PLoS stays afloat with bulk publishing
PLoS stays afloat with bulk publishing
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PLoS 通过批量出版维持生计
作者：
D. Butler
公共科学图书馆（PLoS）是开放获取出版运动的典范，它正在遵循一种高级定制的科学出版模式——依靠大量廉价出版低质量的论文来补贴其少数高质量的旗舰期刊。自2002年成立以来，公共科学图书馆依靠大约1730万美元的慈善赠款在财政上维持了运转。《自然》杂志对该公司账目的分析显示，公共科学图书馆仍然严重依赖慈善基金，远未达到其既定目标，即通过向在其期刊上发表文章的作者收取费用的商业模式迅速实现收支平衡。根据公开的账目，在截至2007年9月30日的上一个财政年度，其668万美元的支出超过了286万美元的收入。但由于公共科学图书馆于2006年12月推出的在线数据库“PLoS One”，其财务前景看起来更加光明。《公共科学图书馆·综合》采用一种“轻”同行评议系统来发表任何被认为在方法上合理的文章。在2007年的第一个完整运营年度，PLoS One发表了1230篇文章，这将产生约154万美元的作者费，约占PLoS当年总收入的一半。相比之下，2007年发表在《公共科学图书馆·生物学》上的321篇文章带来的收入还不到这个数字的一半。从一开始，该公司就有意识地决定通过出版高接受率、成本更低的二线社区期刊来补贴其顶级期刊。除了优质期刊——《公共科学图书馆·生物学》和《公共科学图书馆·医学》，这两种期刊的接受率低，管理费用高，收取2750美元的作者费——它还推出了四种低成本期刊，由志愿学术编辑团队而不是内部员工管理。在这些期刊——《公共科学图书馆：计算生物学》、《公共科学图书馆：遗传学》、《公共科学图书馆：病原体》和《公共科学图书馆：被忽视的热带病》上发表文章的作者收取的费用为2100美元，几乎与顶级期刊一样多。但是这种组合所产生的收入远远低于公共科学图书馆的设想。“很明显，现实与公共科学图书馆最初的计划相距甚远，”美国数学学会（American Mathematical Society）执行主任约翰·尤因（John Ewing）说。《自然》杂志获得的税收记录数据显示，公共科学图书馆最初的预测高估了其顶级和二线期刊将吸引的文章数量。公共科学图书馆还严重低估了制作顶级期刊的成本。“如果最初的模式是通过作者收费来自我维持，那么PLoS似乎还远未达到目标的一半，”世界上最大的教育和科学计算协会——计算机协会（Association for Computing Machinery）出版部副主任伯纳德·劳斯（Bernard Rous）说。尽管如此，劳斯还是支持公共科学图书馆利用多种收入来源和交叉补贴的策略，以允许对其所有书籍的开放访问。面对日益严峻的财政状况，公共科学图书馆在2006年提高了其所有作者的费用，从1500美元增加到其前两大期刊的2500美元，此后又进一步提高了费用。这有助于增加收入，但与《公共科学图书馆·综合》上出现的大量文章带来的新现金流相比，这一增长的影响微不足道。自成立以来，《公共科学图书馆·综合》已经发表了2526篇文章，比《公共科学图书馆·生物学》五年来发表的文章还多，而且这种增长没有减弱的迹象。自今年年初以来，《公共科学图书馆·综合》已经发表了1158篇论文，几乎与2007年全年发表的论文一样多。另一个因素是作者在PLoS One上发表文章只需花费1250美元。“公平地说，包括PLoS One在内的社区期刊对我们的整体财务状况做出了非常好的贡献，”PLoS的首席执行官Peter Jerram说。他补充说：“PLoS正走在两年内实现自我维持的道路上。在此期间，需要一些慈善方面的支持。杰拉姆说：“看到公共科学图书馆多年来取得的进步如何反映在更广泛的研究开放获取方面取得的巨大进步，这是巨大的。”提交给《公共科学图书馆·综合》的论文被发送给约500名研究人员组成的编辑委员会的一名成员，他们可以选择自己审稿，也可以将论文发送给他们选择的审稿人。但是裁判只会检查方法上的严重缺陷，而不会检查结果的重要性。《自然》杂志采访的董事会成员对他们收到的论文和他们征求的审稿报告的总体质量普遍持肯定态度。免费获取的《临床研究杂志》（Journal of Clinical Investigation）的执行董事约翰·霍利（John Hawley）说：“《公共科学图书馆·综合》（PLoS One）上的文章太多了，很难判断其整体质量。仅仅因为它的数量，它就会被认为是一个垃圾场，无论是否合理。”“但尽管如此，它还是把一份不合格的期刊引入了他们的圈子。”Hawley说，PLoS的商业模式受到审查并不奇怪。“公共科学图书馆吹嘘自己的商业模式比其他所有人都好，是‘唯一的’。”他说，总部位于伦敦的开放获取公司BioMed Central所采取的策略，即在广泛的学科领域出版大多影响较低的期刊，“可能更接近开放获取模式”。据估计，BioMed Central的年收入约为1000万英镑（合2000万美元）。一位不愿透露姓名的科学出版顾问表示，这已经是“令人愉快的盈利”。“BioMed Central很清楚，许多中等期刊比大品牌更赚钱，因为它们的编辑成本更低，捆绑期刊的营销成本也更低。我怀疑《公共科学图书馆·综合》也是吸取了同样的教训，”他补充道。BioMed Central现已挂牌出售，这将是“人们愿意为一家开放获取公司支付多少钱的首次迷人市场测试”。■德克兰·巴特勒公共科学图书馆通过批量出版得以维持
Public Library of Science (PLoS), the poster child of the open-access publishing movement, is following an haute couture model of science publishing — relying on bulk, cheap publishing of lower quality papers to subsidize its handful of high-quality flagship journals. Since its launch in 2002, PLoS has been kept afloat financially by some US$17.3 million in philanthropic grants. An analysis by Nature of the company’s accounts shows that PLoS still relies heavily on charity funding, and falls far short of its stated goal of quickly breaking even through its business model of charging authors a fee to publish in its journals. In the past financial year, ending 30 September 2007, its $6.68-million spending outstripped its revenue of $2.86 million, according to the publicly available accounts. But its financial future is looking brighter thanks to a cash cow in the form of PLoS One, an online database that PLoS launched in December 2006. PLoS One uses a system of ‘light’ peer-review to publish any article considered methodologically sound. In its first full year of operation in 2007, PLoS One published 1,230 articles, which would have generated an estimated $1.54 million in author fees, around half of PLoS’s total income that year. By comparison, the 321 articles published in PLoS Biology in 2007 brought in less than half this amount. From the outset, the company consciously decided to subsidize its top-tier titles by publishing second-tier community journals with high acceptance rates that would be cheaper to produce. In addition to its premium titles — PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine, which have low acceptance rates and high overheads, and charge author fees of $2,750 — it has launched four lower-cost journals that are run by volunteer academic editorial teams rather