[Air-L] Open-What?

[Andres Guadamuz]

Ingbert Floyd wrote:

> 
> How are they funded in general, or does it vary greatly?
> 

In my experience, it varies greatly. Some journals manage to survive on 
the "author pays" model, which seems to work well in some circles. As 
you have mentioned, getting funding is more difficult to achieve in the 
social sciences. In our case, we fund our journal through public funds. 
There are two other legal journals operating in the UK, and as far as I 
know, they are funded via their host institutions (IIRC, Warwick and 
Newcastle).

This is viable in Europe, as both the UK Research Councils and the 
European Union have been heavily involved in enforcing open access 
policies for projects funded by the public. If academics are encouraged 
(and often required) to make their findings available to the public, 
then it is only natural that there must be scholarly sites that are up 
to the task. We have found that at least in our case the Arts and 
Humanities Research Council in the UK has been keen to provide us with 
some assistance. I believe that this is a viable avenue of income for 
some journals.

> Two reasons I ask. One, the author pays model is much more viable in
> the "hard" sciences because it is difficult if not impossible to do
> most "hard" science research without grants. Therefore, the costs of
> publishing can be written into the grants, and accepted as an added
> cost of doing academic work. Without a grant, you (essentially) cannot
> do research, and therefore have no findings, and have nothing to
> publish. An exception to this would be the theoretical side of fields
> such as physics (and non-science fields often considered "hard" such
> as math). In social science/studies, however, not all professors are
> able to get grants, yet many of them are still able to conduct
> research of one sort or another. If they must pay to publish, then
> there will be a serious barrier to research production (and to
> obtaining tenure). An author pays model is thus much less viable as a
> solution.
> 

I agree with this statement.

> Second, if it is organizational funding (government, universities,
> non-profits, for-profits, whatever), how easy is it to create a new
> journal? Do supported journals ever get dropped? At least from my
> limited experience observing others trying to obtain money in the US,
> I would be loathe to rely on the government (on any level), or
> non-profits, to directly support academic publishing, especially
> innovation in academic publishing. Of course, indirect government
> funding via libraries is becoming more and more problematic anyway, so
> the point may be moot. Now, you mention that you do not foresee the
> end of traditional publishing, so I acknowledge that it's not
> either/or. But I'm still concerned about the sustainability of any
> particular model. If I were running a journal (I'm not, and never
> have), I'd rather that my own activities funded the journal, than be
> reliant on the whims of a granting organization.

I cannot comment on the state of public funding in the U.S. As I 
mentioned, the experience in Europe is that if you can present a good 
and solid case for funding, then it can be obtained. At the moment we 
have viable funds until 2012. Can we obtain funding to keep the journal 
going further than that? I do not know, but isn't it the same with 
privately-funded journals? We all know that journals come and go all the 
time, so there is nothing new there.

> 
> I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this, given that you seem
> to have evidence I've not encountered so far.
> 

I know that I am offering my own personal experience with SCRIPT-ed, but 
I think that it is a success story of the open access model (if I may 
say so myself). We are on our fourth year, and getting stronger with 
each issue.

let me stress this, I do not think that open access works for all 
journals, and I do not think that it will be the end of traditional 
publishing models. However, given the nature of the market, and given 
the right conditions, I would say that there is a good public policy 
argument to allocate some amount of research funds into funding open 
access journals.

Best Regards,

Andres

-- 
Andres Guadamuz
AHRC Research Centre for Studies in
Intellectual Property and Technology Law
Old College, South Bridge
Edinburgh, EH8 9YL

Tel: 44 (0)131 6509699
Fax: 44 (0)131 6506317
a.guadamuz at ed.ac.uk
http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/

SCRIPT-ed Journal of Law, Technology and Society
http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/script-ed

IP/IT/Medical Law LLM by Distance Learning
http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/distancelearning/