Scientific writing 3.0: A reader and writer's guide - Jean-Luc Lebrun, Justin Lebrun 2021
Journal choice: subscription or open?
Strategic writing
The reading toolkit
You have probably heard of the open access movement in scientific publishing. There is already a wealth of information on its history, models and motivations available on the internet, so we won’t unnecessarily paraphrase what can easily be accessed from a Wikipedia article. Instead, we’ll focus only on the essential details and what concerns you as a writer seeking to be published.
The key differences between a subscription-based journal (the “traditional journal”) and an open access journal are the issues around payment, copyright, and prestige. Let’s take a look at payment and copyright first.
Payment and copyright
In traditional journals, the publisher pays all costs associated with the publication: layout, editing, printing, distribution, etc. In exchange, the author hands over the copyright to the journal, and the paper is placed behind a paywall. To access the article, potential readers have to pay a fee (either per article or as a yearly subscription). Publishing in traditional journals is free for the author, but costly to readers and academic institutions.
In the open access publishing model, the author pays a fee to keep the paper free for readers. Fees range anywhere from USD $8 to $3900. The author keeps the copyright to the published material, and the article is free to access. Publishing in open-access journals is free for readers but costly for the author.
As supporters of the open science movement, we would argue that the point of publishing should be reader-focused. Not all readers (or even institutes!) are capable of shouldering the growing cost of maintaining multiple journal subscriptions just to stay abreast of the latest developments in their fields of research. Additionally, publishing costs are rarely paid for by the author out-of-pocket (a little over 10%)7. The employer or funding agency usually shoulders the burden. Some open access journals will even reduce or remove the fee altogether if the researcher is unable to pay or is from a developing country.
Let’s think about the issue mathematically. Let’s say it costs a non-open access subscription-based journal $900 to publish a paper. Let’s also assume that each reader needs to pay $35 to download that paper. What number of readers does the publisher need to break even?
$900/$35 = 25.7, so 26 readers. At 50 readers, the journal has profited $8508. At 100 readers, $2,600. As the number of readers increases, the total financial cost of accessing the paper grows multiplicatively.
Who pays for these downloads? Researchers and research institutes, i.e. the scientific community. Where do the profits from these sales go? Rarely back into research, but to the publisher. As the number of readers increases, the financial burden on the scientific community increases.
By contrast, in the open access model, the financial burden to the scientific community does not scale up with the number of readers but is fixed. Although the author will pay $900 upfront and never recoup this money, their sacrifice will reach a break-even point with subscription journals at 26 readers. At 50 readers, the cost-per-access effectively drops to $18 per person. At 100 readers, $9. As the number of readers increases, the initial cost remains fixed so the financial burden on the scientific community decreases.
Using statistics from the highly-regarded open access journal PLoS ONE, the average article receives 800 views per year. Using a 3-year period for measurement, this means an article will be viewed 2400 times on average. In a traditional non-open access journal, this amounts to a total expenditure of 2400 × $35 = $84k for access to the research, the profits of which go to the publisher. In an open access journal, the collective cost to science remains at a fixed $900, and the paper’s value is multiplied by its number of readers, so the science effectively costs $900/2400 = 37 cents per reader.
Of course, these calculations are simplified for the purpose of comparison and do not take into account other expenses, nor the fact that readership at subscription-based journals is smaller (a consideration of its own), nor that many researchers have discounted per-person fees as their employer pays a large institutional subscription9. But the fact remains that the amount earned by subscription journals is shockingly large. Make no mistake, the world of scientific publishing is a massive for-profit industry (to put its earnings in context, it earns more than the entire recording industry10 (in 2011, $19B > 14.8B)).
Visibility vs. Citations
Should you care more about being read or about being cited?
A 2008 (and later reconfirmed 2010) randomised controlled trial11 found that during the first year after publication, open access articles received 119% more full-text downloads, 61% more PDF downloads, and 32% more unique visitors (i.e. not repeat visitors). Yet, the same study also found that citation count between open access and subscription-based journals was not significantly different. What does this mean? In a response to the article, Cornell researcher Philip M. Davis suggests that “The real beneficiaries of open access publishing may not be the research community, but communities of practice that consume, but rarely contribute to the corpus of literature.”
This statement deserves attention. As we have expressed earlier, citations are a writer’s currency. While many people may appreciate, learn from, or even use the findings in a scientific paper, only those that then go on to write about such use in further academic documents can offer a citation. Do these writers represent the totality of a journal’s readers? Not every reader is a researcher for whom “Publish or Perish” is a mantra! Citations are only a visible means of having contributed to scientific academia — not the world at large.
Prestige
In an ideal world, your worth to the scientific community is measured by the worth of your scientific contribution — an entity which is extremely difficult to quantify. Especially by administrators who may not have the necessary scientific knowledge! So instead, they rely on objective heuristics that are easily measurable, such as the number of articles written or the ranking of the journal in which the articles were published. Traditional journals are generally more trusted due to their reputation and the long history of their publishers, such as Wiley (>200 years), Taylor and Francis (>160 years), Elsevier (>130 years), and Springer (>100 years).
In contrast, open access publishing is very young. It launched in 2002 in Budapest, gathering momentum after some government bodies demanded that all publications benefiting from Public funding be made freely available (not behind a paywall).
But does open access’s youth engender a lack of trust in its model? Evidence points to a resounding “no”. Open access journals are gaining prestige of their own, eliminating the benefits of the traditional model. Even the incumbent giants of the publishing industry are not immune to the open model. Just recently (March 2019), the entire University of California (UC) system12 terminated its contract with Elsevier over rising subscription costs and limited affordable open access options. We truly are living in historic times.
Not to be left behind, publishing giants are realizing that if they do not adapt, they will lose considerable business. As a result, many large publishers have launched their own open access journals or adopted a hybrid model. The hybrid model gives the author the option of publishing traditionally or paying a publishing fee. The benefit of such a model is that the author retains the prestige of publishing in a well-ranked journal while also making their article accessible to a larger audience. The downside? Open access fees for these major publishers still tend to be on the steep side: US $3000 on average. Some journals also impose an embargo period (usually 12 months) during which the author cannot post the article on a non-commercial platform (their own webpage, for example).
In recent years, the metrics by which the prestige of a journal is measured have begun to change. Open access journals such as PLoS ONE and PeerJ are no longer simply relying on citation count to measure the success of a paper but also on social media visibility and number of readers. This shift may eventually allow scientists to publish where they believe their work will be most beneficial to readers, without having to keep career considerations and traditional measures of success in mind.