The academic library funding crisis - micropayments as an alternative to subscriptions or pay-to-publish

In May 2006 Cell Science became the first scientific Journal to introduce the payment of royalties to authors. At the crest of the emerging wave of ‘open access’ online Journals, Cell Science has marked its 2^nd anniversary with the first introduction of a micropayment system to make scientific research more widely available, affordable and rewarding to authors. Although only a recent entrant into the global Scientific, Technical & Medical (STM) publishing market which an estimated annual turnover of $11bn (2004, Simba), Cell Science aims to transform the way in which scientific journals are funded to enfranchise authors and reduce the cost burden to readers and institutions.

The economic burden of knowledge

If information is power, the ability to rapidly access the latest research findings is essential for all scientists, physicians and industrialists, especially if costly research is not to be duplicated, and time is not to be spent finding technical solutions to problems which have already been solved elsewhere.

However the prohibitive cost of subscribing to a full complement of scientific publications prevents all but the very wealthiest institutions from accessing all pertinent ideas and results. Given that there are an estimated 2,000 international publishers who annually publish over a million articles in over 16,000 journals, and that a year’s subscription to a modest journal such as Brain Research can cost as much as $23,622 (2006 figures), it is perhaps not surprising that most libraries are severely limited in their selection.

In theory, by avoiding the costs of printing and manual distribution, electronic versions of academic journals should be cheaper both to produce and to distribute. Ironically electronic Journals have proven more expensive than print versions simply because institutions are usually required to pay for both. Large publishers have concentrated journal ownership and bundled electronic subscriptions into fixed journal portfolios, further driving up subscription costs within a captive market. For example, in order to access electronic versions of the 200 print journals to which it subscribes, one UK institution reported having to subscribe to a bundle of 1,300 electronic titles at substantially greater cost. By maintaining an independent electronic identity Cell Science will minimise its costs and download charges, and any future print versions will be priced independently.

On average, journal subscription costs increased by 215% between 1986 and 2001, with no immediate sign of a decline. The United Kingdom alone has seen subscription rates rise by over 200% during the last ten years. Even top members of the scientific hierarchy such as Nobel Laureate Professors Harold Varmus, Paul Nurse and Sir John Sulston are actively backing the trend towards ‘open access’ journals such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and BioMedCentral which provide free and open access for readers. ‘Open access’ has thus become a byword for the freedom of scientific information within a symbolic cold war of intellectual property ownership. In a Utopian world, scientific knowledge should be freely and widely available to all, although scientific research itself is far from free to produce or to publish. Even paperless online journals need to find substantial sums to offset the costs of high bandwidth hosting, graphic designers and web programmers, not forgetting the services of the editors and authors who might reasonably expect to receive royalties for their intellectual work. It may come as a surprise to many to learn that at present authors are rarely paid for scientific writing.

The pressure which has been slowly building within the ivory towers of academia over the past twenty years eventually exploded into a spate of refusals to pay for bulk subscriptions, government investigations into price fixing, and a plethora of new open access journals. Despite the recent calm, budget-strapped libraries continue to slash subscriptions to bundles of journals that are activity pushed by small armies of STM sales people who are carried by heavy publishing profits. Indeed, librarians are no longer supporting the notion that merely increasing their funding will solve their present crisis. They have simply come to the inevitable realisation that the vast range of scientific print and electronic journals currently available is simply unaffordable. Many academics are voicing the opinion that only economic models that relate a Journal’s revenue to its popularity will prevent the system from crashing under its own financial burden. Another solution to the puzzle would be a movement towards the increased provision of electronic books, or E-books, which would further reduce the burden of cost upon the libraries. A recent shift in public policy alignment has further polarised opinion against the ‘Fourth Estate’, galvanising librarians, government legislators, researchers, grant funding agencies, and antitrust lawyers in favour of fairer and more affordable models of scientific publishing.

Although it is the general public who fund most research through taxes and charitable donations, it will be upon the insistence of the research institutions they fund, the primary consumers of scientific Journals, that a change in the current system will be effected. To many lay people it may seem bizarre that those who fund academic research then pay again to receive published versions of their own research. Given that the money used to fund UK libraries is all public, and that over 90% of the research funding within the British university system is either governmental or charitable, the general public in effect pays twice, and in no small sum, to obtain access to new research.

