As noted in the blog on October 6 (Associations = Dinosaurs?), publishing and mailing the Journal of the Idaho Academy of Science consumes most of our annual budget. We are therefore considering electronic publication as an option. In that context, I thought it would be worthwhile to see what other state Academies are doing.
Be aware that academies publish refereed documents under a variety of names: journal, proceedings, transactions, and so on. Thus, for simplicity, when I say “journal” below, I could be referring to any of the above.
“Executive” Summary
I found that 41 academies produce some sort of journal. Most, if not all of them generate printed and bound copies that are mailed to their members, and subscribers. For some, like Idaho, this probably represents a substantial fraction of their annual budgets.
Journals are mostly produced the “traditional” way, with printed manuscripts and review copies. Four use a commercial electronic submission and tracking system; how the final journal-assembly steps are handled is unclear. With so few examples, the electronic route to publication will require further study.
Over half (23) of the 41 academies make their journals available online. (Five others display just the table of contents.) Of the 23, nine post only their older issues. The cut-off is from one to five years back. However, this seems to be changing rapidly, probably as they get more of their archives scanned into PDF files.
With perhaps one or two exceptions, academies use PDF documents for their online content. Of the 14 who allow access to their current issues, half seem to be Open Access … anyone can download the files. The other seven academies restrict access, usually to members and paid subscribers. (Most of these restricted-access systems work through a commercial service.)
Only 24 Academies provided data on fees charged to authors who publish in their journals. Ten charged none if the authors were members and the paper stayed within a set page limit. One charged a one-time fee of $100, while one used a more complex formula. The other twelve imposed a range of page charges, averaging about $55 for members and $98 for non-members.
Unfortunately, this assessment leaves open the question: Can, and should, the Idaho Academy “go electronic” with its Journal? The crucial issue is: Will it save money? That will require further study.
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Analytical Basis
The list of “Affiliated Academies” posted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) identifies those organizations that are more or less equivalent to the Idaho Academy of Science. (Some entities on that list are not state-based, but their structures and purposes are similar.)
I then did a search for states not included on the list and turned up several oddities. First, the “Washington Academy of Science” listed by the AAAS is not for the state … it represents the District of Columbia. The state of Washington, which does have its own Academy of Science, does not appear on the list. Two other states – Connecticut and Massachusetts – also have Academies that are not listed by the AAAS.
Four states have no Academy of Science: Alaska, Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. (New Hampshire had an Academy, but it disbanded in the 1970s.)
Disclaimers: Some web sites contained material that, from context, was clearly out of date. Others explicitly stated that they were in the midst of a revision. (In a couple cases, a Google search turned up an older web site as well as a new one.) With such a “moving target,” what follows simply represents an overview of general practices.
Production and Accessibility (web-based or not)
Seven states do not seem to offer a regular refereed publication: Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Montana, North Dakota, Washington, and Wisconsin. (There are city academies in Chicago and St. Louis, and they don’t offer journals either.)
That leaves 41 academies that produce some sort of journal. Not all of them are states: Four states pair up into two dual entities (Arizona-Nevada and Colorado-Wyoming). That situation is more than offset by four “extra” academies: the Northwest Scientific Association, Rochester, Southern California, and Washington, D. C.
With a couple of possible exceptions, all of these organizations produce print copies of their journals. As in Idaho, these hardcopies are touted as a “member benefit.” The academies therefore incur the kind of printing, binding, and mailing costs that have a substantial impact on our budget here.
Most Academies produce their journals “the old fashion way.” That is, authors submit printed manuscripts and copies go out to reviewers. The reviewers compile lists of questions or issues, or mark up a manuscript copy, and the author(s) revise as they see fit. (This cycle can be repeated several times.) Some academies, like Idaho, require/allow electronic submission of the final version, but even that is usually accompanied by a hardcopy. The final manuscripts, along with any graphic images, then go to a compositor for creation of the final journal.
At least four academies – Michigan, Missouri, the Northwest SA, and Tennessee – handle manuscripts online using a proprietary package called PeerTrack™ from the Allen Press.
Authors submit their papers to the online system, and the editors set up for peer review. The system then apparently automatically “oversees” the review process, with timely reminders and so on. Costs and user experiences with PeerTrack are not readily apparently from web sources – this would require further evaluation. Nor is it clear that the process interfaces smoothly with the journal production steps. (The vendor web site says the system has that capability, but it’s not clear whether or not their Academy customers are using it.)
