Market-Driven Free Access to Journal Articles

Authors of journal articles want their efforts certified by peer review and made conveniently available to the widest possible readership. They do not expect royalties nor do they receive them. What they hope for is impact. More specifically, they hope for attention, especially from other researchers, and recognition, especially from those who decide which researchers should be hired or promoted. Journal articles have greater impact if they are immediately and widely accessible. In this Internet Age, maximum impact is achieved by toll-free Web access concurrent with paper publication. Publishers of journals, whether societies or commercial publishers, wish to meet expenses and make a profit. Commercial publishers strive to maximize profits, which has led them to increases in journal prices at rates far in excess of inflation. This, in turn, has led to the "serials crisis" in which research libraries must cancel subscriptions that their clients consider essential. Reduced subscriptions have led to still higher journal prices (to maintain profits), further aggravating the crisis. Journal publishers are taking advantage of the Web's quick, convenient delivery of information by creating electronic versions of their traditional, print journals. To protect their subscription revenues, they have made the e-versions accessible only to those who have paid for a subscription or who are clients of a library that has paid for a site license to the journal. Authors who want their refereed work to be accessible toll-free on the Web concurrent with paper publication are not offered that option. The Entomological Society of America (ESA, www.entsoc.org), publisher of four leading entomological journals,1 now offers that very service to those authors who are willing to pay for it. For authors who buy the service, ESA immediately posts their articles, toll-free to all users, on ESA's server (journals.entsoc.org). Anyone with Internet access can download these articles in portable document format (PDF) without charge. The success of this service, which can be termed Immediate Free Web Access (IFWA), suggests that a market-driven transition to toll-free access for all articles in all journals is possible. ESA's business plan for its journals is simple: The price of IFWA will be based on its cost and no author will be required to purchase it. If nearly all authors buy IFWA and subscriptions are lost because content is increasingly available for free, ESA will compensate by increasing the price of IFWA. If higher prices cause fewer authors to buy IFWA, subscription revenues should stabilize. The endpoint of this plan is uncertain, but it may lead to the demise of paper publication and subscriptions, because authors and the institutions that support them are likely to embrace the benefits of IFWA and strive to reduce the high costs of the present system. Monetary costs of the present system include printing paper issues, limiting access to electronic versions, and making past and present volumes of journals accessible in hundreds of research libraries. Intangible costs are that the present system lessens the impact of articles and severely restricts access by researchers in lesser institutions and in developing countries. Nonetheless, many of the stakeholders in the present system believe that printed issues, or at least tolls in the form of subscriptions and site licenses, will continue indefinitely. ESA began offering IFWA in January 2000. Its price to authors for the service is 75 percent of the price of 100 paper reprints. For example, the charge for a seven-page article is $90. This price provides a greater profit margin than for paper reprints, which are expensive to produce and deliver. IFWA requires only that the PDF file of the article be made freely accessible on ESA's Web server. During the first two months of the service, authors bought IFWA for 13 percent of the articles. The purchase rate has risen steadily, and for March and April 2001 it was 59 percent. Courtesy of Thomas J. WalkerThe difference between Fee Access and Free Access to materials on the Web. If IFWA is a profit-making service that many authors want and are willing to pay for, why is ESA apparently the only publisher that sells it? For scientific societies, the answer is probably that their institutional inertia is great and their members have yet to lobby for IFWA--as ESA members did. For commercial publishers, it may be that they fear that selling IFWA to those who want it will abet a transition to IFWA for all articles. If that should occur, revenues from subscriptions and site licenses would cease, ending an advantage commercial publishers have long enjoyed--namely, financing their journals largely through high-priced library subscriptions. On the other hand, societies have supplemented modest incomes from lower-priced library subscriptions with member dues and page charges. In a world without journal subscriptions, societies and commercial publishers alike will collect page charges to pay for refereeing, editing, and composing. Publishers will pay nothing to make the refereed articles freely Web accessible, because research libraries and PubMed Central will post them without charge. Authors should encourage their publishers to provide IFWA at a fair price. Other things being equal, many authors will prefer to publish in journals that provide it, especially as electronic literature indexes begin linking directly to the e-versions of articles. Most authors would like nothing better than for their articles to be available in full-text, without tolls, via links in Current Contents Connect and other widely used literature indexes. Thomas J. Walker, a professor of entomology at University of Florida, Gainesville, maintains a site on Web access to traditionally published journals at http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm. 1. Annals of the Entomological Society of America, Journal of Medical Entomology, Journal of Economic Entomology, and Environmental Entomology.

Market-Driven Free Access to Journal Articles

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