{"id":693,"date":"2011-02-01T23:01:00","date_gmt":"2011-02-02T04:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/?p=693"},"modified":"2011-01-31T13:01:36","modified_gmt":"2011-01-31T18:01:36","slug":"the-tetrahedron-test-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2011\/02\/01\/the-tetrahedron-test-case\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tetrahedron test case"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\"Tetrahedron<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Phil Davis’s recent post<\/a> over at The Scholarly Kitchen<\/a> on whether open access might save the academic world some money misses the point of the COPE initiative<\/a> and Harvard’s open-access fund<\/a> (HOPE). Davis speculates that for the case of one set of journals that happened to be mentioned in my colleague Bob Darnton<\/a>‘s recent NYRB<\/em> piece<\/a>, HOPE would cost the university more than its current subscriptions, echoing a more general claim he has made in previous work<\/a> that OA article processing charges (APCs) will cost many universities more than they now pay in subscription fees. In\u00a0particular, with regard to Tetrahedron<\/em>‘s $39,082 price tag<\/a>, he says “Of the nearly 6,000 articles in the Tetrahedron bundle, Harvard researchers authored 22 of them in 2010.\u00a0 Given that COPE will pay $3,000 for each article out of this fund, paying for open access would cost Harvard $66K in 2010, $27K more than its subscription price.”<\/p>\n

Harvard’s HOPE fund, like all COPE-responsive funds, is intended to cover Harvard’s fair share of OA article processing fees.\u00a0 Harvard is dedicated to doing its part to underwrite OA fees \u2014 but not others’ parts.\u00a0 For that reason, it does not cover articles based on grant-funded research; the granting agency should cover that. (The same is true of the open-access funds\u00a0at many other COPE-signatory institutions<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

For the particular case at hand, I found 24 articles from 2010 in the Tetrahedron<\/em> bundle with Harvard affiliations using a Scirus search<\/a>.\u00a0 All of the articles were grant-funded (16 by NIH, 11 by one or more other foundations, 5 by companies; the sum is greater than 24 as some articles had more than one funder).\u00a0 Thus none of them would have been eligible for HOPE funding; the HOPE fund cost to Harvard would have been $0.<\/p>\n

But even if none of them had been grant-funded, HOPE covers fees prorated based on Harvard authorship.\u00a0 Since only 65 of the 144 authors on these 24 articles were Harvard affiliated, it would have covered only 65\/144 (about 45%) of the fees. The cost would be (65\/144)\u00d7$3000\u00d724 = $32,500.\u00a0Further, it covers only authors at schools with open-access policies.\u00a0 Of the 65 Harvard affiliates, only 22 were at schools with OA policies, so payment would be restricted to 22\/144 (about 15%), so the cost would be (22\/144)\u00d7$3000\u00d724 = $11,000.<\/p>\n

Of course, BioMed Central journals with similar impact factors to the Tetrahedron journals\u00a0charge publication fees of $1820<\/a>. \u00a0(PLoS journals with considerably higher impact factors charge $1350 or $2250<\/a>.) Presumably, if the Tetrahedron journals were open-access journals, as hypothesized in the thought experiment Davis is implicitly undertaking, they would have to compete for authors with other open-access journals and would need to charge similar rates (just as Nature Publishing Group’s Scientific Reports<\/em> is doing\u00a0relative\u00a0to PLoS ONE<\/em><\/a>).\u00a0 Redoing the calculation with the BMC rate gives (22\/144)\u00d7$1820\u00d724 \u2248\u00a0$6,700. \u00a0Even covering authors at ineligible schools, the cost would only be\u00a0(65\/144)\u00d7$1820\u00d724 \u2248\u00a0$20,000.<\/p>\n

Two of the five bundled journals \u2014 accounting for all but 5 of the 24 articles \u2014 \u00a0are “Letters” journals publishing quite short articles of a couple of pages. \u00a0Presumably, they should require even lower APCs, reducing the likely cost further.<\/p>\n

So, the upshot is that the cost to the HOPE fund for all of the Tetrahedron<\/em> journals would be $0, and even if it were to cover the fees for grant-funded articles, the cost would be $32,500. Or $20,000. Or $11,000. Or $6,700. Or less.<\/p>\n

The truth is that no one knows how much costs would be in a counterfactual open-access world with competitive APC fees<\/em>. The kinds of calculations in Davis’s post (and this one and other previous work) are a kind of silly game. But given that the highest<\/em> APC for an OA journal ($2,900 for PLoS Biology<\/em><\/a>) is far less than the average<\/em> revenue per article for a subscription journal ($5,000 according to the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable<\/a>), it seems extraordinarily unlikely that the overall<\/em> costs would be higher.\u00a0 And we’d drop all of the access restrictions as a nice side effect.\u00a0 Seems like a bargain to me.<\/p>\n

