Journalology #149: A selective collapse
Hello fellow journalologists,
Today’s issue contains five stories that I think you should know about. We’ll cover:
The US Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) assessment on the future cost of open access
A report on the state of peer review based on a large ScholarOne dataset
A thoughtful essay on the Matthew effect and AI
A report by Elsevier on Europe’s research performance
Significant anniversaries for MDPI and PLOS One
Federal Research: Agencies Should Better Manage Anticipated Publishing Cost Increases Amid Shift to Public Access
Amid the federal shift to public access, publishers are changing their business models to remain viable without subscription revenue and will require authors to pay to have their publications made open access. Agencies allow grant funds to cover these charges. Assuming historical patterns continue, the new policies and publishers’ responses may result in significant agency cost growth. This would mean less money for research (see figure). However, only the National Institutes of Health has planned to manage these potential costs. Additional analysis could help other agencies better manage costs, which may triple annually.
JB: The news agenda in 2022 was dominated by the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) “Nelson memo”. One of the main criticisms of that document was that it paid little attention to what the cost of the new policy might be.
On Thursday the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a more detailed assessment of the potential costs for US research agencies. In their words:
In 2024, OSTP published an economic analysis on expanding public access, but it did not fully reflect all five of GAO’s key elements of an economic analysis. Notably, the scope did not address the goal of estimating the potential costs and other effects. Ensuring that future analyses are consistent with the key elements can help agencies better understand the cost implications of their new policies.
The headline figure is that publishing charges for US federal research agencies will increase from $295 million in 2024 to “as much as $ 1 billion annually”. However, I’m not convinced it will be as simple as that.
We’re still waiting to hear whether the NIH will introduce price caps to help reduce the potential increase in cost. I often find myself agreeing with David Crotty and his recent prediction seems likely to me:
Should the NIH eventually announce their APC caps, I would expect to see a rush of TAs signed in the US, similar to the rapid uptake in the EU following the implementation of Plan S. The rich (researchers/institutions/publishers) will get richer, again — an unintended, but entirely predictable consequence.
In this scenario, at least some of the open access publishing costs will be shouldered by academic institutions, not by the federal research funders.
Science ran a news story about the GAO report on Friday, which included this assessment from Christopher Steven Marcum:
Still, some observers fault GAO for assuming the author-pays publishing model would predominate over others that might not cost agencies so much, such as encouraging authors to deposit articles in public repositories or supporting journals that make articles free to read without charging fees or subscriptions. “It is not the federal government’s responsibility to prop up a particular business model,” says Christopher Steven Marcum, a consultant who as a White House official during the Biden administration helped write the Nelson Memo. (That memo did not endorse a particular business model.) “The report seems to say, publishers control all the power, so federal agencies just have to cough up more money for them. I’m a little bit mystified by that.”
