What If Academic and Scholarly Publishers Paid Research Authors?
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A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education sought to explore what the authors of the 10 most-downloaded Sci-Hub articles think of Sci-Hub.
Aside from cherry-picking its facts (the journalist interviewed three
authors out of dozens involved in the papers), the question itself is a
red herring. After all, because publishers assume financial risk for scholarly and academic authors, the economic answer is obvious a priori
— authors should have little problem with piracy of their material if
said piracy might increase the number of people reading their work.
After all, they suffer no harm from this.
It’s like asking publishers if they care that academics are having their bank accounts hacked — the question is not relevant because it’s not their money at stake.Aside from cherry-picking its facts (the journalist interviewed three
authors out of dozens involved in the papers), the question itself is a
red herring. After all, because publishers assume financial risk for scholarly and academic authors, the economic answer is obvious a priori
— authors should have little problem with piracy of their material if
said piracy might increase the number of people reading their work.
After all, they suffer no harm from this.
Money has been a central and simmering issue in the access debates, including the fact that research authors are unpaid. In the Chronicle article, the perceived unfairness of unpaid research authors is referenced in two sentences regarding an author named Pober:
Mr. Pober says he doesn’t mind that many people download(Two small corrections for the journalist — Pober is an MD/PhD, and I doubt Dr. Pober paid to submit his article as submission charges are rare. Instead, he most likely paid some fee after acceptance.)
his paper free since he didn’t make money from its publication. In fact,
like most academics, he paid to submit his article.
The issue came up again recently in a Bloomberg Views overview of Elsevier’s acquisition of SSRN, as the writer tried to explain the economy of research publication:
The university-professor authors, editors and referees ofIt was also raised in a comment this week on a Kitchen post.
the journals, meanwhile, usually receive no monetary compensation for
their work.
The implicit complaint each time someone mentions paying research
authors in passing is that not paying them is unfair. To generate this
effect, the idea of paying research authors is presented as if it makes
perfect sense and would be normal. But I’ve never seen the idea and its
potential consequences explored at length, and normal is a relative
measure.
Of course, most of the readers here know it’s not unfair or abnormal.
Authors have the economic relationship to publishers in which they are
not paid, and in many situations pay fees prior to publication (color
charges, data charges, submission fees, page charges, and/or APCs),
because their financial risk is eliminated and their rewards for
publication are indirect but significant — by
publishing, they lay claim to their findings, making them rivalrous; by
publishing, they claim priority over potential competitors; and by
publishing, they show their employers and authorities in their field
they are not shirking. Publish a paper in the right journal or earn a
stellar publication reputation, and you can go far. Many careers have
been made in this way.
Putting aside the fact that Pober and his co-authors likely benefited
indirectly from a strong research effort and well-cited and popular
paper in a very good journal — getting more grants, more budget, better
postdocs, better facilities, more speaking invitations, more press
coverage, more influence, a greater reputation — let’s pursue a scenario
in which they also would make money directly from
their paper’s publication.
The strawman question
for today: What if publishers paid research authors to publish, on a
widespread basis, and in amounts that would be meaningful?
For payments like this to make sense in the long-term, the positives for today: What if publishers paid research authors to publish, on a
widespread basis, and in amounts that would be meaningful?
would have to outweigh the negatives. The question becomes: Do they?
There are some potential
positives — for instance, authors might be more willing to defend
publishers against piracy sites like Sci-Hub, and might understand
publishing economics more completely. Authors might be greater advocates
of driving traffic to their papers (although incentives and
abilities might remain mismatched here). The PR problems publishers have
faced over the past 15-20 years might be blunted if academics saw
publishers as a path to self-enrichment. It could also quiet the voices
crying “exploitation” to some degree, as payments would appropriate
authors into the financial upside of publishing.
But now we have to look for the downsides.positives — for instance, authors might be more willing to defend
publishers against piracy sites like Sci-Hub, and might understand
publishing economics more completely. Authors might be greater advocates
of driving traffic to their papers (although incentives and
abilities might remain mismatched here). The PR problems publishers have
faced over the past 15-20 years might be blunted if academics saw
publishers as a path to self-enrichment. It could also quiet the voices
crying “exploitation” to some degree, as payments would appropriate
authors into the financial upside of publishing.
For the sake of this part of the discussion, I’ll avoid a
standard royalties model, as it is overly complicated and unlikely to be
implemented on a wide scale. There is an example of this. In 2008, Cold
Spring Harbor Laboratory Press began paying authors and editors
royalties for one of their journals (CSH Protocols), setting aside 10% of subscription revenues and then dividing this up based on the share of usage each author received. Authors received about $300 for papers getting the highest usage, while some received as little as $3
(publishing at the end of the year meant low usage, so low royalties
for that year). If they received less than $25, Cold Spring Harbor
rolled the payments over to the next year. Protocols typically have few
authors, and the program apparently didn’t generate many more papers for
the journal, according to one of its founders. The amounts certainly
were below the $600/year threshold that would have required Cold Spring
Harbor to provide the royalty recipients with 1099-MISC tax forms and
file these earnings with the IRS. The program has since been
discontinued. In its place, a one-time honoraria has been substituted,
something not unusual for commissioned works in journals (e.g., review
articles). According to those who inherited the program, the
administrative burden of a royalty program was too high given the small
amounts being paid out.
