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{% endblock %} {% block meta_description %}{{ block.super }} Business Model{% endblock meta_description %} {% block pagetitle %}: Business Model{% endblock pagetitle %} {% block content %}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.
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:
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).
A fraction of a unit representing an Organization's "weight" for a given Publication.
The weight is given by the following simple algorithm:
By construction, any individual paper's PubFracs sum up to 1.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
In an Organization detail page, under the Support history tab, you will find:
Below the Subsidies list, you will find the per-year data on how these activities impact our financial reserves.
Expanding one of the per-year collapsibles reveals a table with a breakdown of PubFracs at the individual Journal level for that year.
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:
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
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.
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.
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.
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.