Corie suggested I write a brief note on this topic, so here goes.
As I’m sure most anyone who reads this blog knows, Nature did some research on how PLoS is doing financially. This article has provoked some to-be-expected blog postings, and even made it into Bruce Sterling’s blog (congrats!).
I think most of the points have been made, honestly, most of them ad nauseum. Out of everything I’d pull a couple of points out.
First, PLoS did indeed hold itself not just to the access part but the business model part of its work. Declan didn’t make that up. Second, this makes it legit to ask how it’s done on that front. And the research is pretty clear – so far, it’s not at cash flow neutral yet. The tone of the article is pretty damning, but if you read it with non-sensitized eyes it’s not as bad as everyone seems to think. I showed it to non scientists and didn’t get the take the blogosphere did.
But then again, I showed it to entrepeneurs.
And, speaking as an entrepeneur, criticizing a startup for high-flying rhetoric and missed revenue projections in its first five years of operations is kind of ridiculous. If we did this kind of fisking on every web company – or even on Nature’s web 2.0 operations, which I doubt pay their own bills with ads and revenue – we wouldn’t have very many startups left to kick around.
I say this as a complete supporter of Nature’s web 2.0 efforts. I blog here. I post in Nature Precedings. But this stuff is new, people. It’s the province of startups, whether internal or standalone, not big companies and expected quarterly returns. Startups by definition dream big dreams, and project wild results, fail to hit them and start ‘splaining. It’s in the DNA of the startup to imagine great things, to fly high – and to find the wings have some wax on them.
PLoS is simply going through the natural progression of a startup. It has solved the first puzzle: making something people want, which is open access journals. In so doing it has answered the question of whether or not a completely open journal can consistently produce high quality peer reviewed science. That answer, by the by, is hell yes.
PLoS is now facing the second puzzle: whether or not a publisher can build a sustainable revenue stream out of that completely open approach. On this front, the answer from the article actually seems to be less negative than a quick reading. Yes, it’s taken gobs of philanthropy. But the revenues are rising and the model is beginning to emerge. Just as Nature, one assumes, supports the revenue losses from its web 2.0 experiments with revenues from its other operations…because someone in charge sees evidence of growth.
One funny thing about the philanthropic funding. Everyone phrases this so negatively! But when this happens in the for-profit world, it’s through venture capital, and raising more of it is a sign of strength. Do you really think the Moore Foundation is sitting back and throwing cash into a black hole? They do heavy diligence on that level of money. Raising cash is a sign of strength, wherever it comes from, whether the startup is for profit or non profit. The negative cast on this is cognitive dissonance for discussion in another time and place.
The final takeaway is that everybody involved probably needs a deep breath or five. The article wasn’t that bad. Inartful, yes. Inaccurate, probably not. But the real story here is that the data in the article tell us PLoS is figuring out a path to making it, and has investors in it for the long run. How can that be bad?
That’s the view from here at least.
Excellent perspective. I think it must be remembered that it is not fair for publishing companies in academic areas to pretend (much of the time) to not be for profit corporations then to suddenly turn on a colleague and demand entrepeneur-like standards.
The truth is that those of us who produce the fodder for these publishing mills, in great majority, want to see Open Access models tried out. This is not a business issue. It is, to most of us, an ethical issue.
Yeah, I get the difference. I always try to separate the access issue from the business model issue. They’re totally different things. The ethical reason for publishing is a good thing, IMHO. But we have to explore the business models that can operate on top of the open publishing system. And we have to let those models sink and swim, from the BMC to the Hindawi to the PLoS models, because that’s how we’ll get the mix of access and sustainability that we so clearly need…
Thanks for the great blog post. Business models of Open Access publishers are a very important topic and it must be possible to talk about them. But I found it impossible to participate in the discussion of the article until now. Both the article and the following discussion in various blogs have used language that made it difficult for me to have a calm and reasonable discussion about these issues.
Requiring a “business model” for publishing good science is like requiring a “business model” for doing basic research. Before the research is done, the results obtained and understood, the economic value of that research can’t be known. Limiting research funding to only those research programs which promise near term economic return is the same as limiting publication to only those papers that will provide near term economic return to the publisher.
Can a robust scientific community be sustained only doing research that is projected to show a near term profit? The answer is no. Can a robust scientific community be sustained by only publishing research that can provide a near term profit to publishers? The answer to that is also no.
David – I use the term business model in a much more “open” manner than you do. Everyone, including those of us who don’t have to make a profit, have to have a business model.
I run a non profit organization. We still need a model under which we find the funding to pay for our staff. A mentor of mine told me once that no matter what business you’re in, you’re in the cash business. That applies to us hippies in the non profit world as much as the folks at Elsevier – someone has to pay the bills. That’s all a business model is – it’s not about profit, necessarily, it’s about paying bills.
The ugly truth is that access models are a threat to old publishing business models, which were built on closed access. If we’re going to push for open access, we have to in turn start experimenting with open business models. I’d encourage everyone to read Chesbrough and Von Hippel on this front.
We have to expect business model experimentation, both for-profit and non-profit, in OA. Most of those business models will fail the first time around. That’s evolution in action. But if we are prickly and defensive about the business models, instead of pointing with pride to the success of the access models first and foremost, then the odds of losing the public debate go way up.
