goes the way it does – into trying to weigh up one obvious detriment to a public good against another – largely because the kinds of solution that would be adequate to serving the public good in both areas have been ruled out at the start.

    Reply
  14. Jonathan Weisberg

    I strongly second Jamie Dreier's view that universities should fund OA journals, it's just a matter of solving the collective action problem to make this happen.

    Suppose the editors of philosophy's established journals banded together and agreed to walk away from subscription-based publishers, setting up OA shops instead with funding from university libraries. How many libraries would they need to get on board to make this happen?

    As Franz says, it costs about $10K/year to publish an OA journal. That's 50 university libraries paying $200/year, much less than they already pay for subscriptions from for-profit publishers like Springer. If just 100 libraries get in on the deal, they'll be saving money even on journals from academic presses like OUP.

    Instead of moving existing journals to OA, we've been slowly adding new OA journals one by one. Maybe it's time to reverse our approach.

    Established journals would have to change their names, and sacrifice (temporarily) some of their name-brand recognition. Also, defectors would probably be invited to step in as new editors for the abandoned, subscription-based journals. So public campaigning, maybe even some shaming, would be necessary.

    But it seems to me a manageable feat, given some strong coordination in our discipline's leadership.

    Reply
  15. Derek Bowman

    Jonathan Weisberg,

    I like this idea. But what's to stop the publishers from holding the archives hostage? That would seem to prevent libraries from saving money in this way, since they'd now need to support new journals but still pay publishing houses for archive access.

    Reply
  16. Anne Jacobson

    Scientists and others in STEM often pay page fees out of grants. And many universities help with the costs of book publishing. So there very well establihed sources for the kind of fees we are discussing.

    One problem right now for philosophers is that in general we don't have a practice in place that justufues asking for a sum without a specific destination. And we don't have reliable grant resources. The latter seems to me to strongly work against asking authors to pay.

    The last STEM conference I didn't go to had a $1,000 registration fee. I'd expect it did not have many humanities people there. The same thing might happen with philosophy journals charging high fees. Even those at wealthy institutions may refuse out of principle- whatever it might be – to participate.

    Reply
  17. DMS

    What about starting an endowment? Or would that be too difficult to build?

    Reply
  18. Expat Grad student

    Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but your claim that the cost of printing and shipping don't far exceed the cost of putting everything into pdf seems wrong. While it may be true if one plans to use proprietary software, there is no need for that.

    If open access journals want to publish pdfs (as I think they should), just have your contributors submit LaTeX documents. This would also reduce the amount of time spent on copy editing. You then end up with consistent formatting done for free (plus whatever copy editing still needs to be done).

    I understand that many people do not want to learn LaTeX, but it does seem to be on the rise with journals, both for- and non-profit.

    Reply
  19. Franz Huber

    You are absolutely right about this: if you require your authors to submit the final versions of accepted papers as .tex files, then you have almost no publishing costs even if you publish pdfs. However, if you do not require your authors to submit the final versions of accepted papers as .tex files, then almost all the costs are incured by producing pdfs (very roughly the costs are 10 dollars/page).

    Specialist journals such as Springer's Studia Logica can require their authors to submit final versions in Latex. However, if you want to run a pluralist journal such as Ergo that accepts submissions on all philosophical topics and from all philosophical traditions, and you are serious about being open to all these submissions, then you simply have to accept submissions in other formats.

    At Ergo we have briefly considered requiring authors to submit final vesions in .tex, but quickly dropped the idea as many philosophers do not even know what Latex is, let alone would be prepared to produce anything other than a word file.

    To sum up: you can reduce the publishing costs to almost nothing by requiring authors to submit .tex files, but you risk simply not getting any submissions in areas other than logic and formal epistemology and mathematical philosophy.

    Reply
  20. Barry Lam

    Libraries ought to have enough hard copies in recent years to make this problem less pressing. But if we have an open revolt from recent authors, I want to see publishers try to sue all of us for making copies of our published papers available publicly. You think all of the people filling up those journals with their work and doing all of the reviewing will respond well to RIAA-style litigation?

    Reply
  21. Dan Dennis

    Franz, could authors whose articles are accepted be asked to submit a final version as a PDF? There are lots of easy ways of converting a Word document to PDF for free. See http://www.wikihow.com/Convert-a-Microsoft-Word-Document-to-PDF-Format

    Am I missing something?

    Reply
  22. Ehud

    Small technical note: It is quite possible to write most philosophical papers using a simple plain text format such as markdown, and transform it to latex, rtf (word), and many other formats, using pandoc (which is open source and the work of a philosopher).

    Reply
  23. Thomas Nadelhoffer

    A few responses to all of the helpful feedback (in no particular order):

    First, Philosophical Exchanges would be a non-profit enterprise. But that doesn't really help much when it comes to accessing funding–unless this makes it more likely people would donate (or crowd fund) the journal.

