It costs more than three times as much to publish an article in a humanities or social-science journal as it does to publish one in a science, technical, or medical, or STM, journal, and the prevailing model used by many publishers of STM journals will not work for their humanities and social-sciences counterparts. Those are some of the eye-opening conclusions released today in a report on an in-depth study of eight flagship journals in the humanities and social sciences.
The report, “The Future of Scholarly Journals Publishing Among Social Science and Humanities Associations,” was conducted by Mary Waltham, an independent publishing consultant, at the request of a committee organized by the National Humanities Alliance in 2007. The panel was charged with trying to understand how the rapid evolution of scholarly communication, particularly the rise of open access, will affect the alliance’s members, many of which are scholarly societies that rely on traditional subscription models to run their publishing operations. “It was high time we did our homework,” said William E. Davis, chairman of the committee and executive director of the American Anthropological Association.
With money from a grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the patron saint of many recent attempts to diagnose and remedy what ails scholarly publishing, Ms. Waltham took a close look at the data for flagship journals from eight leading societies for the years 2005 to 2007. The participating associations included Mr. Davis’s group, the American Academy of Religion, the American Economic Association, the American Historical Association, the American Political Science Association, the American Sociological Association, the American Statistical Association, and the Modern Language Association.
If eight journals don’t sound like much of a sample, consider that the group includes some of the most prominent publications in major humanities and social-sciences disciplines: The American Historical Review and the American Political Science Review, for instance.
Even learned-society publishers in the humanities and social sciences may be taken aback by just how expensive it is to publish an article in their fields. It cost an average of $9,994 in 2007 to publish an article in one of the eight journals analyzed, compared with an average of $2,670 for STM journal articles.
Difference in Acceptance Rates
That STM figure comes from a study done by Ms. Waltham in 2005 of publishing models that learned societies used for science and medical journals. According to the new report, humanities and social-sciences articles tend to be longer and to have a lower acceptance rate. The average article length in the eight journals surveyed is 19 pages; the STM average is 12 pages. Acceptance rates are much lower on the humanities and social-sciences side; the eight journals in question accepted about 11 percent of the articles submitted to them, while their STM counterparts’ acceptance rate hovered around 42 percent.
All of that adds up to “significantly higher costs per peer-reviewed, published article” for humanities and social-sciences journals, the committee concluded in an overview released with the report.
“The cost per article of publishing in the humanities and social sciences appears to be almost four times the cost of publishing in the STM field,” Mr. Davis said in an interview. “That creates a very different dynamic for figuring out models to support our programs.”
One model not likely to provide that support is the “author-pays” approach, in which scholars come up with money to help journals cover the costs of publishing their articles. That template works well enough in STM fields, in which grant money is easier to come by—not the case in the chronically underfunded fields covered by the study. “Authors in the STM field have ways of financing the publication of their articles that authors in the humanities and social sciences simply do not have,” Mr. Davis told The Chronicle.
The committee also drew attention to a finding that peer-reviewed research made up about 62 percent of what the eight journals published in 2007. The remaining 38 percent consisted of “other scholarly content,” including book reviews. That content is “as vital to the system of scholarly communication” in the humanities and social sciences as peer-reviewed articles are, the committee said.
Such material does not come cheap, though; it must still be commissioned, edited, and put into production. It cost an average of $313,612 per journal in 2007, the study found. Under the author-pays model, Mr. Davis asked, who foots the bill for that type of content?
The study also appears to undermine the notion that doing away with print “would make the open-access model financially viable,” the panel noted. So-called first-copy costs—"collecting, reviewing, editing, and developing content"—added up to about 47 percent of the total outlay among the eight journals studied. Abolishing print versions of the journals would reduce costs, the study found, but not enough. “Even if people were willing to give up print” in fields such as his, Mr. Davis said, “I still don’t know how to finance my publishing program without some similar source as I’m now getting from my subscriber base.”
Does that mean that the scholarly associations that participated in the study reject the idea of open access? Not at all, Mr. Davis said. Instead, the findings are “pointing us away from author-pays open access” toward figuring out what other open-access models could work for humanities and social-sciences journals. That’s the next step. Will learned societies that publish such journals figure out how to take that step? “We will,” Mr. Davis said, “because we have to.”
The National Humanities Alliance will post the report on its Web site as soon as possible, Mr. Davis said.
