A while back, I argued that we philosophers ought to shift our practices so that all of our research was published in open access mediums.
I then suggested several strategies for what the discipline needed to do.
One of the suggestions was that the editorial staff should simple migrate the journal into an open access forum. I noted that this would be particularly easy if the editorial board had the authority to switch publishing venues without penalty from the current publisher.
So, it looks like Analysis has that sort of migration authority, and they are leaving Blackwell. But they they are switching to Oxford University Press!
No! This would have been the perfect opportunity to free one of philosophy’s top journals from the clutches of proprietary publishing. If Analysis had the freedom to move, why not go open access?
In fairness to OUP and Analysis, as far as proprietary publishers go OUP isn’t so bad. I’m told they divert a sizeable chunk of earnings back into academia. They are also in the habit of offering several months of free access to all of their journals.
But still – can you imagine how great it would be if everyone had free online access to Analysis?
Indeed. It even seems like the idea of an academic journal with free online access is an idea for the 90’s, when print things were put up on the web as though it was just a print medium. Now it seems like there’s room for even better ideas, with all of the advantages of the 21st century web.
As the editor of the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, and as someone who would prefer research to be distributed in an open access manner, I think I can shed some light on some of the practical difficulties over and above an ideological abhorrence of open access. Indeed there is one very large practical problem—overhead. It still costs money to produce a journal. Even publishing material exclusively online, you still would need, in addition to the editor, at least one administrator and one person to deal with the web. PAS has an editor, and administrator, and an assistant editor. We try to save money where we can (by typesetting in house, for example) but we still need to pay our administrator and assistant editor as well as rent for an office. The money we get from subscriptions pays for this. The only way we could go open access right now is if we were endowed. Open access research will come some day, but it won’t be easy. There will have to be a change in the business model. But I do not yet see what that model could be independently of living off a charitable endowment.
Hey Mark,
Thanks for the comment. As an editor (and fan of open access) your perspective is very valuable for these sorts of discussions.
I did note in one of the previous posts mentioned above that there are, of course, still costs to running a journal. But you mention costs that I hadn’t anticipated.
In the previous post, I mentioned the costs of hosting the journals. However, I did recommend in this post a way to use funds generated by selling advertisements to provide referees incentives for timely review – http://www.andrewcullison.com/2008/04/fix-peer-review-problems-with-open-access-journals/
Perhaps ad revenue (at least for a popular journal) could generate enough to cover costs.
The other alternative would be for pretigious, wealthy Universities to offer up their administrative staff, office space, and supplies to support an open access journal. With all of the Universities out there, it seems reasonable that we could get a few of them to sponsor an open access journal.
The costs could even be split. Some Universities could offer the server space. Another University could provide the assistant editor. Another University could provide administrative staff. Administrative tasks could even be broken down and distributed across Universities so that departmental administrative assistants could take some of this on as part of their daily job.
Of course, I don’t know what your actual costs are for admin, office space and editorial assistants – so this is all highly speculative.
As a matter of curiosity, Mark, how much of an endowment would you guess we’d be talking about, to put open access genuinely within the realm of possibility for a journal like PAS?
Currently, the money for journals comes from university libraries, when they pay the publishers their hefty access fees. Those same libraries should instead use this money to pay publishers to go open access. It would probably even save them money.
I second Brandon’s question, and then we could figure out how much libraries would need to chip in annually.
Hypothesis:
The institutional subscription fees for Analysis and Australasian Journal of Philosophy are about $100. Mind is about $150. I’m guessing that the operating costs of a journal like Analysis is much lower than the revenue it generates on institutional subscriptions alone – in which case Richard’s seems like a pretty good one.
Not sure how big an endowment would have to be. Our operating costs are at about 30,000 pounds. That would have to then be a fraction of the interest of an endowment. So, you know, big money. I also doubt that ad revenue would be sufficient, though might help.
University sponsorship is an interesting idea. But space is competitive in most universities (well, at least all the universities that I have worked at). And the likelihood of them ponying up for support staff is low. Still, if someone pitched it in the right way to the right university, who knows?
I still think the business model would have to be rethought.
If we are thinking about web publishing, an editor might be able to take over the administrative duties entirely *if* they were given sufficient teaching reduction. But there is still the matter of massaging the author’s documents (which may be a Word doc, rtf, OpenOffice doc, LaTeX…) into an appropriate format depending on the tool chain. Even with a good setup, it is grunt work and time consuming. So the best case scenario is a two person operation as far as I can see. An editor can work for prestige and a sense of duty to the profession, the second person cannot. They would need to be paid reasonably (especially if, as is likely, they turn out to be a grad student).
Wow. That’s a lot. Ad revenue would (at best) probably only generate $10,000 – and that’s if the journal site were bringing in Leiter-size monthly audiences. I doubt it would.
Another option that I didn’t mention before to reduce the costs would be to have authors do the formatting/type-setting. I suspect the best thing would be to have a LaTeX template, and give authors simple instructions on how to insert their text into the template. I think this is pretty normal for other disciplines – and I think The Reasoner does that now.
So the typesetting load could be completely shifted to the authors. I know I’d jump through a bunch of hoops if a prestigious journal was willing to publish my paper.
UPDATE: Regarding University putting up support staff. Aren’t many philosophy departments free to shift administrative duties to administrative assistants that are in keeping with serving the profession and the interests of the philosophy department? Universities probably already pay staff to do administrative work for a philosophy department. The editor could shoulder much of the administrative stuff, but couldn’t a chunk of that fall on the department’s administrative assistant? So depending on the University and the rules governing administrative assistants – a lot of Universities are probably already paying someone who could do a lot of administrative work for a journal.
