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SciPost's Business Model

Our mission:

{% include 'bi/journal-text-32.html' %} Genuine Open Access {% include 'bi/question-square.html' %}


Your role:

{% include 'bi/bank-32.html' %}Make us sustainable

SciPost business model sketch

Today's Open Access publishing landscape is very polluted and unhealthy:

The consequences include large-scale damage to library budgets, depleted research budgets, and curtailed careers of researchers.

We would like to re-empower the academic side in this battle for Open Access, by offering an alternative designed by and optimized purely for academic interests.

Our business model can be summarized by the following:

We don't charge authors, we don't charge readers, we don't send bills to anybody for our services, and we certainly don't make any profit; we are an academic community service surviving on support from Organizations which benefit from our activities.

Said otherwise, our system is academia's antidote to APCs.

The bullet points here give you the outline; you'll find more detailed explanations below.

Principles
  • Authors don't pay to publish
  • Readers don't pay to read
  • Publishing decisions are about science, not money
  • We don't make any profit
  • We survive only thanks to the charity of those who benefit from our activities
Actions
  1. Publish
    We run our publishing activities thinking only about the science.
  2. Report
    We interlink each Publication to its associated Organizations; separately, we compile our expenditures for running our services. We make all this information publicly available.
  3. Sustain
    We rely on charitable support from Organizations to give us resources to keep doing what we do best, namely point 1.
Qualities
  • Economical
    Costs are a fraction of traditional APCs (averaged estimate: €500 per paper).
  • Transparent
    Everybody can see who provides our resources, and who benefits from what we do with resources we are given.
  • Respectful
    Our academic contributors are freed from threatening invoices, bounty hunters, scavenging of research budgets and swiping of credit cards.

How? Bullet points summary

The details

Financial pages

First things first: we make all our financial data openly available. This includes all revenues and expenditures for all our activities, aggregated to various levels. The relevant pages are:

To start: 3 key concepts

NAP

Number of Associated Publications

An Organization's Associated Publications is the set of papers in which the Organization (or any of its children) is mentioned in author affiliations, or in the acknowledgements as grant-giver or funder.

The Number of Associated Publications is always given for a particular context (for example for a given year and/or Journal, or for all years and Journals combined).

PubFrac

A fraction of a unit representing an Organization's "weight" for a given Publication.
The weight is given by the following simple algorithm:

  • First, the unit is split equally among each of the authors.
  • Then, for each author, their part is split equally among their affiliations.
  • The author parts are then binned per Organization.

By construction, any individual paper's PubFracs sum up to 1.

APEX

For a given Journal for a given year, the average expenditures (namely: all our outgoings, in salary and others, faced by our initiative) per Publication which our initiative has published.

All our APEX are listed on our APEX page.

Lost in terminology? All important concepts and their definition (click to toggle) {% include 'finances/_definitions_table.html' %}

The PubFracs system a perfect antidote to APCs

One of the many failures of APCs (Article Processing Charges) is to not offer a sufficiently fine-grained resolution of each paper's relations to particular Organizations. A paper is usually associated to many Organizations (multiple authors with their individual affiliations; multiple granting agencies etc). APCs are great if you are the business sending the invoice. APCs are a nightmare for academic Organizations caring about equitable cost distribution.

In order to resolve things more finely, and in the belief that equitable is computable, we built our systems based on the idea of PubFracs, in which each paper has one unit to be distributed among the Organizations associated to that paper.

The PubFrac weight is given by the following simple algorithm: first, the unit is split equally among each of the authors. Then, for each author, their share is split equally among their affiliations. The results are then binned per Organization. By construction, any given paper's PubFracs sum up to $1$.

At the moment of publication, PubFracs are automatically compiled and linked to the relevant Organizations. This data is displayed on our Organization detail pages, where further relevant information can also be found (e.g. associated publications, authors, support history).

Reporting to all stakeholders: how and where we display information

The APEX page

You will find a detailed listing of our Average Publication Expenditures at our APEX page.

This displays a year-by-year, Journal-by-Journal overview of the expenditures we have ascribed to our publishing activities.

These numbers are computed according to the following algorithm:

The APEX of our Journals fluctuates from year to year, since it depends on our levels of activity (variations in submission and acceptance rates) and our operations (team size, etc.). As a rule of thumb, our APEX is about a factor of 5-7 lower than typical APCs from corporate publishers.

