开放获取期刊的运作模式

OA journal business models

• This is a list of business models and revenue sources for OA journals.

• Some revenue sources are supplementary and not sufficient. We aim to include all the revenue sources actually used by OA journals, even if they are small parts of larger business models.

• The examples provided for each model need only be illustrative, not exhaustive.

• For the time being, the major categories are in alphabetical order, which does not reflect their relative prevalence.

• Related lists in OAD: (1) Section on Economic Issues within the Bibliography of open access, (2) Guides for OA journal publishers.

Added-value products

• Description. The model is for a journal to provide OA to at least one version of its articles but also to sell products or services in order to generate revenue to help cover the costs of publication. Examples of added-value products include PDF editions, printed editions, and compilations of articles.
  • Examples:
    • Postgraduate Medicine Freely available HTML versions and subscriptions
    • Journal of Medical Internet Research Freely available HTML versions and paid memberships (institutional or individual)that provides PDF issues and conference discounts for individual memberships
    • The Annals of Improbable Research has published four versions of each article since December 2007: priced print, priced hi-res PDF, free low-res PDF, and free HTML. (Don't be misled by the fact that AIR isn't a "serious" journal. It still needs a serious business model.)

Advertising

• Description. The model is to use advertising on the journal's web site or journal pages in order to generate income to help support the journal.

1. Variant. A journal or its publisher can sell advertising space to companies willing to advertise in the journal. This usually requires a marketing staff.
2. Variant. A journal can use a service like Google AdSense, which places ads on pages based on an algorithmic reading of their content. These services require no marketing staff. Because the journal doesn't know in advance what ads will be placed, this method can answer suspicions that advertising compromises editorial integrity.

Endowments

• Description. The model is for an OA publication to build an endowment and use the annual interest to cover its expenses.
  • Example. Since 2005, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has been building an endowment to cover its costs. See SEP's fund-raising page.
  • Example. In January 2008, Yale University increased its endowment payout in order to support (among other things) OA for its courseware and library digitization projects.

Fund-raising

• Description. The model is to solicit donations, periodically or continuously.
  • Example. See the fund-raising page from the Public Library of Science.

Hybrid OA journals

• Description. The model is for a journal to publish some OA articles and some non-OA articles, when the choice between the two is the author's rather than the editor's. Authors who choose the OA option must typically pay a publication fee or find a sponsor to pay a fee (see "Publication fees" below). In return the journal provides immediate OA to the article at its own web site. Authors who don't choose the OA option don't pay a fee, although they might still pay page and color charges. Nor do they get immediate OA, although they might get delayed OA if the journal provides OA to its backfile after a certain embargo period.
  • Examples:
    • Free to Read from the American Physical Society.
    • Cambridge Open from Cambridge University Press.
    • Sponsored-article journals from Elsevier.
    • Oxford Open from Oxford University Press.
    • Open Choice from Springer.
    • Funded Access from Wiley.

1. Variant. The journal promises to reduce the subscription price in proportion to author uptake of the OA option. (Failure to do so is sometimes called the "double charge" business model.)
2. Variant. The journal allows authors who select the OA option to retain copyright, or to retain more rights than authors who do not select the OA option.
3. Variant. The journal uses CC licenses (or equivalent) for the OA articles, even if it doesn't do so for its other articles.
4. Variant. The journal makes the OA articles the same versions that it publishes in the paid journal. (The alternative is to make the OA articles a truncation or abridgment of the TA editions, e.g. without links to references.)
5. Variant. The journal insists that the OA editions only appear on its own web site. (The alternative is to allow authors to deposit their OA articles in repositories independent of the publisher.)
6. Variant. The journal waives the fee for the OA option in cases of economic hardship.
7. Variant. The journal offers the OA option without any fee at all, or at a discounted fee, for authors in certain categories, for example, authors who are members of a certain society, authors who are employees of a subscribing institution, authors who serve as an editor or referee for one of the publisher's journals, authors from a certain designated developing country, and so on.
   • Examples: No-fee hybrid journals. Most hybrid journals charge publication fees. These three do not: (1) Pediatrics, published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, charges no publication fee, but the OA articles do not appear in the print edition. (2) Plant Physiology, published by the American Society of Plant Biology, charges no publication fee for members of the ASPB. (3) The Emerald Asset hybrid program from Emerald charges no publication fee for authors willing to write "a summary of their research findings highlighting their practical application."
   • Example. In June 2007, the hybrid Journal of Experimental Botany from Oxford University Press waived publication fees for authors from institutions paying for a subscription. In July 2008, Oxford made clear that all its hybrid Oxford Open journals discounted their publication fees for authors from subscribing institutions.
8. Variant. The journal charges one fee for OA articles that also appear in the non-OA edition available to subscribers, and a lower fee for OA articles that do not appear in the non-OA edition.
9. Variant. The journal refuses to publish work by authors bound by OA mandates (from funders or universities) unless those authors select the OA option and pay the associated fee.
10. Variant. The journal rescinds or limits its permission for self-archiving at the same time that it adopts a hybrid OA model, in order to steer authors who want OA away from (no-fee) self-archiving and toward the (fee-based) hybrid option.

Institutional subsidies

• Description. The model is for an institution to subsidize an OA journal, in whole or part, directly or indirectly. It may provide cash, facilities, equipment, or personnel. The institution may be a university, laboratory, research center, library, learned society, museum, hospital, for-profit corporation, non-profit organization, foundation, or government agency.

