Thursday, March 17, 2016

Where does scientific society money go, and the future of open-access


There's been a bit of a storm on Twitter recently about PLoS, open access, and scientific societies. One underlying issue seems to be what the "return on investment" is from publishing in different venues.


I've held leadership positions in 3 major societies over the past 5 years (Society for the Study of Evolution, Genetics Society of America, and American Genetic Association), so I re-examined the reports I got from those societies to compare/ contrast. I won't present exact numbers here, since that's inappropriate and since I'm looking at a single year's report (2012 or 2014) for each society rather than a multi-year running average.

All three societies were (at least as of those reports) financially quite healthy, each with reserves well over $1 million that produce some investment income. All three, at least in those years, were saving more than spending. Much of society yearly income in all cases was from their flagship journal (and specifically institutional subscriptions of that journal). I should add-- while colleagues are often critical of price gouging by publishers like Wiley-Blackwell, well over half of the proceeds from publication may go to the scientific societies, so we scientists & scientific societies are the gougers. (The publishers are just our hit-men.) The annual conferences produced a very small net profit for two societies (SSE, and GSA, though the latter sometimes loses money in some specific organismal meetings in specific years) but a net loss for the third (AGA, which keeps an outlay for the conference in its yearly budget).

What do they spend their journal income on? Clearly some of it is used to keep publishing cheap for scientists. All societies have some other shared expenses like stipends for some editorial (or occasionally officer) positions, travel for the board/ council members, etc. In the year I examined, SSE spent a lot on student awards (over $100K on students alone) as well as some on other awards, various educational initiatives and annual meeting symposia. More recently, SSE has taken on large expenditures for funding outreach efforts and a workshop for trainees on preparing for diverse careers. GSA maintains multiple staff (some shared with other societies) so most of the expenses went there, but the staff work on their journals, spearhead education & outreach efforts, communications & policy activities, etc. GSA also gave out various awards both to distinguished established researchers as well as trainees, as well as funds for the diverse expenses mentioned above (e.g., board travel). AGA spends a ton on "special event awards" which fund workshops and symposia at other meetings, and also spends on its own annual conference. AGA also more recently started sizable "Ecological, Evolutionary and Conservation Genomics (EECG) Awards" for graduate students and postdocs.

The flagship journal from each of these three societies (Evolution, Genetics, and Journal of Heredity) is not open-access, but an open-access option can be purchased for a particular submission at the time of acceptance. Uptake on that is low-- I think under 20%. Each journal makes or will make their old issues freely available online (Evolution does not currently but will do this for issues >2 years old beginning in 2017). Publication costs are moderate (Genetics) or even waived for short papers in these journals (Evolution for members, J Heredity for everyone).

Here's what these journals and societies do now-- they get large sums of money from institutional journal subscriptions (which cost $500-$1200 annually) and use those funds both to make publication cheap to the scientific community and to provide several services (including grants) for the scientific community. Libraries pay in order to grant access to their communities. What this means, by definition, is that access is not "free", and if a reader does not use one of these libraries (e.g., they do not work for a big university), then they have to wait perhaps 2 years to see this published science or have to pay a one-time use fee.

The open-access movement argues this setup is unacceptable. Federal grant dollars often support the research (let's focus on federally funded USA-based scientists and USA-based readers for simplicity here), so as a citizen who "paid" for the research with their tax dollars does not get instant free access to the results of that research, but has to either wait 6 months to 2 years (depending on journal) or pay again to see sooner. Even that is not exactly true always, given the growth of preprint servers like arXiv or bioRxiv-- the core science may be available immediately and free, but the edits from the peer review process and copy-editing are not.

Could these society journals go full open-access? Sure, but it's non-trivial since the funding currently garnered from libraries would be cut. With such a great drop in income, there would be two choices: raise prices elsewhere (by hefty open-access fees for submissions and/ or making conferences more expensive so they are profit-generating) and/ or cut services (i.e., reducing student grants, education/ outreach activities, and/ or funding workshops for trainees). Some institutional libraries may still also support open-access publishing (e.g., my institution provides such funds), but these funds are often limited and run out (e.g., as of when I'm writing this in March 2016, my institution's open-access funds for fiscal year 2015-2016 are already depleted).

