How learned societies can adapt to OA

On October 5, 2005, the British Computer Society (BCS) released a report, Open Access and the Learned Society: the future role of the Learned Society in academic publishing. (Thanks to Informaticopia.) Excerpt:

This report summarises the views expressed at a BCS Thought Leadership on the future role of Learned Societies in academic publishing. Two speakers introduced opposing views on the theme after which 30 participants discussed the matter in three groups. Participants were from Learned Societies, publishers, universities, and research councils. At the end of the evening, held at the Royal Society in London, each table reported back to the gathering. Although debate was fierce no definitive view was reached as the topic is evolving rapidly.

The traditional model of publishing the findings of academic research in a printed journal is disintegrating. It is becoming increasingly impossible to charge high fees for journals because technology has made it possible for researchers to offer online their own findings to scholars free of charge....Demise of subscription journals has begun As technology has developed, pressures on the subscription journal model have mounted. The internet has made self-archiving possible for researchers and Google Scholar and similar search engines have recently made it even easier to retrieve information. If scholars can find 'good enough' versions of reports online, they are unwilling to pay for the published version. Academics are then likely to stop subscriptions to journals where 'good enough' versions are available online as their budgets increasingly come under pressure. Libraries' budgets have been growing at a slower rate than academic reports and they have not been able to afford everything that they would like. Open access goes some way to solving that problem by making reports available to more people....There was general agreement during the evening that if Learned Societies cannot rely on the revenue from journals in the future, they need to rethink their business models and their approach to journals publishing. None of the players in the journals arena (Learned Societies included) are sacrosanct and need to acknowledge change and adapt to it....In terms of funding there are several alternatives for open access. For author-pay journals, the payment usually comes out of the research grant, although in some cases authors pay themselves. It was pointed out that this may work for subject areas with large research grants but is a stumbling block for less 'wealthy' research areas. In some cases, journals are subsidised by grants or take advertising. It was reported that one problem with author-pay journals is that most are not breaking even. Even by gaining in reputation and increasing their number of papers, journals will not raise profitability as their costs will rise in proportion to revenue increasing....It was suggested that Learned Societies could take on the role of offering version control and peer review....One way of funding quality checks would be to make a charge for open access. Participants thought that paying for open access could be acceptable if the price is right. But an acceptable price was suspected to be insufficient to cover publishing costs. The right price for students is likely to be lower than for other potential readers....

Various potential problems [with self-archiving] were raised during the evening. Firstly, self-archiving is a threat to the viability of publishers and learned societies as it moves papers away from their own websites. They are therefore not able to monitor how many people are looking at their research and cannot therefore prove the interest in their journal. A lot of society publishers have reportedly already imposed an embargo on internet archiving of papers or are planning to do so. Another problem with self-archiving is the risk that the self-archived paper will not necessarily be the refereed version....Most participants agreed that there should only be one definitive copy of archived material and everyone should be able to link to it. One solution would be to archive the report on the society's or publisher's website and offer authors free links to it. The British Library was suggested as one place to archive papers online, or it could be the role of Learned Societies, alongside higher education institutes. On the other hand, the universities argue that they need their own system of archiving their research. They use institutional repositories to showcase their work for prospective partners and funders and to assemble material for their own purposes....

Learned Societies, including the BCS, need to publish findings of research as dissemination of information is part of their remit. At the same time, the journal is generally accepted not to be the main reason people join Learned Societies. They join for reasons such as networking opportunities and advancing their career. It was suggested that Learned Societies and publishers should take a step further back and decide whether there is any value in journal publishing at all. Is there another way of determining the value of academics, rather than publish or perish? If research communities already communicate within themselves, should publishers be asking how to help them, rather than assuming journals is what they need?...Learned societies such as the BCS, which have wider roles than journal publishing, and are therefore not at such risk from loss of such revenue streams, are better able to experiment with new open access models than those dependent on income from journals.

(PS: It looks like a serious and constructive dialogue. But in the discussion of a "charge for open access", didn't anybody point out OA is free of charge by definition? OA journals can charge authors or their sponsors a fee to cover the costs of editing and publication. But they're not providing OA if they charge readers a fee for access.)