1. Variants: university subsidies. There are many forms of university subsidies for OA journals: in-house publication of OA journals; funds to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals; and provision of facilities, equipment, or personnel. (Note that many of these subsidies are also used by TA journals.)
   • Example. Philosophers' Imprint is edited by philosophy faculty and published by librarians at the University of Michigan. Because the university already pays the salaries of these employees, and allows them to give some of their working time to the journal, the journal needn't charge reader-side subscription fees or author-side publication fees.
   • Example. Many universities have established funds to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals. For example, see the funds at the University of Amsterdam (est. January 2007), the University of Calgary (est. June 2008), the University of California - Berkeley (est. January 2008), the University of Helsinki (est. June 2008), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (est. March 2005), the University of Nottingham (est. June 2007), the University of Wisconsin (est. August 2007).
2. Variants: government subsidies. There are many forms of government subsidies for OA journals: direct grants to OA journals or publishers; grants to researchers which they may use for publication fees or page charges at OA journals; in-house publication of OA journals; tax deductions for non-profit publishers of OA journals; budgetary support for public universities which publish OA journals, subsidize OA journals, or hire faculty who spend part of their work-time editing OA journals. (Note that many of these subsidies are also used by TA journals.)
   • Example. SciELO, which publishes OA journals, is funded by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico or CNPq, in the Brazilian federal government, and by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo or FAPESP, in the Brazilian State of São Paulo. The full SciELO network throughout Latin America and the Caribbean publishes 550 OA journals (as of 7/13/08).
   • Example. Canada's publicly-funded Social Science and Humanities Research Council offers a program, Aid to Open-Access Research Journals, to support OA journals in the humanities and social sciences. In 2007, it gave grants to 11 OA journals.
   • Example. The Canadian Province of Quebec offers a program, Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC), which supports 25-30 journals, including the journals within Consortium Érudit. These journals are not OA, but provide OA to their backfiles after a two-year moving wall.
   • Example. France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique provides support for a large number of OA journals.
   • Example. The US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences publishes the peer-reviewed OA journal, Environmental Health Perspectives.

 Membership dues

• Description. The model is for a membership organization, like a learned society, to use membership dues to support an OA journal, in whole or part. (See "Institutional subsidies".)

Non-OA publications

• Description. The model is for a publisher to subsidize its OA publications with profits or revenue from its non-OA publications.

1. Variant: Print edition. An OA journal might sell subscriptions to a print edition of the same journal, and use the revenue to cover all or part of the costs of the OA edition. (See "Added-value products" above.)

Publication fees

• Description. The model is to charge a fee upon acceptance of an article for publication. The idea is for the fee to cover the costs of production, although in practice it might cover more or less. Since rejected articles pay no publication fees (but see "submission fees" below), the publication fee must cover the costs of publishing the accepted article plus the cost of reviewing the number of articles the journal rejects for each accepted article. Because costs per accepted paper rise with the rejection rate, the fee must rise with the rejection rate. The bill may go to the author, but is often paid by the author's funder or employer rather than by the author out of pocket. Hence this model is sometimes, misleadingly, called the "author pays" or "author fee" model. The fee is sometimes called a "processing fee" or an "article processing charge" (APC).
  • Examples:
    • BioMed Central. See the BMC Article Processing Charge FAQ.
    • Hindawi. See the Hindawi page on its Article Processing Charges.
    • Public Library of Science. See the PLoS page on its publication fees and its Publication Fee FAQs.

1. Variant: Fee discounts or waivers. Some OA journals waive or reduce publication fees in cases of economic hardship. Some do it for all authors from certain, designated developing countries. Some do it on request, no questions asked.
2. Variant: Institutional memberships. Some OA journals and publishers offer institutional memberships. The chief benefit of membership is that the journal waives or reduces publication fees for authors affiliated with member-institutions. Some charge a flat fee for membership. Some charge an amount linked to the number of articles published in the journal by the institution's employees.
   • Examples: Institutional memberships:
     • BioMed Central. See the BMC page on its membership program.
     • Hindawi. See the Hindawi page on its membership program.
     • Public Library of Science. See the PLoS page on its membership program.
3. Variant: Institutional arrangements without memberships. Some OA publishers strike individual deals with individual institutions.
   • Example. In January 2008, the Max Planck Society agreed to pay the publication fees for MPS authors when they publish in any of the (then 17) OA journals from Copernicus Publications.

 Reprints

• Description. The model is to sell reprints or offprints to help support an OA journal.
  • Example. Postgraduate Medicine freely provides HTML versions of its articles but also sells reprints to generate income.

Submission fees

• Description. The model is to charge a fee for evaluating a submitted paper, whether or not the paper is later accepted. A submission fee may be in addition to a publication fee for manuscripts accepted for publication (see "Publication fees" above). Submission fees can reduce publication fees at journals with high rejection rates.

• Example. Journal of Medical Internet Research. See JMIR's fee schedule.

Volunteer effort

• Description. The model is to use unpaid volunteers for some of the work in producing the journal. All scholarly journals (OA and TA) use volunteers to some extent, as authors, referees, and some kinds of editors. When volunteers have a salary from another organization, and are allowed by that organization to spend some of their time on the journal, the institution is directly or indirectly supporting the journal (see "Institutional subsidies" above).

• Example. Open Medicine.