Is there a place for a Subscription Journal in an Open Access world?

At the Annual Meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) in San Diego later this month [30 May, 2 p.m.] I will assert that yes, a subscription journal can continue its subscription business-model while effectively accelerating the transition of their discipline to Open Access—but only in the right circumstances, and only if a publisher adopts what I call "Maximum Dissemination" of the authors' work, including elimination of its paywall.

Some of the hardest problems to solve in the efforts to transition a whole discipline to Open Access involve society publishers in the humanities and some of the social sciences [HSS]. Unlike disciplines in STEM, the HSS disciplines rarely have funding agencies or government mandates that put money into accelerating free and open access to the scholarly record.

The momentum for Open Access in the various STEM disciplines is accelerating, largely due to recent strong actions by universities and funding agencies alike that are putting pressure on scholarly journals in those disciplines to "flip" to Open Access. Nothing in this post nor in my presentation at SSP is intended to blunt those initiatives, which I fully endorse.

But for humanities disciplines and many of the social sciences don't have funding agencies willing to provide funds to enhance dissemination. And, frankly, most of publishers in these disciplines have not been significant contributors to the hyper-inflation of journal pricing that has characterized STEM journals for the last 30 years.

Nevertheless, significant categories of scholars or potential scholars are excluded by the current paywalled journals even in HSS. It's worth enumerating a few categories of those who are excluded by a paywalled business model:

• Emerging scholars--having finished an advanced degree, but not yet associated with their next institutional home. We've spent 5 or 10 years educating new entrants to a field and then cut them off right while they are looking for their next institutional context to continue their chosen life's work.
• Retirees--often cut off from their institutional credentials with which they could otherwise continue to participate in areas of study that have already been their life's work.
• Unaffiliated scholars world-wide--there are innumerable reasons why individuals end up unaffiliated with academic institutions. Very few of these reasons justify being cut off from scholarly discourse.
• And under-resourced libraries--it's important to point out that every library in the world is under-resourced in some discipline or another. The exclusion of libraries in the Global South are particularly egregious, but it’s really important to take note that the exclusions of the paywalled system are ubiquitous.

Flipping the source of revenue from charging for access to charging on the production side (APCs, for example) eliminates all the above categories of people excluded from accessing the scholarly literature in their discipline. But it creates a similar list of those who are excluded from contributing to the scholarly literature simply because they create a barrier to those that do not have ready access to sources of funding for APCs.

Setting the stage for the presentation at SSP:

For the purposes of the presentation at SSP, I'm starting with the stipulation that a hypothetical scholarly society at its annual meeting of researchers and scholars has just held a vote which overwhelmingly calls for a transition of their discipline to Open. And now the Society’s publisher must decide what to do with their flagship journal which is a profitable subscription journal. The dilemma that this presents to the publisher and the society is that this publisher’s flagship journal enjoys a top reputation among scholars and provides important revenue for the society. This revenue is relied on for membership development, keeping the costs of meetings and conferences reasonably priced, and even to providing some money for awards, research initiatives, and travel scholarships.

Since there are no major funding organizations backing this particular discipline, many of the options for flipping this journal are unattractive. In particular, APC models do not look like they will support the kind of surplus that has previously been provided to the society. And the APC model has its own set of excluded populations, which overlap with those groups marginalized by paywalled systems listed above.

Redefining the Principal Mission of the Society Journal

I propose that we re-think the mission of the scholarly journal to focus on maximum dissemination and applying current tools and technologies to do so.

Scholars and researchers are experts in their fields. An article is accepted into a scholarly journal precisely because other experts in the field have reviewed a submitted article and have agreed that it meets the standards of scholarly rigor appropriate for that discipline. Scholars should be confident that publishers are looking out for their interests, and that they can rely on publishers to be the experts in dissemination—in how to do everything in their power to find the like-minded reader who will benefit from reading an accepted article. In fact, in the not so distant past, before the hyper-inflation of journal prices, this is what publishers attempted to do. They'd melt lead, typeset the text, cut-down trees, and put bundles of journals onto ships to go to the end of the world to find appropriate readers for their published articles.

Today dissemination is almost 100% electronic, and the Internet has opened up vast capabilities to get an author's work to the places where like-minded readers can find it and absorb it. Publishers wanting to maximize dissemination would want to regularly brainstorm each step in the process of publishing to identify ways in which they can be courageous in their commitment to maximizing dissemination.

The most important point in the process where a courageous approach to dissemination could be a real break-through in Open Access is the point at which an author's accepted manuscript post peer-review is accepted for publication. Early in the effort to recruit publishers to support Open Access, publishers were pressured to acknowledge that authors could self-archive a pre-publication version of their work (the so-called “green version”). Of the 2,561 scholarly publishers listed on the Sherpa/Romeo site which tracks publishers copyright policies with regard to self-archiving, a full 81% of them acknowledge that authors can archive some form of their submitted work. A very small percentage of authors actually do such archiving, and many of those that do, put their works in places that are not sustainably accessible.

Accepting an author’s final accepted manuscript (post peer-review) is the ideal point at which the publisher could take on the mantle of providing maximum dissemination of the author’s work.