than in-house staff. At $2,100, the fees to authors for publishing in these journals — PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics, PLoS Pathogens and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases — are almost as much as those for its top journals. But this combination has generated much less income than PLoS envisaged. “It’s very clear that the reality is very far from PLoS’s original plan,” says John Ewing, executive director of the American Mathematical Society. In particular, PLoS’s initial projections overestimated by an order of magnitude the number of articles that both its topand second-tier journals would attract, tax-record data obtained by Nature reveal. PLoS also grossly underestimated the cost of producing its top-tier journals. “If the original model was to be self-sustaining through author fees, it seems that PLoS is not even half-way there,” says Bernard Rous, deputy director of publications of the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society. Nevertheless, Rous endorses PLoS’s strategy of tapping multiple revenue sources and cross-subsidizing to allow open access to all its titles. Faced with an increasingly dire financial situation, PLoS hiked all its author fees in 2006, from $1,500 to as much as $2,500 for its top two journals, and has since increased them further. This has helped to boost revenue, but the effect of the increase has been minor compared with the new cash flowing from the flood of articles appearing in PLoS One. Since it launched, PLoS One has published 2,526 articles — more than PLoS Biology has published in its five years of existence, and that growth shows no signs of abating. PLoS One has published 1,158 papers since the beginning of this year, which is almost as many as it published during the whole of 2007. Another factor is that it costs authors only $1,250 to publish in PLoS One. “It’s fair to say that the community-run journals, including PLoS One, are contributing very well to our overall financial picture, says Peter Jerram, chief executive of PLoS, adding: “PLoS is on track to be self-sustaining within two years. In the interim some philanthropic support will be needed. “It’s tremendous to see how the progress that PLoS has made over the years has been mirrored by the great strides taken towards openaccess to research more broadly,” Jerram says. Papers submitted to PLoS One are sent to a member of its editorial board of around 500 researchers, who may opt to review it themselves or send it to their choice of referee. But referees only check for serious methodological flaws, and not the importance of the result. The board members who Nature spoke to were generally positive about the overall quality of the papers they had received to review and the referees reports they solicited. “There’s so much in PLoS One that it is difficult to judge the overall quality and, simply because of this volume, it’s going to be considered a dumping ground, justified or not, says John Hawley, executive director of the freeaccess Journal of Clinical Investigation. “But nonetheless, it introduces a sub-standard journal to their mix.” Hawley says it’s unsurprising that the PLoS business model has come under scrutiny. “PLoS trumpeted its business model as being better than everyone else’s, as being ‘the one’.” The tack taken by BioMed Central, a Londonbased open-access company, of publishing mostly lower-impact journals in a wide variety of disciplines “is probably closer to what works in open access”, he says. BioMed Central has an estimated annual revenue of around £10 million ($20 million). It is already “pleasantly profitable”, according to a science-publishing consultant who asked to remain anonymous. “BioMed Central knows well that much of the journal middle order is more profitable than the great brands because of the lower editorial costs and the cheaper marketing costs for bundles of journals. I suspect that PLoS One is a result of learning the same lesson,” he adds. BioMed Central is now up for sale, which will be a “fascinating first market test of what people will pay for an open-access company”. ■ Declan Butler PLoS stays afloat with bulk publishing