The APEX (Average Publication Expenditures) page.

Country-level data

At the country-level financial data page, you will find a list of countries with associated expenditures, subsidies and how this impacts our financial reserves.

In an ideal world where each Organization equilibrated their support to what we deliver for them, all these impact numbers would tend to zero. In the meantime, we survive with the generosity of some to help compensate for bystanders.

Country-level data on the impact of our activities on our financial reserves.

The Organization list page

At the Organization list page, you will find a list of institutions related to our publishing activities.

The list can be filtered by country, or by searching for a particular Organization through its name or acronym.

Each Organization's NAP (summed over all our activities) is displayed, together with an indication of whether they have supported our activities or not (yet).

Clicking on a particular instance leads to that instance's detail page.

The Organization list page, with filters.

An example Organization detail page
(Support history tab)

In an Organization detail page, under the Support history tab, you will find:

An example of an Organization's detail page (Support history tab) with the Subsidies list.

Below the Subsidies list, you will find the per-year data on how these activities impact our financial reserves.

An example of an Organization's detail page (Support history tab) with impact on reserves.

Expanding one of the per-year collapsibles reveals a table with a breakdown of PubFracs at the individual Journal level for that year.

An example of an Organization's detail page (Support history tab) with per-Journal PubFracs.

Sponsorship

Why?

It is very important to understand that although we compile data on which Organizations benefit from our activities, we do not bill these Organizations for the services we provide. We are a charity whose mission is to serve the global academic community, and our editorial services are neither for sale nor delivered against payment.

This opens up some frequently-asked questions:

The reason why Organizations should support us is quite simple: our existence and continued operations saves them money. In fact, it saves them a lot of costs which would have otherwise been incurred had their authors published elsewhere.

Our operations would be immediately sustainable if Organizations benefitting from our activities generally supported us at a level commensurate with their PubFrac share.

The inevitable reality is that some Organizations will remain bystanders, while others do support us more than others. In practice, sustainability thus means equilibrium between

Levels of support

Organizations fall somewhere in the spectrum between those that generously support our activities and fuel our growth, all the way to those that remain bystanders. In fact, we like to categorize them as follows:

Category Support
(vs PubFrac share)
Impact on
our reserves
{% include 'bi/trophy-fill.html' %} Champion 4x or more strongly positive
{% include 'bi/battery-charging.html' %} Promoter Twice or more positive
{% include 'bi/battery-full.html' %} Supporter On par neutral
{% include 'bi/battery-half.html' %} Sympathizer Below negative
{% include 'bi/battery.html' %} Bystander None strongly negative

If we could have all Organizations which benefit from our activities land in the Supporter category, we'd be robustly sustainable. Any Promoters or Champions would then propel our growth. In the meantime, they allow us to survive.

In-kind support

Sponsorships allow us to cover our central personnel and operational costs, and are absolutely crucial to our sustainability. They are however not the only way Organizations can concretely help us in our mission.

We also welcome in-kind support from Organizations, in any useful form including (but in no way limited to):

In-kind support is particularly interesting for us for the following reasons:

Is your Organization interesting in helping us with such in-kind support? Please contact our administration to discuss concrete possibilities.

Why do we push for this business model?

We view our model as the cheapest, fairest, simplest model which an academic publishing infrastructure can adopt.

A subscriptions-based model is out of the question because it is incompatible with our core guiding principles.

We are also against the author pays model, often implemented through Article Processing Charges (APCs). Why? Besides being arguably quite insulting to scientists,

Our consortial funding model with PubFracs-based recognition solves all these problems in one go. Our pooling of resources and maximally simple accounting drastically simplifies administration for everybody involved. Our transparency means that recognition is given where it is due.

Closing words

As far as our operations are concerned, we run them in the most efficient way possible, with complete transparency, for the benefit not only of scientists worldwide, but also of their supporting Organizations (and anybody else interested in science).

On the question of free-riding, there will of course always be Organizations which are better than others at taking responsibility for themselves, and for the broader community. Though we do not ban free-riding, it does make our model more challenging to sustain. However, since our integrated costs are dramatically lower than those of other publishers, our infrastructure remains cheaper for our sponsors to fund even if some level of free-riding is present. And besides, since we make all data public, who deserves credit for supporting us will be clear and transparent for everybody to see.

As far as our sustainability is concerned, we put our trust in the hands of the Organizations which benefit from our activities.

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