The pressure of big money interests has continued to prevail despite the explosion of open access journals. Indeed recently the British government, anxious not to upset the STM publishing billionaires, declined to implement recommendations from its own select committee who had voted in favour of making scientific information freely available to the general public. Lately the United States Congress similarly asked the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a policy to ensure the archiving of all grant-funded research findings within six months of their original publication within its PubMed Central open access database. However, after heavy lobbying from the media mandarins, this proposal was watered down to a non-obligatory recommendation that all research be made accessible online a full year after its original commercial publication. The bureaucratic European Commission (EC) has itself begun a review of the STM publishing market which it dominates in terms of quantity, if not quality.

The pendulum swings towards ‘pay-to-publish’ open access Journals

However, despite the explosive growth of open access publications, established journal prices have not entered into freefall simply because each individual journal owns an effective copyright monopoly on the information it publishes. If one wants to read about a crucial new technical or theoretical advance, there is only one vendor holding the key to that specific knowledge and advancement. Governmental attempts to require publicly funded researchers to publish their findings on the Internet have gained little ground, although at least one major private research foundation, the Wellcome Trust, has demanded that all their grant-funded research is made openly available on the Internet within six months of its original publication. The launch of Google Scholar may further encourage academics to publish within open access Journals, as will the new Cell Science initiative to pay authors royalties. Given that the prices of scientific periodicals are currently often inversely related to their scientific impact, the introduction of micropayment models might provide a mechanism to allow the revenue of a journal to be coupled to its demand.

Despite the apparent monopoly of the established journals, the advantages of the Internet have still driven a sharp growth in Open Access publishing. There are currently more than 2,000 peer-reviewed open access titles. Many predict that Open Access literature will exceed subscription literature in both citations and downloads within five years, and many major commercial publishers are starting to experiment, including OUP, Blackwell, Springer and Cell Press. The problem is exactly how to remove the onus of hefty library subscription payments without merely offloading the financial costs of publishing onto the shoulders of the scientific authors themselves as is presently the case. It is all well and good to relieve the burden of publication costs from wealthy institutions, but requiring authors to pay for publication within open access journals is hardly a fair or ideal alternative, and this especially disadvantages those researchers from Africa, Eastern Europe, Central & South America.

The Wellcome Trust lately compared open access business models where the Journal recoups its costs by levying a charge to publish from submitting authors, and the current model where the research is taken free of charge, often with a handling cost, but access is paid for by subscription. The Wellcome Trust understandably found in favour of an open access publishing model for scientific research articles. This policy shift has two major repercussions for authors. First, the copyright holders of the work are obliged to grant a free public license for the use, copying and distribution of their research, and, second, that they must subsequently deposit a digital copy within an open access public archive (with all its attendant time and tribulations) with six months of publication.

The open-access debate is not merely a question of economics; it is an issue of public access to publicly funded information. Indeed, ‘open access’ has become a ‘byword’ for the freedom of scientific information. Yet there are other factors at work within this information gold rush. There is no use having a Journal if no-one knows of its existence or indexes the journal articles within popular mining databases. Whilst the NIH’s PubMed, the world’s primary database for medical articles, has recently been criticised for excluding many European titles from indexing within its database, effectively starving them of the oxygen of interest, the same can not be said to be true for Google. Google Scholar, Google’s recent entry into academic publishing, promises true open access to the world of scholarly publishing. Its new database is expected to make Google a global player within the world of academic publishing within a year of its release from beta testing. As Google Scholar will give top ranking to a publisher's site whenever open access versions of an article first appear, many publishers are starting to eye an Internet pay-per-view model in preference to the preferred 20^th Century model of library subscriptions.

The advent of the ‘pay-to-publish’ model

The principle bones of contention are whether the profits of existing publishers such as Reed Elsevier, who recorded a 2004 operating profit of £204 million in the STM sector, are excessive, and if, as in the conventional media, scientific journals should instead pay researchers or their host institutions for news. Indeed academics may be charged up to $3,000 to offset the handling and publication costs for each article they publish, and this is equally true for open access. Whilst open access publisher PLoS allows free access to its excellent electronic journals, their substantial editing and distribution costs are recouped by a one-off ‘membership’ fee to scientific authors of some $1,500. In the same vein, UK electronic open access publisher BioMedCentral requires the payment of a ‘processing fee’ of between $675 and $1740 per published article. This is somewhat reminiscent of the fee charged by the more prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), which presently charges $70 per printed page, excluding the additional thousands requested for the reproduction of colour figures and creation of an open access version. For legal reasons papers published within PNAS are marked as ‘advertisements’. Might the same not apply in principle to the PLoS and BioMedCentral? Perhaps the real question is how open access publishing may be achieved without holding authors who must publish their research to ransom. In effect scientific authors are trapped within between the clashing rocks of pay-to-publish and publish-or-perish, which may now be more simply summarised as pay-or-perish.

