Informationsplattform Open Access: Business models

Business models

Open Access (OA) means free online access to scientific and scholarly information. This inevitably leads to the shifting of the financial burden from the end-users of OA information, such as readers and libraries, to the authors, libraries and research organisations etc who make the information available. After all, it still costs money to publish OA content and make it available online. Although authors are not usually charged a fee for self-archiving their documents in institutional or subject-based repositories (the green road to OA), personnel and infrastructure (computers etc) are needed to operate such document servers and the costs must be borne by the host institutions. On the other hand, authors who have their articles published in an OA journal or with an OA publisher (the golden road to OA) may or may not have to pay a publication fee. While the strategy known as the golden road to Open Access is frequently associated with the publication fee business model (which is often misleadingly equated with the "author-pays model"), a study carried out by the Kaufmann-Wills Group (2005) revealed that less than 50% of OA journals actually finance themselves in this way.

In fact, Open Access has given rise to a whole host of business models, some of which are described below.

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Publication fee model

Variant 1: author pays

In this business model, financing takes place at the beginning of the publishing process by charging the author a publication fee (also known as an article-processing charge (APC)). Hence the term author-pays or author-financed model. Although the publication fee is frequently borne by the author's research funder or employer, such financial support is not always available.

Generally speaking, the willingness of authors to bear part of the costs themselves varies greatly because publication behaviour differs from discipline to discipline (see German Research Foundation, 2005). Whereas in the life sciences, authors often have to pay a fee for publications in print journals or for colour illustrations or photos, this is not the norm in the humanities and the social sciences. Moreover, publishers differentiate between established scientists and their junior colleagues, and between different types of publication (monograph or journal article). Hence, junior scientists are frequently obliged to finance the publishing of a printed monograph, for example a dissertation, themselves. Established authors, on the other hand, frequently enjoy better conditions when it comes to the publishing of textbooks, monographs and collective volumes. Those OA journals which are financed mainly through publication fees frequently offer discounts, for example to authors from developing countries.

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Variant 2: research funder subsidises

Nowadays, many research funders subsidise authors' publication fees. For example, scientists and scholars participating in projects funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) can apply for a publication allowance of 750 Euros per annum which can be saved up over the grant period (see Information on applications for allowances in kind, p. 5). Although these authors are free to choose whatever type of publication they wish, the DFG expects that "the research results which it funds be published and that, where possible, they be made available digitally and online via open access" (Open Access guidelines, p.10). There are similar programmes in Austria and Switzerland. For example, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) provides financial assistance for publications in OA journals or in hybrid journals which offer authors an OA option for a fee. The costs can be refunded up to three years after completion of the project. In its Open Access Policy, the FWF requires that the research results of the projects it funds be made openly accessible via the green or gold road to OA. In Switzerland, too, several scientific organisations (for example the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the Rectors' Conference of Swiss Universities (CRUS), the Conference of Swiss Universities of Applied Sciences (KFH), the Swiss Conference of Rectors of Universities of Teacher Education (SKPF), the Council of the Swiss Scientific Academies (CASS)) have introduced Regulations on Information, Valorisation and Rights to Research Results  which contain provisions mandating open access to the scientific publications of the projects they fund. These provisions oblige authors to make their work openly accessible via the green or the gold road. Irrespective of whether they are published in conventional or open-access media, the SNSF supports the publication of high-quality scientific research results by paying successful applicants a publication grant.

There are a number of arguments against the financing of publication fees by research funders:

  • The research fields which receive the most funding, such as the natural sciences, benefit much more than the humanities and social sciences.

  • By paying publication fees out of research funds, there is a danger that there will be a lack of funds for active research.
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Variant 3: institutional membership

Another way of financing publication fees is via the institutional membership of the institution (e.g. university, research organisation) to which the author belongs. Some OA publishers such as BioMed Central and PLoS offer academic and research institutions institutional membership. The fee depends on the membership level chosen and the size of the institution. By becoming members, institutions enable their authors to publish a certain number of articles per year free of charge or at a reduced fee in the journals operated by the publisher in question. For example, since 2008 the fees for the articles which Max Planck Society (MPS) researchers publish in PLoS journals have been covered by the society's institutional membership. Because many OA publishers now offer institutional membership, an institution may have several, especially if it wishes to offer its authors as much freedom of choice as possible.

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Variant 4: Publishing support funds

In this variant, universities or research institutions reimburse the fees charged to authors by OA journals from a fund established especially for this purpose.

This business model is currently being tested by Bielefeld University Library (UB) in a pilot programme which runs until the end of 2009. The idea is to prevent authors being put off publishing their work in an OA journal because of the costs involved. Authors who do not have access to other funds such as publication allowances from research funders can apply for a grant from the Bielefeld UB fund. This is especially important for junior scientists and scholars who are less likely to have funding of their own.

Similar funds have been in existence in the USA, the Netherlands and the UK for some years now.