Requiring authors to use a specialized LaTeX class would be great. I would love it. Never going to happen. Most academics don’t even use Word properly.
About dropping administrative work onto the department’s administrative assistants. Most are already overburdened. Especially in the UK where various administrative bodies in the University meet savings targets by offloading work to the department level. (I’m looking at you, HR…)
Still even with the current regime there are things that can be done to improve open access. For example, as you may know PAS is a proceedings of talks given fortnightly in London. Right now I am trying to work out how to generate podcasts of these. If everything works out to our satisfaction, these will be distributed on an open access basis. (Wiley-Blackwell wasn’t happy at all about the suggestion.)
Mark,
Perhaps having philosophers use LaTeX is asking a bit much. At first I was thinking that it would be some simple copying and pasting with a few tags around headers, but I was completely ignoring some of the more technical formatting issues (e.g, blockquotes, bulleted lists, footnotes, endnotes etc…)
Regarding the admin stuff. I know at some Universities admin staff is way overburdened. A philosophy department would need to assess the workload of their own admin staff before committing admin support to a journal.
It might be worth coming up with a multiple editor model where some of those editors are in departments with lighter than average admin loads (perhaps at selective teaching colleges).
I know that part of the large burden placed on admin in some departments has to do with the added burden of having a graduate program. An admin at a graduate program sends out hundreds of job applications every year, processes hundreds of graduate applications on top of doing whatever an admin at a teaching college would do.
btw-Podcasting that PAS talks would be AWESOME…
Andrew,
I find this a very interesting discussion, and wanted to add a few points. I also want to extend my thanks to Mark for his input in this discussion already.
First, at neither the graduate program where I was trained nor my current institution do I think the departmental administrative staff would be able to help with the running of a journal to any significant degree. While USD doesn’t have a grad department, and thus is free of all the additional work such a department generates for support staff, we only have one administrative assistant (and 2 work studies) for 18 full-time faculty and anywhere from 13-17 adjuncts a term. I just don’t think that the additional duties you are thinking of could be performed by our departmental staff. And I suspect that my current insitution is likely to be fairly standard in that respect. Also, I think the likelihood of my dean to give release from teaching, particularly on a regular basis, to run a journal is very minimal.
I work as a section editor for the IEP, run by Jim Fieser and Brad Dowden. As you may know, the IEP is open-access, like the SEP. And while there are differences between journals and encyclopedias, there are many similarities, particularly with respect to the issues at hand (e.g., a multiple editor model). I have no idea if either Jim or Brad get release time in exchange for their many efforts on behalf of the IEP. But I know that (at least) the rest of the work for the IEP is done by volunteers. The section editors are all volunteers, as are the referees and, I think, the copy-editors/formatters. There are some weeks when I’ve put in 5-10 hours for the IEP, though most weeks it is less than that (1-2). While this may not be much, it does add to the already pretty high burden of obligations that most of us have. It also leads to a higher rate of turnover than is desirable.
I certainly think that open-access is desirable. I just don’t see it being feasible for a philosophy journal, especially a high quality one, any time soon.
Hi Kevin,
I hope all is going well, and it’s good to have the perspective of another editor on this thread.
I have a quick question about this claim:
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While USD doesn’t have a grad department, and thus is free of all the
additional work such a department generates for support staff, we only
have one administrative assistant (and 2 work studies) for 18 full-time
faculty and anywhere from 13-17 adjuncts a term. I just don’t think that the additional duties you are thinking of could be performed by our departmental staff. And I suspect that my current institution is likely to be fairly standard in that respect.
==============================
When you say ‘I suspect that my current institution is likely to be fairly standard in that respect’ – do you mean with respect to the 18 full-time faculty and 13-17 adjunct?
That doesn’t seem standard to me for a teaching college, but perhaps I have a bit of a limited perspective. I did my undergraduate at a teaching college with 7 full time faculty in the philosophy department. They have more now, but I think it’s about 10. None of the teaching colleges I interviewed at had more than 10 full-timers.
Related point. Your hourly estimates are helpful. In order to determine how feasible it would be to have a departmental admin shoulder any portion of the workload for journal administration – it might be good to figure out how many hours a week a journal admin would typically put in…
If someone reading this has any idea, I’d love to hear an estimate. I’ve never been on the operation side of a journal – so I couldn’t even begin to make that estimate.
Let me add that Philosophers’ Imprint constitutes an existence proof of the feasibility of a high-quality open access philosophy journal (published by a university library).
Hear, hear… (to Richard’s Philosophers’ Imprint comment)
On a blog I suppose that should be something like ‘read, read’
I have a consideration over Richard’s idea of simply diverting University resources to pay journal costs in order to make them open access:
wouldn’t this create a free rider problem?
As it is, everyone contributes because they need the resources, but while open access would help so many people, it might also make certain smaller universities contribute less (or contribute to fewer).
Any ideas on how to provide an incentive on the large scale?
Andrew,
I wasn’t suggesting that our numbers were standard (we’re bigger than some departmetns with grad programs), but that staff not having time to do these things would likely be standard. My guess is that smaller departments often have a wider range of things done by the departmental staff than we do, and that as a result having fewer faculty might not necessarily result in more time for journal stuff.
Regarding the hourly estimate, I could easily put in double that on a regular basis (and sometimes do, if mutiple sugmissions come in at a time or if I’m having trouble getting referees). But I’m sure that it’s much higher, and much more consistent, for general editors as opposed to a section editor.