OA journal business models

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  • 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.

Contents


[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Endowments

  • Description. The model is for an OA publication to build an endowment and use the annual interest to cover its expenses.

[edit] Fund-raising

[edit] Hybrid OA journals

  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.
  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.

[edit] 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.)
  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.)

[edit] 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".)

[edit] 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.)

[edit] 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).
  1. Variant: Fee discounts or waivers for economic hardship. 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: Fee discounts for author assistance. Some OA journals, such as Hydrology and Earth Systems Science, reduce their publication fee for authors who submit their manuscripts in a certain file format or who choose to do their own copy-editing.
  3. 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.
  4. Variant: Institutional arrangements without memberships. Some OA publishers strike individual deals with individual institutions.

[edit] Reprints

  • Description. The model is to sell reprints or offprints to help support an OA journal.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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).
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