Elsevier Sponsored Articles Option for Evolution and Human Behavior
At present, people who want to read an article in Evolution and Human Behavior can get access to the article in a number of different ways. Many readers get access through their institution, though of course not all institutions subscribe to the journal, and not all readers are affiliated with one of these institutions. Members of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) get the journal as part of their membership (which is $66/year for non-students). A third option is to pay for an individual subscription to the journal ($477 in the United States), or for individual articles, which I believe is about $30. (So those of you considering an individual subscription or purchasing an article should simply join HBES, which is a much better deal; membership in the Society also gets you a reduced rate to the annual conference, which will be held in beautiful Miami Beach, Florida this summer.)
From the perspective of authors of articles in the journal, some worry that the expense associated with purchasing the journal – either as an individual or as an institution – will reduce the readership of the article. Articles are normal goods, and as the price goes up, demand can be safely predicted to go down. Elsevier, it is worth noting, allows other avenues of dissemination – including posting a version of the paper on one’s web site. (See their Article Posting Policies for more).
Soon, authors who publish in Evolution and Human Behavior will have a new option. If an author wants her article to be available for free to everyone, she may pay a fee to Elsevier to make it a “sponsored article.” These articles, instead of being available only with a subscription or by payment, will then be available to be downloaded and viewed by anyone. The fee to make an article available for free has been set at $3,000.
The first reaction people have to the idea of sponsoring articles is that it seems as though Elsevier is now double-dipping, charging institutions and individuals for access to the entire journal – which of course includes such sponsored articles – and then deriving revenue again for the subset of articles that are sponsored.
Elsevier has a response to this, their double dipping policy, which reads in part:
- Elsevier’s policy is not to charge subscribers for open access content and when calculating subscription prices only to take into account content published under the subscription model.
- Elsevier amends its journal list prices to account for each and every sponsored open access article. Our subscription customers are not charged for open access articles – we do not double dip
My understanding of this policy is that when they set a price for a journal subscription, they reduce the price in proportion to the fraction of sponsored articles in the prior year’s volume of the journal. (To give some frame of reference, E&HB historically has published around 60 papers a year. This number will obviously rise as we move to the new rate of eight issues per year.)
One important note is that the option to sponsor an article comes only after acceptance; this prevents the decision – in either direction – from influencing editors.
How does Elsevier’s price compare with other options? Berkeley has compiled a list of prices. As can be seen from the table, Elsevier’s price is comparable to some of the other big names in academic publishing (e.g., Springer and Wiley charge $3,000 as well). Prices at Public Library of Science (PLOS) vary depending on the outlet, ranging from $1,350 for PLOS ONE to $2,900 for PLOS Biology. (Pricing also depends on the country of origin of the paper.) The rules and prices surrounding publication vary a great deal; journals such as the one that hosts this blog, Evolutionary Psychology, are open access with no fee at all.
Is the option to pay to sponsor an article in Evolution and Human Behavior a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? I’ve addressed the relationship between Elsevier and E&HB before, and it bears emphasizing that I am not an unbiased party. It seems to me that it’s hard to see the present situation as any worse than before. After all, authors are free simply to publish in the usual manner, and decline the offered option. In this sense, it seems to me that authors are at a minimum no worse off than they were previously.
On the other hand, I predict that authors (and perhaps reviewers and readers) of the journals might be a little irked by the new option. Despite the disclaimer about double dipping, Elsevier might be seen as trying to extract yet more revenue from the journal, in this case from authors as opposed to readers, which might strike some people as somewhat vexing, given that authors already feel as though they are providing the content that Elsevier sells for free. I would not be surprised if some authors wonder exactly how prices will be “amended” to “account for” sponsored articles.
Clearly, the publishing and pricing model surrounding academic publishing is in a state of flux. Groups such as the Human Behavior and Evolution Society are likely to face difficult decisions in a dynamic publishing environment in the near future, and I, for one, hope that experts on these issues are willing to share their knowledge and insights as these important changes take place.
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