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Hybrid business model

Hybrid business models are based partly on subscriptions and partly on publication fees. This model has also been adopted by many conventional publishers. Since 2004, for example, authors with the publishing house Springer Verlag can opt to pay an open-choice fee of 3000 US Dollars per article to have their conventionally published articles made openly accessible online. Other publishing houses which offer such an option (for some of their journals) include Oxford University Press, Blackwell, Wiley and Elsevier. Because these prestigious publishers generally hold out only a vague prospect that revenue from open-choice fees will lead to a corresponding reduction in subscription fees, this publishing strategy would appear to be primarily a marketing ploy on their part. For the time being, therefore, it is unlikely that it will ease the financial burden on libraries.

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Community-fee model

Business models in which publications are financed jointly by the authors and readers in a particular scientific community are known as community-fee or community-pays models. Some scholarly societies traditionally finance their publication activities via membership fees. In this case the members are usually both readers and authors of the scholarly articles published by the society. As a result, the two groups share the costs of the OA publications. Many of the journals hosted by the HighWire Press are edited and financed by scholarly societies.

One example of a journal which is funded by a community is Documenta Mathematica, which was founded by the Association of German Mathematicians (DMV). The journal is openly accessible online and can also be purchased in print form for a small fee. According to the DMV, the journal costs it only 200 Euros per annum to produce. Other examples are the Journal fuer Psychologie and the community psychology journal Forum Gemeindepsychologie. Run by scholarly societies in the field of psychology, these journals were transformed from print to OA format.

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Institutional subsidies

Nowadays, many scientific and scholarly institutions invest in their own publication services, for example in the form of a document server or a university press. The institution subsidises in whole or in part the costs of making content openly accessible and is responsible for the entire publishing process. In addition to the openly accessible online version, print versions of the documents in question (for example monographs) can often be purchased, for example via print-on-demand services. The authors or the editors frequently bear part of the expense, which can vary depending on the amount of work involved.

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Combined model

Sometimes a number of different business models are combined. This is the case in the business model employed by German Medical Science (GMS), a German and English-language portal for medical journals. Each of the journals is edited by a different medical society. The platform and journals are funded by the German National Library of Medicine (ZB MED), the the German Institute of Medical Documentation and Information (DIMDI) and the Association of the Scientific Medical Societies in Germany (AWMF). The German Research Foundation (DFG) provided part of the start-up finance. Payments, such as donations and the medical societies' publication fees which cover part of the costs of running GMS, are handled by GMS gGmbH, a non-profit limited liability company set up especially for that purpose. The publishing tasks (for example, peer review and editing) are shared by the three participating institutions. Publication fees were introduced in 2006 and are paid by the medical societies. The goal was to recover at least part of the costs from 2008 onwards which called for successive increases in publication fees. A review of the extent to which this goal has been achieved is currently taking place.

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Consortium business model: the SCOAP3 initiative

The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) is an association of research laboratories, scientific societies and libraries. Its aim is the successive conversion of the leading journals in the field of high energy physics (HEP) to OA. The roadmap for the project is as follows: First, the consortium approaches the various national research funders and persuades them to agree to cover publication fees. In a second step, publishers are offered the option of financing publications entirely through publication fees, on condition that these publications are made openly accessible.

This model for the redirection of subsidies is not automatically transferable to other science fields because not all research communities use such a relatively small journal market (most HEP articles are published in six peer-reviewed journals). Furthermore, OA has a long tradition in the HEP community where 90% of published articles are available as OA preprints.

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Hybrides Publizieren

Als hybrides Publizieren wird allgemein ein Open-Access-Modell bezeichnet, bei dem neben der online bereitgestellten Open-Access-Version auch eine kostenpflichtige gedruckte Version veröffentlicht wird. Dieses Modell hat sich vor allem für Monografien als sehr vorteilhaft erwiesen: Durch die frei zugängliche Online-Version wird die Sichtbarkeit und Verbreitung erhöht und dadurch erhöhen sich, so die Hoffnung, auch die Verkaufszahlen. Durch die Kombination mit Print-on-Demand-Diensten kann der Verlag flexibel auf die Nachfrage reagieren. Insbesondere einige Universitätsverlage praktizieren dieses Modell: beispielsweise der Verlag der Universität Weimar und das Verlagshaus Monsenstein und Vannerdat. Das Hybride Publizieren ist somit sowohl Open-Access-Strategie als auch Open-Access-Geschäftsmodell, nicht jedoch zu Verwechseln mit dem Hybridem Geschäftsmodell, das beispielsweise Springer mit seinem Open-Choice-Programm anbietet.

Vgl: Steinhauer, Eric W. (2007). Hybrides Publizieren als Marketing-Mix: Erfolgsmodell zur Verbreitung von Hochschulschriften und wissenschaftlichen Monografien. 

Vgl: Ulrich Herb: Online oder unsichtbar Telepolis vom 05.Oktober 2007

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Other financing options

Another financing option is for an OA journal to cross-finance publications using donations and the revenue it generates from advertising and from the sale of print editions and other added-value products. Some OA journals rely heavily on the voluntary efforts of their operators. This volunteer effort is usually backed up by an institutional infrastructure. However, when the number of publications increases, this volunteer-effort model can prove impracticable on its own and must be supplemented by other business models.

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Links for further reading

Further links

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