New Preprint: “If Funders and Libraries Subscribed to Open Access: The Case of eLife, PLOS, and BioOne”

UPDATED December 6, 2017:  “A Fix for Open-Access Cost Barriers” (via NatureIndex.com)
The preprint below is discussed. 
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The following PREPRINT was posted on Saturday, November 4, 2017 to the PeerJ Preprints website.
Title
If Funders and Libraries Subscribed to Open Access: The Case Of eLife, PLOS, And BioOne
Authors
John Willinsky
Stanford University
Matthew Rusk
Stanford University
Source
PeerJ Preprints 5:e3392v1
doi: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.3392v1
Abstract

Following on recent initiatives in which funders and libraries directly fund open access publishing, this study works out the economics of systematically applying this approach to three biomedical and biology publishing entities by determining the publishing costs for the funders that sponsored the research, while assigning the costs for unsponsored articles to the libraries. The study draws its data from the non-profit biomedical publishers eLife and PLOS, and the nonprofit journal aggregator BioOne, with this sample representing a mix of publishing revenue models, including funder sponsorship, article processing charges (APC), and subscription fees.
This funder-library open access subscription model is proposed as an alternative to both the closed-subscription model, which funders and libraries no longer favor, and the APC open access model, which has limited scalability across scholarly publishing domains. Utilizing PubMed filtering and manual-sampling strategies, as well as publicly available publisher revenue data, the study demonstrates that in 2015, 86 percent of the articles in eLife and PLOS acknowledged funder support, as did 76 percent of the articles in the largely subscription journals of BioOne. Twelve percent of the articles identified the NIH as a funder, 8 percent identifies other U.S. government agencies. Approximately half of the articles were funded by non-U.S. government agencies, including 1 percent by Wellcome Trust and 0.5 percent by Howard Hughes Medical Institute. For 17 percent of the articles, which lacked a funder, the study demonstrates how a collection of research libraries, similar to the one currently subscribing to BioOne, could cover publishing costs.
The goal of the study is to inform stakeholder considerations of open access models that can work across the disciplines by (a) providing a cost breakdown for direct funder and library support for open access publishing; (b) positing the use of publishing data-management organizations (such as Crossref and ORCID) to facilitate per article open access support; and (c) proposing ways in which such a model offers a more efficient, equitable, and scalable approach to open access than the prevailing APC model, which originated with biomedical publishing.

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Filed under: Academic Libraries, Associations and Organizations, Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Data Files, Libraries, Management and Leadership, News, Open Access, PLOS, Publishing