One alternative to this commercial approach could be the “Open Journal System,” an Open Source software package meant to handle the process all the way from submission through production and indexing of the online publication. (I am currently evaluating this approach and will report those results in another blog.)
Of the 41 academies with refereed publications, 28 provide some form of information online. The others have no purposeful online presence for their journals. Like Idaho, these organizations mail the printed copies out to their members. Most, if not all, sell subscriptions to libraries and other interested customers. I applied the term “purposeful” here because it appears that some academy journals are made available in electronic format by outside content providers. (It is not clear what financial arrangements are made in those cases. One presumes that some consideration is provided to the copyright holder.)
However, five of the 28 display just the Table of Contents (TOC) for their journals on their web sites: Florida, Michigan, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. There are no restrictions on printing or downloading that information.
Still, while the online TOCs can be useful, potential readers must then request printed copies of specific papers they think might be useful. Thus, in reality, only 23 out of 41 academies make their refereed content available online.
Nine of these provide online access just to older issues: Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Illinois, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia. These documents are all held as downloadable, and searchable PDF files. However, some of these archives are not very complete. All but one seem to be Open Access, in that anyone can download them. The time when recent issues are moved from a members-only access category to open access varies (near as I can tell) from one to five years. This feature seems to be changing almost in “real time,” depending perhaps on how quickly older issues can be scanned into searchable PDF files.
Seven states are, or seem to be, open access: California, Connecticut, Georgia, Minnesota, Mississippi, Ohio, and Oregon. I say “seem to be” because in some cases the content cannot be downloaded directly. You may need to register before downloading content … and I did not work through that process far enough to see if there might be restrictions buried in the details. California makes individual papers available this way, but apparently not the entire issue.
Seven other academies offered tightly-controlled online access through a commercial partner or the academy itself: Arizona-Nevada, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, and the Northwest Scientific Association. Again, I did not work all the way through the subscription processes – there may be categories (academic faculty, society “partners,” etc.) that receive free or deeply-discounted subscriptions.
Thus, there is no dominant model by which Academies make their refereed content available on the web. The one common denominator is the use of downloadable PDF files to hold that content. Only a handful seem to use HTML (web-coded) documents, or some other online viewing system.
There is no way to tell whether or not enough members “opt out” of the mailed hardcopy to provide worthwhile cost savings. (We will need to obtain that information by writing directly to the organizations involved.) In Idaho, many members do choose the online PDF of The Retort, our newsletter. This provides a substantial savings in printing and mailing costs.
Fees and Page Charges
For the Idaho Academy, financial considerations will be a major factor in deciding on a possible new approach to handling our Journal. As noted above, there are 41 relevant examples. Unfortunately, the web sites for 17 of them do not provide any information about a fee structure. If they provided “Instructions for Authors,” and those instructions did not mention page charges, I assumed none were imposed.
Ten academies (less than half the remaining 24), charge no fees on papers authored by their members. For some, only one of the authors need be a member; a few are more restrictive. Six of these have no explicitly-stated page limits: Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Minnesota, Northwest SA, and Utah. The other four – Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia – set an upper length limit, after which page charges are imposed. The limits are 10 or 15 pages, and they charge $35 to $50 for each page over their limit. (Georgia has a $35 per page charge for non-member papers.)
The other fourteen academies charge some sort of fee on papers authored by members or non-members. Alabama imposes a one-time processing fee of $100. New Jersey charges a $25 processing fee, but members get up to 12 pages before an unspecified page charge is added. Non-members pay a $100 per page charge for papers in the New Jersey journal.
Twelve academies impose page charges on all papers: Arizona-Nevada, California, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas. Arizona-Nevada charges $15 per page up to 8 pages, then doubles to $30. For all but one or two of these academies, page charges for non-members are substantially more than for members. Member page charges, not including Arizona-Nevada, range from $25 to $100 per page, with an average of $56. Charges to non-members range from $50 to $120, with an average of $98.
Several academies make provisions to waive their page charges under a variety of circumstances.
Correlation?
I next examined this information to see if there was any connection between journals being available online (or not) and the fee structures. Of course, with data for only 24 of 41 cases, any conclusions must be considered only tentative at best.
Still, all the categories of online presence – from no online access to online open access – except one had basically a 50-50 split: Nine of the 17 charged some sort of fee or page charges, the others did not. The exception was the set of academies that worked through a commercial service or had tight members-only subscription access. Four out of those five imposed page charges. This may or may not be significant.
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