Redistributive implications of open access

This article addresses the virtues of gold open access from the perspective of its impact on social science scholarly associations and their members. OA has clear and obvious virtues, including redistribution downward and outward of research findings. But it also has the potential for upward redistribution or narrowing of the realm of publication, which this author finds troubling. A central question is who will cover APCs. The article identifies five potential sources of the necessary funds or ways to reduce the funds that are necessary, and discusses problems with each in terms of likely gainers and losers. It also identifies two potential substantive concerns about the kinds of social science scholarship most amenable to open access. It concludes by observing that, as is often the case, an apparently narrow technological innovation opens large issues— organizationally, substantively, and even morally.

This article does not address the concrete financial, legal, and intellectual details of how a scholarly society in the social sciences should engage with innovations leading to gold open access. Instead, it approaches the issue at a slightly higher level of abstraction-mostly assuming its benefits and looking more systematically at its costs. In particular, it considers some of the deeper, even moral, conundrums of redistribution and democratic control that might be associated with a move toward a broad programme of gold open access among social scientists.

UPWARD AND DOWNWARD REDISTRIBUTION
Open access has evident benefits for writers, researchers, students, the interested layperson, policy makers, and perhaps others. Open access journals can promote greater equality among both individuals and ideas; they may be especially valuable to younger scholars or those whose reputation is not (yet) so broad that readers will seek out their work in print or gated publications.
When combined with electronic-only publishing and other changes in the ecology of publication, gold open access can contribute to both breaking the logjam created by highly selective print journals and reducing the fragmentation of too many subfield-specific journals. Open access, that is, gives more scholars access to a wide audience and gives more readers access to the fruits of the resources enjoyed by scholars in wealthy universities and research centres. teaching-oriented settings to remain professionally engaged, collect and disseminate data that can be used to promote diversifying a discipline, and provide arenas for academics who feel marginalized to connect with like-minded others in their discipline; if they must divert funds to open access, they may be forced to perform fewer of these services.
Thus it seems unduly cavalier to say, as one European Community funder is reported to have held, 'If learned societies are a casualty of the move to OA, then so be it'.5 The APSA is by no means a perfect institution, but it fosters the discipline of political science and the well-being  Payment to publish a specific article by the author, the author's university, or an external funder such as a grant-making foundation;  Underwriting a journal, an issue, a scholar's research programme, or some other bundle of publications by a government agency, a foundation, or corporate or political paid advertisements;  Lowering publication expenses by reducing support for editorial direction, peer review, copy editing and page setting, electronic handling of manuscripts, and so on;  Having professional associations pay the costs that otherwise would have been covered by journal subscriptions; or  Charging high fees to libraries and other organizations that serve as a conduit from a journal or publisher to scholars, students, and other readers.
All of these strategies are feasible, subjects of current discussions, or actually in place. They can be combined or subdivided. Leaving aside the (important) details of design and implementation permits one to focus on the central concern of this article: the implications of each strategy for redistribution of publication possibilities and content.
User fees (article processing charges, or APCs, in this arena) are common in many areas of life, perhaps increasingly so in the public arena as financially pressed local governments seek to raise revenue without raising taxes. User fees have the standard benefits of participation in a market; they are efficient, targeted, well understood, transparent, flexible in response to changes of supply or demand. They are effective in calibrating and responding to the potential user's level of desire; if one wants to publish an accepted article badly enough, one will find the funds to pay for its publication.
But user fees also have the standard flaws of participation in a market: any more than a trivial charge is much more costly for the poor than the rich. Estimates of the charges for publishing in an open access journal range from under $200 to over $5000, "with the lowest prices charged by journals published in developing countries and the highest by journals with high-impact factors from major international publishers."6 These charges can be burdensome for a graduate student or junior faculty member, a person with heavy family commitments, scholars in resource-poor colleges and universities, scholars in disciplines or disciplinary subfields with little or no external funding ('woe to the scholar of Chaucer or Prester John')7 and individuals in poor countries that lack foundations or other underwriting organizations. It is easier for well-established scholars to find a sponsor for their new article than for those not yet widely recognized (a nastier version of this point is the prospect of 'vanity publishing' from well-heeled pedants matching up with 'predatory' open access journals that will publish anything for a sufficient fee). It is easier for scholars with research grants, which are much more common in empirical than in philosophical subdisciplines, to cover APCs. Perhaps the publisher or scholarly society can subsidize or waive fees for people or institutions or countries with financial stressbut that adds a layer of complicated and potentially politicized bureaucracy, and simply exaggerates the costs for those just above the threshold of subsidy. User fees, in short, risk encouraging publication by the well- Finally, a foundation, government agency, or ad sponsor might change its priorities or focus after some period of time. That could be desirable; there is no reason to assume that a journal or research agenda that was highly valuable X years ago