I’m honestly surprised the issue the editor you were talking to brought up doesn’t get discussed more. Aside from a little amount of discussion about “predatory” for-profit open access journals no one seems to be talking about the change in incentives “author-pays” models bring about. I’m really excited to see how “eLife” does when it launches, since it’ll at least initially be operating under a “philanthropy pays” open access model.

Now if only we could get enough such funding to cover all of science, we’d really be set…

I have discussed this topic with the editor of a subscription based ecology journal, he has an interesting take. When journals are subscription pay based they have incentive to only accept high quality material; they want to attract as many subscribers as possible. With an authors pay journal the incentive is go take in as many papers as possible. Because of this there are fears that the average quality of papers would suffer as a result of a journal going open source. Of course this is more black and white then reality but is one source of resistance to going open access.

But the point I was trying to make is that may not be true for individual disciplines. It very well could be that the cost of publishing Ecology journals is subsidized by overhead from other departments which are more successful at bringing in external sources of funding. So economic models that explicitly shift the cost of publishing to individual researchers from university libraries might be neutral or beneficial overall, but still bad for disciplines that have been benefiting from these sorts of hidden subsidies.

In my own field (plant biology), the highest impact journals are published by the American Society of Plant Biologists. These journals haven’t moved to an exclusively open access model yet, however the ASPB (unlike the ESA) opposes the Research Works Act. There is clearly variation between different societies, although whether that is a result of the differences in the fields themselves, or just the views of the people who happened to be in power within different organizations when the OA movement burst on the scene is certainly open to debate.

My view is that the deeper cause is sociological, and related to the role that Learned Societies have evolved to play in academic fields, especially Society’s that are perceived to publish the high-impact journals in a particular field. In fields like Ecology, where there are effectively no OA journals to submit to (besides BMC Ecology & PLoS ONE), Societies can maintain a guaranteed subsidized revenue stream via their stranglehold on the publishing market by rejecting OA.

Societies fear OA since it disrupts the Society’s economic base, not because it disrupts the Journal’s economic base. PLoS and BMC prove that journals can be economically sustainable under OA. What is at issue here is the potential risk of OA to kill off the classical cash stream that support Societies. And like any bureacratic class in government, universities, etc., Learned Society bureacracies will seek to protect themselves, even at the expense of the hands that feed them.

What is needed is a broader discussion of alternative economic models for Learned Society’s that are not coupled to subsidies based on publishing closed access journals. If such alternatives are non-viable, then perhaps it is time to ask how Learned Society’s must adapt to the realities of the 21st century or if they are actually necessary at all.

I would guess earth scientists depend more on public shared datasets while the ecology labs I know tend to be doing fewer things where reuse of data is possible. But that is just adding even more anecdote and speculation.