15.1 Open access journal literature is an open educational resource  (Page 8/16)

So, put differently, there are three fundamental publishing models for scholarly journals in a non-rivalrous digital environment:

Reader pays. (Where “reader” is a user online, not necessarily in print) If you don’t pay, you can’t have access. This is the subscription or “paywall” model used by toll-access journals. The journal’s incentive, then, is to publish content that readers are most willing to pay for (or demand that their library pay for it). This has been a good incentive structure for high publication quality, but obviously provides a counter-incentive to provide the widest access (the incentive is to widen access only towards the point where number of subscribers and revenue per subscriber are optimized).

Author pays. If you don’t pay, your article can’t be published. It sounds a bit like a vanity press when you put it that way, but reputable author-pays journals don’t collect until after an article has been accepted, so there’s no “pay-to-play”. (Reputable author-pays journals also have discounts or waivers for researchers who truly can’t afford it.) The journal’s incentive is to publish content that authors are most willing to pay for (usually from their research grants). This might sound like the journal’s incentive will be to publish anything, and thus collect the most article processing fees. No doubt there will be a few journals that do this (as there have always been vanity presses), but I don’t think most will go down this path. The publication process for an academic is all about prestige; if a journal is known to publish junk, it will have no prestige, and thus few academics interested in publishing there. So I think the incentive structure here, too, will support scholarly quality. If anything, the author pays incentive structure will support a change in quantity, I think, not in quality. Particularly if authors pays journals are completely electronic, whereas reader pays journals continue to publish a print edition, the reader pays journals are bound to a certain size (additional “Web only” content would be seen as having less prestige), whereas the author pays journals can publish as many or as few articles as they wish. In this case, I think the incentive for the author pays journals is to publish as many articles are of high quality and high interest, i.e. toward the optimal equilibrium between number of articles published and prestige per article. This might suggest that author pays journals will tend toward less journals with more articles per journal; or, since quantity is serialized, toward less-frequent issues with more articles per journal. Or, given that author pays journals mostly operate in electronic-only format, they might publish on a rolling schedule… At this point, I refer the reader to a game theorist, and will simply say that I don’t think the author pays model will be the death of scholarly quality.

Third-party pays. If the sponsor doesn’t pay, the author can’t be published and the reader can’t have access. This model has all the problems typically associated with the patron/donation/advertising/merchandising/promotional/what-have-you model. (Mitigated somewhat by the fact that your editors, referees, authors, etc. are still academics, and won’t give their time to something with no prestige; if a journal starts printing nude centerfolds as ads for Playboy , I would expect defection from the academic labor, and so the journal would lose value. This is the essentially the same theory that the New York Times won’t print bad journalism because it would make the paper less valuable.) On the other hand, if the cost of publishing is very low, this model may be very promising; so this could be a good fit for “no-frills” journals.