Lunch Talking at SPARC 2012

In the lunch break at SPARC 2012 today our table was discussing the negotiation of author rights for repository deposits. In lamenting how authors tend to be backed into a corner by the publisher's last-minute demands to sign the copyright transfer form (or else forfeit their publication opportunity), a delicious and subversive idea arose. I present it for you here, without any claim of endorsement by SPARC or my lunchtime companions.

PLOS NULL: the high profile, high impact journal that publishes articles that have been peer reviewed, accepted and corrected for publication by third party journals whose lawyers have then refused to agree the author's pro-repository copyright transfer amendment.

Value Transactions and The Publishing Business Model

I'm at the SPARC2012 Open Access conference, and all this talk about Open Access is reminding me that the issue of scholarly publishing is actually very straightforward.

Publishing companies have a very simple business model - they take authors' articles, add value and charge for that value.  You can see this process illustrated in the diagram below, with the various stages in publishing an article broken out between the different parties, and each transaction explicitly labelled with its typical financial charges and legal agreements.

A decade on from the original Budapest Open Access Initiative and here we are in Kansas City just about to start discussing more of the nuances and implications of this obvious publishing model.