Matthew Salter, Publisher, American Physical Society (APS) attended this online meeting to help PACT further explore issues from scholarly societies’ perspectives.
The APS focuses on its community of researchers and scholars - their work and interests drive the creation of new and innovative specialist journals. The Physical Review journal series comprises 15 peer-reviewed research journals, five of which are fully open access.
Several issues were discussed, namely...
Model and Budget: APS’s primary publishing objectives have always been about increasing dissemination of research and prioritizing affordability of access. As such, APS has been more reluctant to increase prices than other actors in the publishing marketplace. APS is a non-profit, therefore its financial statements are available to the public. Matthew noted that small academic associations’ mission, aims, and skillsets are very different from those of commercial publishers, for example, commercial publishers can more easily take advantage of economies of scale. They also approach publishing with a business-oriented attitude that allows them to be more agile and respond to the needs of their customers by developing products and services. This is not typically the approach of society publishers. Small publishers may run at a very small scale but serve their communities well.
Max Planck Society partnership: This “read and publish” pilot program is in its first year and is widening access to content. It highlights an important issue: publishing quality material and the sustainability of the whole system. APS is using the pilot to help develop systems, infrastructure, and procedures for institutional agreement and to test out business models to achieve financial sustainability.
Challenges of institutional open access
A challenge faced particularly by society publishers is achieving sustainable open access as the cost of open access may be considerably more than current subscription revenues. Matthew noted that this is less of a problem for commercial publishers that command larger subscription budgets with their customers.
Large publishers and rigid OA models: Smaller societies have different ways of operating and different goals. Commercial publishers can adjust their operations more easily and invest more in developing services.
The dilemma for UMD: these are complex issues and there is no “one size fits all” approach. Matthew emphasized the need for sustainability in serving the community. There are problems with scaling small systems.