Since the royalty model is unrealistic, I’ll instead focus on a
per-article fee to authors, as this illuminates many of the downsides
that would arise in either case, while allowing us to do some
straightforward math.
The first downside — paying authors in a meaningful way would
probably kill Gold OA and CC-BY in their tracks and move the entire
industry fully back to the subscription and licensing model, with
stricter copyright enforcement and authors more directly appropriated
into copyright enforcement. Piracy would not be tolerated throughout
academia, and payment terms would probably require authors to control
distribution of their works beyond the publisher’s own channels. Authors
would be more reluctant to share reprints without payment as this could
imperil their reputation for future payments, which would mean that
ResearchGate and Academia would probably wither and die. You only need
to think a moment, and these effects become clear — publishers would
have more control over author behavior in general having paid them. (Note: Some people may view some of these effects as positives.)
But let’s continue to explore the idea of paying authors beyond this one major set of consequences.
One important baseline difference in academic and scholarly journal
publishing is that the sheer number of authors we deal with far
outstrips the number in trade publishing, either book or magazine. A
single research paper in some fields could have more authors than exist
on a book publisher’s entire author list or a magazine publisher’s
entire cadre of writers. This is a key difference.
Because of the scale generated by large author lists — lists that are growing longer with each passing year
— a major and clear negative is that aggregate expenses across the
board would rise, as more money would be needed in the system than
before in order to pay authors while leaving other aspects funded as
they are now. Because the scenario of authors being paid would cancel
revenues from author payments to publishers, payments would trigger two
sources of price increase — the costs of paying authors, and the costs
of recovering revenues no longer coming from authors. Estimates aren’t
easy to make, but to sketch a model, let’s assume payments to authors
would be large enough to be personally significant, to serve as an
incentive.
Identifying who would get paid would not be a simple matter for many
papers. There are many types of “authors” for scholarly and scientific
papers. There are contributors, first authors, last authors, and
research team participants. There are authorship groups that sometimes
number in the thousands. Creating a payment system might lead to a great
deal of negotiation around payment contracts, authorship roles, the
authorship list itself, and so forth. This could slow the production of
papers, the publication of results, and the advancement of early career
scientists who would be negotiating from a weak position to be included
on paying papers.
Let’s assume, for simplicity’s sake, that each author on a scientific
research paper receives $100 for getting a paper published in a
journal. For some articles, especially in astrophysics and epidemiology,
there can be more than 1,000 authors per article, with an upper bound
of more than 3,000 listed authors in some cases. This means that a
publisher would have to pay as much as $100,000-300,000 per
article and cut 1,000-3,000 checks. Let’s pick the midpoint, and assume
the model’s paper has 2,000 authors. The administrative costs for one of
these papers would be astronomical (pun intended), while the
consequences aren’t clear. Would authorship lists shrink to incentivize
publishers to prefer one group’s work over another’s (because it would
cost less in author payments)? Would authorship lists grow, so more
people could get on the gravy train? Would the model last long, or would
it move to a flat per-paper payment model (discussed below)?
The per-author approach would make fields with large and
collaborative authorship groups far more expensive for institutions and
individuals paying to access content, while each individual author would
receive a token amount at most. How much would prices rise in order to
support these mini-payments to authors? Right now, I would speculate
that an astrophysics article can be published for at most a few thousand
dollars in costs to the publisher. Imagine that small amount
ballooning by $200,000 or more. Imagine what carrying those costs in
author-intensive fields — astrophysics, microbiology, epidemiology,
geological sciences — would do to library budgets.
Let’s continue the scenario, where to the new $200,000 in author
payments, we add the administrative costs to deal with checks,
snafus, and disputes, which I’ll peg at a normal 30% overhead. Now we’re
adding another $60,000 in processing costs. So an article that might
have cost $2,500 in expenses for the publisher to publish now costs
$262,500 to publish. Assuming 1,000 articles per year for a robust
astrophysics journal, an expense line of $2.5 million explodes to
expenses of $262,500,000, and this does not take into account
the previous payments from authors now foregone, which may be another $1
million in a year. That’s at least $260 million in expenses the
publisher would have to absorb — costs that would certainly be passed on
to libraries, subscribers, and others. Estimating 5,000 institutions
for a rough estimate, that would be a greater than $50,000 price
increase for one title. Clearly, that is not going to work.