How does PLoS manage? PLoS doesn't provide all the same services to the community that a scientific society does. I say this not as a criticism of PLoS-- they function solely for publication (and do it extremely well) whereas societies now function for facilitating publication while also providing diverse other services. I'm thrilled PLoS is running a profit now-- they are providing a valuable vehicle for publication and have been leaders in the move toward openness in science. They are also a business, so they need to run a profit-- again, our scientific societies are all running profits, too.

Basically, we have set up a situation where any major move to open-access by a profitable society journal bears risk of a major reduction in other services to which the community has grown accustomed. Is this risk worth it? Here, I will go out on a limb and give a personal opinion rather than just an "option." I would argue yes with a caveat. I feel that societies have no greater obligation than to maximize the dissemination of science, even if that means accelerating access by 1-2 years. Giving out student grants or funding workshops & outreach events-- those are all very valuable, but their impact is typically limited to direct participants. The "potential" impact of accelerating access to all the literature (both inside and outside the scientific community) seems greater to me. Making science available immediately is the democratization of knowledge. Further, moving to open-access removes the community's reliance on libraries, which has always been a source of financial uncertainty-- it provides the opportunity to go to what I think may be a more stable model, even if less lucrative. The caveat I would add is that there would have to be support for publication costs for scientists with limited grants... I would hate for science to not be able to be published in X journal because the research team did not have (sufficient) funding. I realize the consequence may be some reduction of other society services (and certainly I would not advocate those going to zero), but I think the positives outweigh the negatives.

I realize not all will agree with my opinion above, and I respect that the other side is quite valid. I also do NOT argue that a move by society journals to open-access be taken hastily-- clearly, we need to assess the potential financial consequences and be prepared to react if there will be some losses. Nonetheless, I hope this stream of consciousness is useful or at least thought-provoking. Please feel free to disagree, but please be nice.

14 comments:

  1. Very thoughtful comments Mohamed! One "devil's advocate-y" idea I'll throw out there is that if the "perks" of membership to societies are cut (no free page charges, fewer awards, more expensive meetings) societies may lose their members. A slippery slope to no societies? Ack!

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  2. That was Maria by the way - I'm not sure why my name didn't come up on that one!

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  3. An interesting and important post, Mohamed. I’ll go out on a different limb, in the spirit of discussion. In particular, I wonder whether open access (in the sense of immediate online access to one and all) is more important for scientific societies than sponsorship of conferences given their important role in training young scientists. After all, anyone who does not have access to a journal via a library subscription can easily request a paper from the author. It’s less clear, though, that conferences organized and subsidized by the SSE, GSA, etc. can be so easily replaced.

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    1. I'm not an expert on copyright law. Do you know if when I transfer ownership of the copyright to the publisher I lose the right to disseminate the work to individuals (meaning I break my contract when I give you a PDF)? What if the individual requesting a copy wants to use it in a course or pass it along to his research team in a private company?

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  4. Totally fair points by both of you-- thanks!

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  5. Not sure why you refer to society journals as price gouging. They're by far the best value for money of any journals going:

    https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2013/09/18/follow-the-money-what-really-matters-when-choosing-a-journal/

    Also worth noting that some scientific societies publish OA as well as subscription journals. The Ecological Society of America, for instance.

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    1. Agreed on both counts, but my point was that some people do say that all journals (including those from academic societies) are price-gouging with institutional subscriptions that regularly increase in price by well over inflation. And also agreed about OA society journals-- the GSA's newer journal, G3, is an example. However, of the 3 societies I mentioned, the "flagship" journal is not OA.

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  6. Good stuff, Mo. I, too, am glad PLoS is running a profit. Hopefully they'll use it to hire copy editors!

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  7. Thanks, Mo. I have not seen anyone put open access in this context. I am a fan of open access, but now you tell me if we go all-in on OA, our societies will offer far fewer benefits to students?