Imagine at that point that a publisher informs the author as follows:

• Congratulations. Your article "xxxxx" has now passed peer-review and has been accepted for publication in the Journal of yyy.
• Part of our commitment to you is that we will seek maximum dissemination of your work, both the published version that we will now be preparing and your Author's Accepted Manuscript (post peer-review) for those who do not yet subscribe to the Journal of yyy.
• Upon publication of our published version we will archive your accepted manuscript in an Open Repository that meets all the requirements of sustainable accessibility. If you have a preference for which Open Repository, you'd like it submitted to, please check the appropriate box(s) below:
• {The author's home institution Institutional Repository}
• {An Open Repository used by many in this particular discipline.}
• {A National Repository used by scholars in the scholar's home country.}
• {etc.}

It's well documented that very few researchers/scholars actually understand the nuances of Open Access. Many of the things they think they know for a fact about Open Access aren't true. This accepted author is relying on the publisher for their expertise in navigating these waters. It is simply good practice to put a little info icon "i" next to some of these messages so that authors can click on to learn about sustainable accessibility, copyright, and other details. Authors are free to learn or, on the other hand, free to get on with their own work trusting that the publisher will do the right thing. Yes, it’s true that authors should know more about Open Access, but that should not be a requirement for them to have a publisher do right by them.

When the publisher's version of the article is published, the publisher enables its delivery system to bifurcate between requests from subscribers and requests from non-subscribers. This is what they already do today, offering subscribers the published version and non-subscribers a paywall, where they can rent or buy the single article, or to subscribe to the whole journal before getting the published version. But now, in this imagined scenario, the publisher who is following my proposed strategy to maximize dissemination sends non-subscribers directly to the author's accepted manuscript. The publisher knows where this is because it was the publisher who put it there.

Take note of the benefits of this approach to publishing a journal article:

• No restriction that prevents unaffiliated scholars, emerging scholars, or retirees from getting access.
• No barriers to under-resourced libraries gaining access. Moreover, this model of access will use the tools people already use to find articles including Google Scholar, other search engines, Webscale discovery system in libraries, and any other means of clicking on DOIs or URLs for the article. The entire process should work seamlessly for the user.
• No paywalls, no embargoes. As soon as someone e-mails or tweets news of this article being published, everyone in the world (with a good Internet connection) can gain access to the author's insights and results.
• No APCs which could restrict demographics and countries which cannot afford to participate in an APC-based system.
• No changes to the journal's current revenue model: subscriptions to the published version continue to be a source of revenue for this journal.

What's wrong with this model?

I'm often guided by the advice of an old friend of mine, Gerry Weinberg, who wrote back in the 80s: "If you have a bright idea and cannot think of at least three things wrong with your ‘solution’ then you probably haven't thought through the problem sufficiently.”

The NUMBER ONE thing "wrong" with this model is obvious: Why will anyone continue paying for a subscription when everyone can get the author accepted manuscripts for free?

Let's look at that objection closely. Imagine a university that has a center of excellence in the field in which this flagship journal publishes. That means that a number of researchers and scholars at that university, and very likely a good number of students, will be visiting several articles in this journal every few months if not more often. The subscribers will get the published version with excellent formatting, links to related articles, links after each citation, and other content related to the discipline such as conference announcements, letters to the editor, commentary on articles, and news. Non-subscribers will get pointed to the accepted manuscripts of a variety of authors sometimes on various platforms (Word, Google Docs, etc.) with limited linking to related content. If a publisher cannot beat the user experience of these non-subscribers, then it is not much of a publisher.

Now, in this hypothetical, publishers cannot charge hyper-inflated subscription charges. They no longer have customers "over a barrel." And so, if they try to charge too much, customers with limited means cancel and "get by" with access to the various author accepted manuscripts.

At the SSP presentation I will provide a couple of real world examples in which a publishing operation has embraced the fungibility of their content with freely available content and ended up with a profitable business. In one case it's a publisher who a few years ago began making their content free-to-read. The result? Their world-wide subscriptions have remained stable, and tracking usage of the free-to-read versions has provided up-selling opportunities for their sales force.

Is this risk free? No. But I think we can all agree that the future of scholarly publishing is hardly risk free! I suggest that by making a courageous embrace of the principle of maximizing dissemination a publisher will stand to gain an even stronger brand with scholars and researchers. This is especially true of those with a really strong brand already. The goodwill created by fully addressing the author’s interest in full and immediate dissemination will accrue to the journal and to the publisher. Measure any risks against the benefits of this model: no excluded populations of readers, no embargo, no paywall, and no APCs. I think it's a clear win.

Lots of other things are “wrong” with this model, but so far, I’ve not encountered any that are insurmountable, and all fall short of the substantial benefits of this model.

I'm hoping that readers of this LinkedIn LongPost will add comments which can help us think through this model. If you think of one of the dozen other things "wrong" with this model, I hope you'll share it in a comment, but also measure it against the list of things "right" with this model.

I'll also be interested in comments from anyone who has suggestions on which disciplines and scholarly societies might be likely to take this idea of maximizing dissemination seriously. Getting a single scholarly society's flagship journal to adopt this maximum dissemination approach would be a concrete lesson for lots of other disciplines.