Astrophysics has an extremely robust and collaborative authorship
community, so let’s move to an area where fewer authors typically work
together — biomedicine. Here, let’s assume an average of 12 authors for
the sake of discussion to see what problems might occur in groups this
small.
Biomedicine is also collaborative, and multi-center trials are not
unusual. First-author position and last-author position mean a great
deal. Multi-national collaborations are fairly common in this and other
fields. Ethical issues are more front and center.
For this, let’s write the story as it might occur a few years after
author payments have become the norm involving a paper that’s slightly
above average in size, and slightly more complex than average in
composition:
A savvy editor receives a multi-national,
multi-center study with 15 authors from six institutions in three
countries. She experiences a few still-unfamiliar thoughts before
commencing with scientific review, as now authors are being paid.
There’s been a lot of training over the past few years, and the editors
have quickly learned the tricks of the trade that come with experience,
but it still feels strange. First, how will the authors in the other
countries want to be paid? In local currency? How will their tax
authorities deal with the payments? Do we have nexus there? Will this
create it? What about the institutions involved? One of them, the editor
knows, requires that payments go to the researcher’s department, while
one of the institutions insists that any payments go to a fund for
scholarships.
multi-center study with 15 authors from six institutions in three
countries. She experiences a few still-unfamiliar thoughts before
commencing with scientific review, as now authors are being paid.
There’s been a lot of training over the past few years, and the editors
have quickly learned the tricks of the trade that come with experience,
but it still feels strange. First, how will the authors in the other
countries want to be paid? In local currency? How will their tax
authorities deal with the payments? Do we have nexus there? Will this
create it? What about the institutions involved? One of them, the editor
knows, requires that payments go to the researcher’s department, while
one of the institutions insists that any payments go to a fund for
scholarships.
The editor also sees that there is a long
“contributor” list, which she knows now means that there are going to be
authorship disputes down the road, especially if the manuscript moves
toward acceptance and publication. Why? Because ever since publishers
started paying authors, senior academics have become notorious for
pushing younger colleagues off the author list and into this unpaid
“contributor” category to make things go more smoothly early, and then
to demand that some or all of the contributors move onto the author list
once the journal has made a decision. The big names starting throwing
their weight around when they think the editor is invested in the paper.
She’s seen these battles before, and they can be bruising. The senior
academics have probably made promises they shouldn’t have, there will be
a battle between the authors and her publisher, and she’ll be caught in
the middle. How much does she want to deal with this?
“contributor” list, which she knows now means that there are going to be
authorship disputes down the road, especially if the manuscript moves
toward acceptance and publication. Why? Because ever since publishers
started paying authors, senior academics have become notorious for
pushing younger colleagues off the author list and into this unpaid
“contributor” category to make things go more smoothly early, and then
to demand that some or all of the contributors move onto the author list
once the journal has made a decision. The big names starting throwing
their weight around when they think the editor is invested in the paper.
She’s seen these battles before, and they can be bruising. The senior
academics have probably made promises they shouldn’t have, there will be
a battle between the authors and her publisher, and she’ll be caught in
the middle. How much does she want to deal with this?
Then she catches that the first author
(B.A. Payne) is actually the Payne who is notorious for negotiating
after initial decision for a higher-than-normal author payment,
sometimes 5-10x normal, like it’s a speaker’s fee for keynote at a major
conference or meeting. He’s even been known to require that every
author be paid this amount — and he’s gotten it from time to time at
some of the glamour journals, so he’s unashamed to ask for it
everywhere. While the publisher has a contingency fund set aside
which editors can use to secure a certain number of key papers per year,
she’s used her allotment by now, and would have to ask for an exception
if she moved the paper forward. And it’s the week before Thanksgiving,
making it unlikely that she’ll get the person she needs on the phone.
There have been a lot of new people hired in Finance to handle author
payments, but they still tend to sneak away just before major holidays,
and they’re overworked the rest of the year. She sighs. The fact the
organization is nearing year-end makes it less likely she’ll get
approval, as well.
(B.A. Payne) is actually the Payne who is notorious for negotiating
after initial decision for a higher-than-normal author payment,
sometimes 5-10x normal, like it’s a speaker’s fee for keynote at a major
conference or meeting. He’s even been known to require that every
author be paid this amount — and he’s gotten it from time to time at
some of the glamour journals, so he’s unashamed to ask for it
everywhere. While the publisher has a contingency fund set aside
which editors can use to secure a certain number of key papers per year,
she’s used her allotment by now, and would have to ask for an exception
if she moved the paper forward. And it’s the week before Thanksgiving,
making it unlikely that she’ll get the person she needs on the phone.
There have been a lot of new people hired in Finance to handle author
payments, but they still tend to sneak away just before major holidays,
and they’re overworked the rest of the year. She sighs. The fact the
organization is nearing year-end makes it less likely she’ll get
approval, as well.