    Second, I have tried to think of creative ways to get more people to volunteer with the journal to keep the operating costs down. For instance, as was noted above, refereeing is already a highly distributed, purely volunteer, and unpaid "service" we contribute to the field. Why couldn't we adopt a similar model for typesetting–which would further cut down on costs (see my next comment)?

    Third, several readers mentioned the costs of typesetting. This is a significant cost. I assume it's why Philosophers Imprint requires authors whose work is accepted to submit a LaTex file. See here for their directions: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/philosophersimprint/ Surely, requiring authors (or their friends or graduate students) to typeset their own manuscripts is suboptimal (even if it is better than the other options available). I see no reason why we couldn't make this part of the volunteer basis of the journal. Here's what I had in mind: In order to submit to and publish in Philosophical Exchanges, each philosopher would have to sign up to be either a referee or a typesetter (or both). Each author would get one "free pass." But after an author has published an article, she is not allowed to submit or publish another until she has refereed a paper or typeset a paper (depending on her skill set). The more successful Philosophical Exchanges is, the more people would likely be willing to volunteer in this way.

    Fourth, two readers have mentioned an endowment. That seems like a great idea. I suggested earlier that I could try to crowdfund the journal with something like kickstarter. That would be one way of building an initial pot of money to develop the journal. The problem is that it won't cover the costs long term. For that, we would need a proper endowment. Unfortunately, Templeton would not be a suitable source of funding (given the polarizing nature of their influence, funding, etc.). But if people have any other concrete suggestions concerning alternative funding sources, I am all ears. The NEH has a wing for digital humanities funding, but they explicitly don't fund new journals. Plus, we need more than just start up funding. We need funding to maintain the journal long term.

    Fifth, a reader mentioned the APA. Unfortunately, they won't apparently be much help. They are starting their own journal (which is a good thing) but it, too, will be behind the pay wall of Cambridge University Press (which is not a good thing). So, while the APA could have done something to forward the open access philosophy movement, they chose not to do so.

    Finally, I wanted to thank Franz for highlighting just how much work is involved (even for a newly launched journal such as Ergo). Even with 40 area editors, Franz and Jonathan are each still spending 24 hours per week on the journal. If you add that workload on top of a usual teaching and research load, it quickly becomes unmanageable unless the hosting department/university is willing to give course releases, etc.–which also requires a substantive investment. The more narrowly focused the journal is, the less of a problem this will be since a specialist journal will presumably receive fewer submissions (and require less time) than a comparably successful pluralist (or generalist) journal. Since Philosophical Exchanges is aiming for the latter format, that means that developing and running it will take significant time. And while the folks in the digital humanities wing of the library here at College of Charleston have agreed to do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to setting up the journal, funding it long term will be a problem here (as most places). So, that's where things stand.

    Reply
  24. Franz Huber

    (1)

    Dan, that's a great idea, but I am afraid it does not work: a journal needs a professional appearance with a uniform design. Collecting pdfs and putting them online is not enough.

    (2)

    Eduh, you are absolutely right that it is possible to transform non-.tex files into .tex files etc. However, this takes a lot of time. And even if you had the time to do all this in addition to managing a journal, academic publishing is more than just, well, publishing. While I don't agree with what Greg says here, you get an idea of what else is involved:
    http://choiceandinference.com/2013/11/11/open-access-philosophy-journals/#more-4019

    You can still do all this yourself — after all, that is what publishers do for a living, and why shouldn't you be able to do the same? However, I doubt you can do this over an extended period while still pursuing a career in academia. That is just not possible.

    (3)

    Thomas, first, thanks a lot for your efforts in launching a new open-access journal!

    Second, your proposal from above is similar to one I made on this blog few years ago:
    http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/what-kind-of-obligation-to-philosophers-have-to-referee-papers.html

    I still think we should try to implement something along the lines you suggest. However, I also think it would hurt rather than help Philosophical Exchanges if you started out by doing so. A journal first needs to build up a reputation, and before you have done so every restriction is, well, restrictive. Some philosophers do not even respond to e-mails that do not invite them to give a talk for a fat honorarium. It just won't happen that the current superstars of our field start typesetting for you in order to submit their work when publishing houses pay them for submitting their work. And if the current superstars don't submit their work to your journal, the future superstars who don't have tenure yet won't do so either…

    Reply
  25. Patrick Frierson

    My view is that this collective action problem could be significantly mitigated if well-established scholars preferentially submit articles to open-access journals, particularly of the JESP and Ergo kind. If Colleges and Universities have the sense that the journals they fund are likely to become among the most highly reputed journals in the field, $10,000/year will be a relatively small price to pay for the prestige that it will bring to the institution. If a JESP funding model were combined with voluntary contributions, the cost to the institution would be even smaller.

    Reply

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