FEATURE ARTICLE
Free Internet Access to Traditional Journals
Can scientists find ways to share published research without high cost? The experiences of one society suggest it can be done cheaply, even profitably
Thomas Walker
The All-Electronic Future
Traditional journals will change rapidly once they go all-electronic. What the changes will be cannot be predicted, but their nature will be greatly influenced by whether access is free or by subscriptions, site licenses, and pay per view. Therefore it is important to compare these two economic models with a view of deciding which to pursue and which to eschew. The free-access model will revolutionize journal publishing whereas the current mix of subscriptions, site licenses and pay-per-view plans attempts to maintain current revenue streams, the greatest of which is from research libraries.
(1) Publishers will no longer pay for printing and mailing issues and reprints, which now account for 30 percent or more of total publishing costs.
(3) Libraries will no longer pay to display and preserve paper issues. Each library that subscribes to a journal and archives it binds the issues into book-sized volumes (at more than $6 per volume) and provides space for the ever-growing number of volumes at a cost of about $18 per volume (Getz 1997). Then, to maintain full-service access to the volumes, each library must pay an average of more than $3 per volume per year for staff and operating costs. Several hundred to several thousand libraries do this for each journal. Andrew Odlyzko (1998), an AT&T Labs mathematician who has done extensive research on journal publishing, estimates that the total cost to libraries for providing these services is $8,000 per article. For U.S. scholarly science journals the total savings would thus be approximately $5 billion (using the Tenopir and King data as above).
Let's first consider free access, which I advocate. If central printing is ended and access is free, this triad of large costs of the present system will vanish:
(1) Publishers will no longer pay for printing and mailing issues and reprints, which now account for 30 percent or more of total publishing costs.
(2) Libraries will no longer pay for subscriptions or site licenses to journals. The total probably exceeds $2.5 billion annually. Two recent articles estimated that revenues generated per article were about $4,000 (Tenopir and King 1997, Odlyzko 1998). If three-fourths of revenues are from libraries, the cost per article is about $3,000. In 1995, 6,771 U.S. scholarly science journals published an average of 123 articles (Tenopir and King 1997). Combining these estimates, the savings to libraries from subscriptions to U.S. scholarly journals alone would be $3,000 x 6,771 x 123 = $2.5 billion.
(3) Libraries will no longer pay to display and preserve paper issues. Each library that subscribes to a journal and archives it binds the issues into book-sized volumes (at more than $6 per volume) and provides space for the ever-growing number of volumes at a cost of about $18 per volume (Getz 1997). Then, to maintain full-service access to the volumes, each library must pay an average of more than $3 per volume per year for staff and operating costs. Several hundred to several thousand libraries do this for each journal. Andrew Odlyzko (1998), an AT&T Labs mathematician who has done extnsive research on journal publishing, estimates that the total cost to libraries for providing these services is $8,000 per article. For U.S. scholarly science journals the total savings would thus be approximately $5 billion (using the Tenopir and King data as above).
The chief costs that would continue in the free-access model are those of editing (including supervision of refereeing and revision) and composing. These costs are sizable, but Odlyzko gives data indicating that $300 to $1,000 per article should be sufficient. Another continuing cost would be server space and maintenance, estimated above for the PDF files of an average journal, at $26 per article per year for each posting site. (The megabytes per article will doubtless be greater and the costs correspondingly higher—except that the costs of digital technology continue to decline.) The chief new cost will be digital archiving, and that will not be trivial. Both the serving and the saving can and should be done by research libraries and at a small fraction of the cost of the traditional versions of the same two functions.
In order to provide free access, the publisher will have to be paid up front, but if investigators and their institutions believe free access is worth continuing, they can surely find ways to redirect funds to maintain it. For example, journal subscriptions currently cost University of Florida libraries about $900 for each article published by UF researchers. Thus redirected subscription savings alone could probably pay publications costs. The critical point to remember about free access in the all-electronic future is that the total cost will be much less, and it will be borne by the same parties as pay for the present system—namely investigators and their grants and institutions. The principal difference will be that most of the money going to publishers will no longer flow through the institutions' libraries.
The other economic model (subscriptions, site licenses, and pay per view) requires that libraries buy site licenses to give their patrons access to the publishers' digital files. It permits individuals who wish to subscribe to pay their fees and get their passwords, but individuals who neither subscribe nor have a library that buys a site license are expected to pay prior to viewing in an Internet equivalent of a vending machine. Maintaining a controlled-access system has its own costs; it is easy to imagine that a society might spend more money maintaining subscription lists and passwords and dunning subscribers and maintaining server security than it would spend to prepare and serve articles.
An important consideration regarding the site-license system is that publishers possess the journal archives. Libraries will no longer own archival copies but will be required to lease the right to access the publishers' archives. Each time the leases are renewed, the prices may be renegotiated.
Free access to traditional journals is affordable and achievable. It is the right thing to do for those who pay for the research and for those who do it. Scientific societies can provide it and profit from it. Societies that offer free access will gain modestly in revenues and in their competition with commercial publishers for the best manuscripts, and they will gain greatly in their service to their members and the public. Members should therefore make sure their societies provide it. By establishing a tradition of free access now, investigators can guarantee free access in the all-electronic future. Libraries should help by establishing partnerships with societies to provide permanent posting of freely accessible articles and to archive the digital versions in preparation for the time when digital versions are definitive. Taking action now can secure an information highway where toll gates do not limit access to the literature of science.
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