will continue to be equally valuable years or decades later. But it will be unsettling, and perhaps unjust, for scholars, publishers, or journal editors to learn that the dissemination support they had long counted on is being withdrawn or diverted to a new agenda. In short, if markets have one set of flaws, institutional subsidies have a different and perhaps worse set.10 These anxieties would be lessened if the costs of publishing an article in an open access journal were lowered, say, from several thousand to several hundred dollars. As some open access journals have shown, it is not hard to reduce expenses. The front-end costs of handling manuscripts could be cut by, for example, reducing the number of peer reviews or expending less effort to find the most appropriate reviewers, reducing checks to confirm the submission's originality, desk-rejecting many more manuscripts without an editor spending time to explain why, or using off-the-shelf rather than tailored database systems or software for managing the flow of manuscripts. The back-end costs of handling accepted manuscripts could be cut by, for example, reducing the level of copy-editing or fact-checking, lowering the quality of artwork or requiring authors to cover its costs, or eliminating proof reading at the journal. Editors could receive a smaller subvention and fewer assistants or staff; face-to-face meetings could become tele-conferences. Or journals could change their review criteria, perhaps to match PLoS ONE's focus on only methodological rigour rather than substantive importance, and thereby raise acceptance rates dramaticallythus increasing the number of scholars available for author charges. There are probably other possibilities too.
Some of these cost-cutting measures could spark useful innovations. Perhaps authors (or their institutions) can efficiently be held responsible for copy-editing and proofing; a department, university, or scholarly society can hire a professional editor so that the expense of improving an article would be widely distributed among authors or even among all faculty or APSA members.
More interestingly, what is gained by substituting online post-publication peer review for prepublication anonymous peer reviews 11 seen only by the editors and author? Perhaps post- A final strategy for meeting the expenses of a non-subscription open access journal is for academic publishers or scholarly societies to increase the prices to libraries and other organizations for buying monographs, print journals, or bundled licenses for electronic rights.
(As another blogger put it, 'do people who use subsidized child care at conferences know that libraries are paying for it?' through higher subscription payments for scholarly society journals than are needed to cover publication costs.) Prices for journals and books from commercial publishers have risen faster than library budgets, especially in some disciplines, and there is no reason to think that the trend will stop. Library budgets at even wealthy universities such as information is presented, how much is presented, and how it is presented. In some social science disciplines (e.g. economics and psychology) there will be little disruption, since the coin of the realm has long been articles or even unpublished working papers. In other social sciences such as sociology, cultural studies, and political science, however, a growing dominance of articles over books could substantially change the nature of the discipline (Darley et al., 2014: 27). In political science, for example, shifting attention to articles would advantage some subfields or topics, and disadvantage others, relatively or even absolutely. Just as gold OA has progressed further and along different financial and intellectual lines in the natural sciences than in the social sciences, so it has found more enthusiasts in some than in other subfields of political science. The more "science-y" end of the disciplinescholars who study politics through precisely defined methodologies such as aggregate data analysis or formal models, and who mostly write short, highly focused empirical articles-tend to see more benefits in OA than do scholars on the more humanities-oriented end of political science, such as political philosophers, political historians, or those using qualitative methods such as ethnography or intensive interviews.12 Whether the benefits of greater availability of articles outweighs the costs of losing the breadth of scope, epistemological frameworks, and type of information available most often in a book seems worth considering, even if it is impossible to decide.13 A final way in which the technology of open access could redistribute the content of scholarship has to do with the hoary question of a possible trade-off between quality and quantity. The standard assumption is that open access is or will be closely linked to electronic publishing, so that the old constraints of hard copy publication will vanish. But by a different logic, open access, non-subscription based journals could actually introduce new constraints on the number and type of articles published. That is, if foundations, government agencies, departments or universities, scholarly societies, or even individuals have to shift funds from direct research support to support for publication and dissemination, at the margin fewer research projects will receive funding, at least in the short run, or individuals will think twice before incurring the costs of submitting another manuscript to a journal. Whether commercial or nonprofit publishers are as eager to begin and maintain journals once their revenue streams from subscriptions decline, or whether new publishers will emerge, are also open questions.
Fewer and more carefully chosen articles might not be a bad thing, given that the modal political science article receives barely one citation.14 A lot of words are published that have no impact except possibly on the career of the writer. But the idea that fewer and better articles might be preferable has more than a hint of elitism, which is antithetical to the moral and intellectual impulse behind open access. And there is no guarantee that 'fewer' will be associated with 'better'. So the more likely and perhaps more desirable outcome is an expansion in the number of published articles, independent of qualitywhich brings us back to the question of 'who pays?' with which this argument began.
In sum, open access is an apparently technical, financial, and organizational issue that in fact raises questions of redistribution and democratization in disciplines and scholarly societies.