    Regarding the apparent financial trade-off between access to publications versus other society services such as meetings and grants, I support Dr. Lenski's comment, above.

    Putting aside the legal or ethical theory for a sec, let's observe the student experience empirically. I don't know about in the US, but students here in Colombia, South America (not Columbia in NYC), do not wait 2 years or even 2 hours for access to journal articles. They go straight to authors' webpages, ResearchGate, bioRxiv, GoogleScholar links, Sci-Hub (http://sci-hub.io/), or specific groups on Facebook to find older PDFs, and they basically never fail to find a PDF of the exact citation they are looking for. (They should write the author directly, but most students are too shy.) Thus, our claims that people can't access the literature is more of a legal argument, not an empirical observation.

    On the other hand, as Dr. Lenski points out, above, society services are not so easily replaced. Going to a scientific meeting often provides tangible and important benefits, e.g., making a key personal contact that leads directly to the next stage of a student's career, such as a Colombian student meeting a potential PhD advisor in the US. However, costs are a real (not theoretical) limiting factor for many students to attend meetings, thus subsidizing meetings is a tangible good of societies.

    Last but certainly not least, society-sponsored research grants for graduate students have a real impact beyond the actual monetary award. Grant writing is one of the most important skills a student can develop, and getting in the game early is key. Students with grants on their CV likely have more confidence and better options as their career advances. While I have no survey data, I suspect that a big reason why many students join societies is to be able to compete for these seed grants. As Maria pointed out, without these grants, perhaps student membership drops.

    What a cruel dilemma: either we have a financially healthy society or committed to OA, but not both? There must be a way out of this.


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    1. Thanks Andrew. I do think you're right about people often being able to get published papers if they put in some effort to do so.

      I should stress one word in my sentence above-- "any major move to open-access by a profitable society journal bears RISK of a major reduction in other services to which the community has grown accustomed." It's not certain the benefits would be "far fewer". Basically, money has to come from somewhere to replace what would be lost that we now get from libraries-- we as a group could pay a lot more for publishing (via open access fees), or we could pay for other services (e.g., higher conference fees, higher memberships), or we could reduce the services. But I should stress that I absolutely do NOT advocate "stopping" the other benefits that societies do. But I would entertain a discussion of scaling some of them back 20%, for example.

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    2. I edited some of the language in the post above to clarify-- replaced "stop" with "reduce". Thanks!

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  8. Very thoughtful piece Mohamed. Beside my editorial work for G3 and Genetics I was much involved with the Genetics Society UK (board and executive board 2007-2015). They publish Heredity with NPG and co-publish Genome Research together with CSH. Jointly the journals generate a large amount of revenue for the society. But like the societies you described, the Genetics Society UK has verly low membership fees (especially for student members) and gives back a lot of the revenue through travels grants, fieldwork grants, training courses, annual conferences and by supporting a large number of sectional interest groups and one-off meetings.
    I sometimes wonder if members of these societies realize their membership fee is really a minor part of the income of the learned society.
    I agree that it would be great if we canmake the nubmers work for OA for all these journals. But for me the open data policies by most of these journals is way more important than the OA. THe strict data policies really help the reproducibility of results and the potential re-use of findings that were supported by tax payers' money,

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  9. A very thought-provoking post. Can you be more specific about how dependent the societies are on library subscription fees versus author fees and advertising?

    I'm wondering if there may be scope to create an open access system that returns the same profit to the societies just by correcting inefficiencies and improving scalability in the publication process. Publishing doesn't intrinsically have to be expensive, but you do inevitably lose the library subscription fees with open access. Could that loss be offset if you had near-zero publication costs and could publish more articles while keeping author fees constant and advertising to an expanded readership?

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    1. Hard to be specific without a detailed analysis. I might guess the library subscription fees alone come to over 1/3 of the total yearly income for some societies, but it's definitely variable across societies and across years. It's definitely POSSIBLE that there would be a way to do it all without losses in the services I described. I'm sure someone has done a detailed cost analysis, but there are surely many unknowns for a particular year for a particular society.

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