I guess the point of my post here is that it feels like most of the science bloggers just got caught on a massive piece of troll bait. Be proud of the data in the article, not angry. Point out the success and ignore the tone. And don’t feed the trolls – it only helps them multiply.
What is an appropriate business model for an open access high profile (here defined as high rejection rate) journal? If 90% of the submitted papers are rejected, there is a lot of peer review and editorial work that is not picked up by the author-pays model. I can see the following options:
Anything else I didn’t think of? The PLoS approach appears to be the last strategy, and I don’t see anything wrong with that. I could imagine that a strategy that includes submission fees (in addition to fees for the accepted paper) would also work.
To be fair to PLoS: since June 2006 their FAQ has contained this passage:
"Can journals like PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine be supported by publication fees alone?
Possibly not. These journals are run by professional editors, reject a large proportion of the submitted papers, and publish a great deal of added-value content. They are therefore very expensive to run, but they are also representative of only the top tier of scientific journals, which includes Nature, Science, and The New England Journal of Medicine – a tiny fraction of the full complement of scholarly journals. Publication fees provide an important revenue stream for PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine, but this is also supplemented with income from philanthropy, advertisers, sponsors, membership and other parts of the publishing operation."
Archive.org of PLoS FAQ
So my take on this debate is that two Nature pieces frame the debate in an unfortunate and unrealistic way by implying that eg. PLoS Biology should be sustained on author fees alone. The framing may be intentional or not.
My blog post
Best
Anders
The advantages of pre-print posting at a site like Nature Precedings could be established as another commodity included with the submission fee to a NPG family journal. Again, there are problems here because the spirit of NP is more OA in nature (rightfully so), but again, these are the kinds of things that need to be considered as scientific publishing evolves.
So take my above suggestions with a very large grain of salt (I know that these suggestions are severely problematic), but I was attempting to use current examples of free services that could be considered to be of value and offered in exchange for a submission fee.
…..I am glad that it did initiate the conversation (and in a big way…).
Thanks Noah for posting your thoughts. Whilst I’ve been tracking the conversations, I’ve only left a couple of short comments here and there.
In the grander scheme of things, my favourite quote initially made by Bill Hooker last year remains:-
“I wouldn’t like to predict where all this is going,” Hooker adds. “But I’d be happy to bet that we’re going to like it when we get there.”
There was another aspect to that article: the “dissing” of PLOS One. This was what caught my ire. It was not just a matter of inartful expression; there was a strong hint in that article that PLOS One is a “lightly-reviewed” publish-everything-journal, a cash-cow that subsidizes PLOS Biology and others, almost like an author-pays, mildly-peer-reviewed version of Nature Precedings. There was absolutely no evidence or even discussion presented to back up this claim.
The main points about PLOS’ business model were simple: PLOS claimed it could run a journal that publishes only a few papers a year based on author-submission, we (i.e. Nature) said many times that they were wrong, PLOS has not yet broken even, PLOS’ operating costs are more than they ever expected or projected, and now PLOS seems to have admitted the shortcomings of its position by starting PLOS One, a journal that publishes more papers than the other PLOS journals, which of course changes the economics considerably.
These points could have been made by merely pointing out that PLOS One publishes more papers and presumably can therefore operate on a larger, more-efficient scale. There was no need to cast aspersions on the quality of the articles published in PLOS One, or to even appear to be hinting that PLOS One would indiscriminately publish anything and everything it received since every paper published meant more cash in the PLOS bank. It is understandable that a Nature writer would harp on “quality”, since that is the raison d’etre for Nature’s existence, but that also makes the article more of a biased, propaganda or “attack piece” from NPG.
To me, the very fact that selective journals are less easily sustainable than journals that publish lots of papers raises questions about why selective journals need to exist at all in their present form. As we all know, linking or highlighting and explaining papers that a certain group of people considers notable can be done even without publishing the papers themselves. Judging the (de)merits of this approach is a different discussion altogether…
(for those whose interest in this issue is at an almost unhealthy, masochistic level, more thoughts at http://floatingnotes.tumblr.com/tagged/publishing/ )
To echo other people, thanks for a very levelheaded post, John.
I completely agree with you that PLoS’s inability to reach overall breakeven is no cause for shame or even concern. Like most start-ups, it’s taking a few years to get to that point. You’re also correct that many of NPG’s activities, not least Nature Network, fall into the same category.
What I’m worried about is that an apparently permanent situation is developing in which PLoS’s high-end journals are subsidised by charitable funding or proceeds from its low-end journals. I think this works against PLoS’s own aims, namely to create new publishing models that others will adopt. To its credit, PLoS has provided one option for authors who wish to publish in a high-end open-access journal where none previously existed. Unfortunately in the current situation that’s all there’s ever likely to be: one option. I wish we could be encouraging, instead of discouraging, others to develop.
“…an apparently permanent situation is developing…”. I have no idea where this notion of permanence is coming from. Can someone explain how can gradual move towards sustainability be understood as “permanently unsustainable”?
“…I completely agree with you that PLoS’s inability to reach overall breakeven is no cause for shame or even concern. …”
I am concerned.
I recently started wondering what happens when the money flow stops and Plos can’t afford to be in ‘business’ any more.
Do the servers get wiped?
All publications go into the recycle bin?
This is not just a concern for Plos, but for all electronic only journals. At least with journals that make a hardcopy you know the articles will remain in some libraries. What happens to electronic journals such as Plos?