If you had free online access to all of the content of this Journal, would you pay for a subscription? Think about this for a moment before reading on.
I might. I like to page through the printed copy. I appreciate the care the editorial staff has taken to juxtapose related articles and the opportunity for synergistic browsing. I find useful information in the advertisements. The format is convenient and I can use it anywhere-without a computer, Kindle, or wireless connection. Nevertheless, many graduate students and younger faculty members are perfectly satisfied to have an online subscription that is paid for by a university or other institution. These readers, who are rapidly becoming the majority, use online searches and read articles online. Why pay for the same thing if you can get it free?
This is a dilemma that all journals, magazines, and newspapers face. Fewer and fewer people are willing to pay for a printed copy, costs are going up, and the era of personal journal subscriptions may be ending. During my 12 years as JCE editor the total number of individual subscriptions has fallen by approximately 20%, despite the fact that prices have remained constant and we have made strong efforts to retain subscribers. Much of our revenue is now derived from institutions, not individuals.
Subscription fees pay for production and distribution, salaries of our excellent editorial staff here in Madison, support of our Secondary School Chemistry Section, technical expertise needed to keep this Journal online with the latest features in a changing Web environment, and creating special issues on occasions such as Chemistry Week and Earth Day. We are non-profit, so all of the fees are used to make the JCE as good as it can be. Without subscriptions, this would be a very different (perhaps nonexistent) Journal.
Proponents of open access journals (in which the content is free) often quote Stewart Brand (of Whole Earth Catalog fame) as saying, “information wants to be free”. What Brand actually said at the Hacker’s Conference in 1984 was “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.” (1) (A slightly different form appears in Brand’s book about the MIT media lab (2). The fighting is real. High quality information needs to cost something, else how can the quality be supported? The main point of Brand and others who have repeated his mantra is that information needs to be available, but not necessarily gratis.
Proponents of open access argue that because the government pays for research through grants, the research should be published where all taxpayers can read and use it. This assumes that everything published is the result of government-supported research, which is not true of the JCE. In a year we may publish two or three articles that acknowledge support from the NIH, for example, and a significant fraction acknowledge no federal support at all. Also, the government is a notoriously fickle partner in publication of useful materials. A case in point is the Eisenhower National Clearainghouse (ENC), which was supported for many years as a repository of professional development materials, lesson plans, Web resources, and much more for K-12 education. As of September 29, 2005, the U.S. Department of Education ended its support of ENC. Consequently, if you go to the ENC Web site now, you are asked to subscribe in order to get access to the materials that used to be free. Open-access proponents further assume that editing and publication add little or no value beyond what was originally submitted. This too is false for a large fraction of the articles in this Journal. Our copy editors and graphics editor correct usage, resolve issues of ambiguous or contradictory statements, revise graphs and chemical structures for clarity, readability, and accuracy, and help authors present their work in the best possible way.
Of course this produces a higher quality product, but is that what is really wanted today? Audiophiles said that MP3 could not be successful because of its less than optimal quality, but CD sales have plummeted because most people find the ability to copy and share music files more compelling than high fidelity. Is this Journal barking up the wrong tree by trying to achieve the highest quality product? If that’s not what our audience wants, then we need to know so that we can concentrate on what is really important. I would like to hear what you think. Please contact me by email (jwmoore@chem.wisc.edu) or respond to the blogged version of this editorial at http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/chemeddl/. The more we know about what you value in this Journal, the better we can serve you.
Literature Cited
1. Report from the first Hacker’s Conference printed in the May 1985 Whole Earth Review, p. 49.
2. Brand, Stewart The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT Penguin Books: New York, 1988, p 202; see also http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/IWtbF.html (accessed September 2008).
I will continue to subscribe to the print version of J Chem Educ. I used to subscribe to JCE even when I was an undergraduate student in India long time ago. JCE is an excellent journal. To add more value to subscribers you could provide more labs, videos etc only to print subscribers and not to others. Also, you could invite material which are suitable only to the print version and material suitable only to the online version. I think the two versions can coexist and evolve. What puzzles me is why ACS is not taking more active interest in supporting JCE. I think JCE is getting step child treatment from the ACS big wigs in Washington DC. I am always astonished that many research chemists from major universities in the US do not even consider publishing papers in JCE - even though they are educating undergrads in their departments. Why such an attitude exist and how to change that mindset? I can go on but I will stop….
Regarding whether journals add value to what they publish in general, I offered these comments awhile back. (I’ve provided the link also in my comment name info, in case it doesn’t show up in the comment itself)
I’m not that young, but I’m a huge fan of open access online publishing, and I wish all of the ACS journals could move in this direction. JCE could learn a lot from studying open-access journals such as PLOS to determine means of staying financially afloat and also maintaining high publishing standards.
Three arguments:
1. While I understand that the US government is fickle and the NIH supports little of the content in JCE, the political argument of common pay (via taxes) for common knowledge (through open access) remains difficult to refute. Ideally, NSF and DOE would have the same policies as the NIH, and JCE would be affected to a greater extent.
2. Leveling the research/teaching playing field for the resource-poor colleges and universities. I teach at a small undergraduate-focused college. Our library budget cannot afford print or online subscriptions to enough journals to allow our faculty a competitive foothold in their disciplines. Free content is good for our faculty, and good for our students. More US students today are attending community colleges and smaller colleges, where access is limited by small library budgets; if we want ’science for all’, we need to support open access initiatives. This argument extends overseas to resource-limited research environments in the developing world as well.
3. Environmental resource usage - that’s a lot of trees to slash and burn, and a lot of gallons of gas used in getting those paper copies delivered. I know the costs are more than just the materials and postage, but I’m guessing that’s a good proportion of the costs. (What proportion is it?)
Keep up the good work.
As chemistry librarian at a large research institution, and someone who predates the web revolution in scientific journals, I can say that one can be an OA advocate while also understanding the quandaries publishers face in this area. It is simplistic to assume, as many do, that publishers add no value to the journals they produce. However, in some cases that value is overblown and overstated, and for some publishers it comes nowhere near justifying the prices charged to institutional subscribers. JCE is an exception: a quality publication at a reasonable price, and libraries are (or should be) committed to supporting these as long as possible.
However, a single standalone title cannot realize the economies of scale that can be found in a portfolio of journals hosted from the same platform, such as the ACS Journals or large commercial operations such as ScienceDirect or SpringerLink. It’s nice that there are still some truly “independent” journals like JCE out there, but they are economically doomed in the long run. That’s why many small publishers and non-profits, including some other ACS divisions, have been forced to sell themselves via contract to commercial platforms. The benefit is better financial footing and a wider audience that comes from the marketing clout of those platforms. The downside is substantially higher prices for subscribers.
If JCE ultimately decides to join the ACS Publications fold, that’s certainly better than going to Elsevier or Wiley. But it means no OA, ever. ACS brass remain implacably opposed to any form of open access. (Discounting the disingenous window dressing they call “Author Choice”.) It will mean sharply higher prices, and probably a smaller audience of subscribers since many smaller institutions will not be able to follow.
I would hope that JCE would investigate other OA platforms and business models before making that jump. There are plenty of small journals that have successfully planted themselves in OA publishing and done fine without charging subscription fees. They are exceptions, but they’re out there. And your audience of readers would be much larger.
And you should forget about print — today’s students and younger faculty don’t care about print anymore, and there’s no reason to bother with its costs in the OA environment. Many libraries don’t bother with print anymore either, when there is an option not to.