The Wellcome Trust recently commissioned a detailed study as to why the publishing of scientific research has become a ‘failing market’. The producers of the research (namely researchers, funding bodies & institutions) are also the primary consumers of the published research. Even if the media and general public were to be interested in original research findings, up until now the existing subscription based model (and costs) have effectively presented a barrier to their access. Being both end consumers and producers of scientific publishing, researchers are in reality isolated from most of the costs inherent within the their system. Researchers (and their hosting and funding institutions) are asked to surrender copyright to their work to publishers, without remuneration. The publishers then take on both the political peer review process and copyright of the finalised article, if it is indeed ultimately accepted. Publishers then resell the intellectual property back to the producers at a substantial profit margin. Rather than finding its way back to the researchers, or even to other members of that community who perform the peer review process, publishing profits are instead funnelled into the pockets of shareholders or learned societies. At the other end of the wealth creation cycle, researchers then access other published articles from their scientific peer group, if they can indeed afford to do so, through their host institution via its subscriptions. To the researcher, this pre-paid access appears to be free of charge, thus effectively removing selective market pressures from within the system. The absence of visible competition within such a dependent market has allowed publishers to consistently increase their subscriptions at rates which are well above inflation. Ironically the most popular Journals usually offer the lowest subscription rates.

The advent of open access has created the horns of a dilemma – pay-to-publish or pay-by- subscription. Many intellectuals, including the Economist, advocate a pay-to-publish model as a solution to the difficulties in making open access publishing profitable, thereby relieving the burden of subscription costs from libraries and institutions. However, is asking scientific authors to pay to publish their work really a morally acceptable solution to the dilemma of making open access publishing pay, or merely a redistribution of financial stress? Scientists have to publish quality work on a regular basis if they are to survive and prosper within their research careers. The ‘pay-to-publish’ model advantages wealthier grant-holding laboratories and individuals, and disadvantages those who are struggling to obtain funding and exposure.

The advent of micropayments

So what alternatives are there to the traditional subscription-based and the pay-to-publish open access models within the Brave New World of the Internet? Apparently overlooked by the Wellcome Trust, amongst others, is a third publication model which answers many of the short-comings of both the current models. The solution, first instituted by Cell Science, is a micropayment funded model, wherein a small revenue is generated every time an article or edition is accessed by an end user. In volume such micropayment royalties would cover not only publication costs, but also the payment of royalties and third party payment processing fees. Journals would rise and fall according to fairer market principles, with more popular Journals collecting higher revenues and paying out more in royalties to the most popular authors. Good research would be readily available, affordable and accessible, and would be paid dividends. Excellent research might conceivably even repay itself from publication revenues. Libraries would no longer have to pay vast sums to subscribe to bundles of journals that few people read, and crusty titles would fade away, gathering dust within the vast vestiges of 20^th Century libraries. Authors would consider levels of royalty payments in their assessment of which Journal to publish in, and not solely impact factors or prestige. A truly competitive market for STM publishing could be created, with those Journals which offer less interesting fare or smaller royalties falling by the wayside.

Open access publisher Cell Science was created for many reasons. Primarily it was to increase the availability, affordability and accessibility of intellectual property within the research community. A key aim was to increase the extent of the audience who could access such materials, in other words to counter the ‘closed shop’ practices which existed within scientific publishing at the turn of the Millennium. By making scientific research openly accessible to the general public and media at modest cost, the portals of scientific learning would at last be opened.

Although its modus operandi is more akin to that of a co-operative than of a corporation, for the convenience of accounting and raising investment, Cell Science was founded in 2002 as a Private Limited Company with a capital outlay of no more than $30,000. Funded through limited advertising and micropayments, it was intended that its editors would be paid in the form of dividends and its authors in the form of royalties. As Cell Science is unlimited by the spatial constraints of printed matter, its authors are free to present their work in full colour without being penalised by colour printing costs or handling charges. Not only are authors promised royalties, but they publish for free, and are encouraged to innovate through the use of real-time movie clips and other state-of-the-art audiovisual media.

Cell Science has initially offered scientific reviews from leading International authorities, although from 2007 it is expected that the full publication of original research findings will commence. Cell Science is intended ultimately to provide a flexible level of publication for a wide range of scientific correspondence, from articles to short dispatches. In addition scientific correspondence, in support or contradiction of papers previously published, will be welcomed, as debate is the engine of scientific advance. It will be interesting to see how Cell Science fares within an intensely competitive market place, and whether it will successfully form the crest of a wave of economic change within the well-heeled and comfortable enclave of scientific publishing.