July 31, 2014
Dear Mr. Madhan,
The American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) is a professional society founded in 1924 that is devoted
to the advancement of plant biology. It publishes two high-impact primary research journals—Plant
Physiology (founded 1926) and The Plant Cell (1989)—and other publications, organizes conferences,
and undertakes other activities that are key to the advancement of plant science. We welcome the
opportunity to comment on the DBT-DST Open Access Policy.
First, though, we’d like to point out the various long-standing relationships we have with Indian
scientists and businesses. ASPB’s journals have published dozens of articles over the past few years
coauthored by Indian scientists. We have well over 100 members living and working in India. We have
worked for several years with Globe Publishing Services in New Delhi to support our dozens of Indian
library subscribers, including members of the large DeLCON consortium. And, finally, our composition
services are provided by TNQ in Chennai, India, in collaboration with our American vendor.
ASPB is well aware of the benefits of increasing access to research results and in fact was one of the first
scholarly publishers to deposit all final, publisher-improved (the “Version of Record,” or VoR) articles
into PubMedCentral. The Society is supportive of initiatives to broaden access to its research content
and is working to ensure that our policies are compliant with the various funder and university
mandates worldwide. ASPB offers authors the opportunity to deposit their accepted manuscript in their
institution’s open-access repository, typically with a six-month embargo {“Green OA”). Authors may also
purchase immediate Gold OA for their VoR article for a nominal fee.
But increased access comes at a cost. ASPB invests significant funds in supporting the peer-review
process, both through staff and through its online peer-review system. Additionally, we support the
copyediting, proofreading, composition/XML tagging, printing, online hosting (dissemination and
discoverability services), and archiving efforts necessary to preserve the VoR to ensure the content is
accessible by future generations. All told, we invest several million dollars each year to produce our two
journals. Those funds come from a combination of author fees, APCs (article processing charges), and—
most significantly—library subscriptions. It is indeed these subscriptions that support the bulk of the
important publishing activities noted above. We must therefore enter into OA-type arrangements
judiciously and consider national funder mandates carefully. Some items of concern include the
following:
•
Although ASPB has determined that releasing all content within 12 months is consistent with
our business model, we would like to comment that public access policies that mandate an
embargo period are likely to have profoundly negative impacts on the subscription revenues of
smaller societies in some fields (and please note that about two-thirds of the highest-impact
journals are published by scholarly societies). We know from the usage data for our journal
Plant Physiology, for example, that usage is robust for three or four years. We therefore believe
that any public access policies adopted by the Indian government should be free of temporal
mandates.
•
Further, as subscription revenues shrink in the face of OA mandates, the capacity for small
publishers like ASPB to innovate may be closed off. Societies will be unable to further invest in
their journals, and ASPB specifically may be unable to monetize the new products and services
we are currently working on that we hope will allow us to diversify our revenue streams in the
near to mid-term future.
•
We do not understand the section in the DBT/DST policy that states “DBT/DST will not
underwrite article processing charges levied by some journals.” Although ASPB offers both
Green and Gold OA, we strongly prefer Gold OA, whereby authors pay a nominal fee to make
the VoR immediately accessible. Green OA leads to “versioning” of the literature, and while we
support our authors’ right to reuse their content in whatever way they choose, we would prefer
that scholars and the public have access to the final, improved version of the paper that is
hosted on our journals’ web sites.
•
At this time, ASPB continues to retain copyright. As already noted, our authors are free to reuse
their content however they choose, commercially as well as non-commercially for educational
purposes. But ASPB retains the commercial rights to reuse by third parties, and those rights are
most efficiently exercised—and our author s’ rights most effectively protected—when we hold
copyright in the VoR. Therefore, ASPB cannot at this time accept the proposed Addendum to
Publication Agreement attached to the draft OA policy.
Again, thank you for this opportunity to present our views on the complex nature of scholarly publishing
and to explain the role of the publisher—and, further, the library subscription—in this critical enterprise.
Sincerely,
Crispin Taylor, Ph.D.
Executive Director