But the most important point is that the idea behind COPE and the HOPE fund is not to save an individual institution money.\u00a0 If in the long term COPE has the intended effect of shifting journals such as Tetrahedron<\/em> to an OA model within a journal ecology based on an efficient market \u2014 a situation that we manifestly do not now have \u2014 and if under those conditions Harvard ends up paying a bit more, well, then the market has spoken.<\/p>\n

By the way, the Tetrahedron<\/em> bundle price<\/a> is now up to $41,361.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Phil Davis’s recent post over at The Scholarly Kitchen on whether open access might save the academic world some money misses the point of the COPE initiative and Harvard’s open-access fund (HOPE). Davis speculates that for the case of one set of journals that happened to be mentioned in my colleague Bob Darnton‘s recent NYRB […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2110,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[618,68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-open-access","category-scholarly-communication"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5pLfN-bb","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":314,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2009\/09\/15\/harvards-new-open-access-fund\/","url_meta":{"origin":693,"position":0},"title":"Harvard’s new open-access fund","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Tuesday, September 15, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Harvard's participation in the open-access compact is being managed by the Office for Scholarly Communication, which has set up an open-access fund\u2014the Harvard Open-Access Publishing Equity (HOPE) fund\u2014consistent with the compact. Through HOPE, Harvard will reimburse eligible authors for open-access processing fees. Initially, members of the four Harvard faculties\u2014Arts and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "open access"","block_context":{"text":"open access","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/scholarly-communication\/open-access\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1552,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2012\/10\/17\/guide-released-on-good-practices-for-university-open-access-policies\/","url_meta":{"origin":693,"position":1},"title":"Guide released on good practices for university open-access policies","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Wednesday, October 17, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm pleased to forward on the announcement that the Harvard Open Access Project has just released an initial version of a guide on \"good practices for university open-access policies\". It was put together by Peter Suber and myself with help from many, including Ellen Finnie Duranceau, Ada Emmett, Heather Joseph,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "open access"","block_context":{"text":"open access","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/scholarly-communication\/open-access\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":471,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2010\/06\/09\/a-proposal-to-simplify-the-university-of-north-texas-open-access-policy\/","url_meta":{"origin":693,"position":2},"title":"A proposal to simplify the University of North Texas open-access policy","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Wednesday, June 9, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"\"In High Places\", statue by Gerald Balciar, University of North Texas - Denton campus, installed 1990. Image via Wikipedia. The University of North Texas is engaged in a laudable process of designing an open-access policy for their community. Draft language for their policy is now available at their site on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "open access"","block_context":{"text":"open access","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/scholarly-communication\/open-access\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/en\/thumb\/c\/c4\/UNT_Eagle_statue.jpg\/300px-UNT_Eagle_statue.jpg","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":680,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2011\/01\/18\/are-open-access-fees-disenfranchising\/","url_meta":{"origin":693,"position":3},"title":"Are open-access fees disenfranchising?","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Tuesday, January 18, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"I had an interesting discussion over coffee at the recent\u00a0SOAP Symposium about the question of whether the\u00a0article processing fee revenue model for open-access journals\u00a0disenfranchises authors with fewer financial resources. It prompted me to write up a fuller explanation of why this worry is misplaced. Opportunity for full participation in research\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "open access"","block_context":{"text":"open access","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/scholarly-communication\/open-access\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1647,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2013\/01\/29\/why-open-access-is-better-for-scholarly-societies\/","url_meta":{"origin":693,"position":4},"title":"Why open access is better for scholarly societies","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Tuesday, January 29, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"[This is a heavily edited transcript of a talk that I gave on January 3, 2013, at a panel on open access at the 87th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA, the main scholarly society for linguistics, and publisher of the journal Language), co-sponsored by the Modern\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "open access"","block_context":{"text":"open access","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/scholarly-communication\/open-access\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1533,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2012\/10\/08\/open-access-week-2012-at-harvard\/","url_meta":{"origin":693,"position":5},"title":"Open Access Week 2012 at Harvard","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Monday, October 8, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"...set the default... Here's what's on deck at Harvard for Open Access Week 2012 (reproduced from the OSC announcement). From October 22 through October 28, Harvard University is joining hundreds of other institutions of higher learning\u00a0to celebrate\u00a0Open Access Week, a global event for the promotion of free, immediate online access\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "open access"","block_context":{"text":"open access","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/scholarly-communication\/open-access\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2110"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=693"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":709,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693\/revisions\/709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}