All considered, even without reading the
paper, she decides this one is too much trouble right now. It’s easier
to reject it. Let someone else deal with this payment prima donna
and his unsorted crew of collaborators. It will save her
organization money and headaches. Besides, she had a paper earlier in
the day that was different but nearly as good, and the group involved
is known to be easy to work with and to donate their author payments to
the publisher’s parent society.
paper, she decides this one is too much trouble right now. It’s easier
to reject it. Let someone else deal with this payment prima donna
and his unsorted crew of collaborators. It will save her
organization money and headaches. Besides, she had a paper earlier in
the day that was different but nearly as good, and the group involved
is known to be easy to work with and to donate their author payments to
the publisher’s parent society.
incentives. But did this seem like a set of decisions an editor should
be involved in? Does it help or hurt the evaluation of the science?
Let’s assume a milder model, in which there is a flat per-paper
payment that the authors themselves have to divvy up in some manner,
leaving the editor and publisher out of it. Let’s assume the payment is
$1,000/article. At approximately 1.5 million published articles per year,
the financial impact would be $1.5 billion on the industry. With the
industry estimated to be between $10B and $25B in total revenues, we’re
talking a 9-15% tax on the system to pay authors. Assuming publishers
pass along that tax, institutions would face a 9-15% addition bundled
into an annual price increase for a site license. This would not go down
well, and would cause ruptures in many library budgets if generally
applied in short order. But every publisher would have to agree to do
this, which runs into anti-trust issues immediately. For one group of
publishers to do it and other to not would create chaotic market
dynamics — potentially better papers for some, but a raft of
cancellations as the costs hit the market. We are in an era of stringent
budgeting. How this stalemate would be broken — a standoff between
author payments and risks involved in recovering the fees — is unclear.
There is also the very real possibility that author payments would
become another mini-economy within scholarly publishing. We can see this
in other industries, where each point of the transaction trail adds
costs (credit card fees, agency fees, transaction fees, courtesy
charges, and so forth). The $1.5 billion gross estimate could increase
another 15%, easily.
In the case of the 15-author biomedical paper, each author would
receive about $67. For the 2,000-author paper, each receives 50¢.
Either per-paper model may encourage more “salami slicing” of
results, which occurs probably too frequently already — this is the
practice of squeezing as many papers as possible out of one study.
Imagine this behavior incentivized with money as well as publication.
But let’s assume the market dynamics make this an irresistible
change, and it soon sweeps the industry. At $1,000 per article, the
costs might be absorbed in a few years, if library budgets could grow to
match (we’ll ignore the effect on tuition and fees for this exercise).
But how long does the flat-fee scenario last? And what does that do
for/to authors?
Soon, a natural market might emerge, one that would defeat the
flat-fee model. Some papers are worth more than others, some authors are
worth more than others, and so forth. Rather quickly, you’d have
bidding. The bidding would have two sides — journals bidding for
authors/papers, and researchers bidding for authorship. These both
already occur as journals woo authors with promises of priority
handling, good placement, cover positioning, and bells and whistles,
while researchers ask to be added to papers (or are asked to join papers
— in medicine, some authors are already paid by sponsors to do this).
While competition for papers occurs in the current reputational
system, we find it distasteful when a senior author is paid to sign onto
a paper (as noted above, it does occur). What would a senior author ask
to receive in order to join a promising paper and lend gravitas? Would
this researcher’s participation increase the bargaining position of the
authors to drive up their payments from the publisher? How long do these
negotiations take? Is more science published more quickly, or does the
system slow to a crawl as everyone is now focused on their immediate
financial position?
The bidding war is an interesting item to examine more closely. It brings to mind the
story of Jack Andraka, who won a science prize for an approach to
pancreatic cancer screening, which he then leveraged into grants and
celebrity. No paper was published, his approach was found wanting
(and non-novel) as word spread, and nothing substantial other than fame
and noise came from it. But at one point, he might have benefited from a
bidding system, pocketing a high fee based on unsubstantiated claims.
How would a bidding system avoid these problems? How “in the blind”
would the bidders be? Would they only be given the author names, the
grant number, and the abstract, then asked to bid? Authors would be
tempted to pimp their papers, as they would gain notoriety for being
pursued. What if the winning bidder found fatal flaws in the paper?
Could they get a refund? What kind of retraction would this be?
This scenario also brings up the ethical problems already extant in
scientific and scholarly publishing — plagiarism, exaggerated claims,
fraud, image manipulation — and seemingly amplifies them. After all,
adding an incentive to an already heady pile of incentives would promise
to only bring out more bad behaviors.
It’s entirely possible that new disclosure rules and limits akin to the Sunshine Act
would be developed. Readers may come to implicitly trust journals that
don’t pay authors to publish, an inversion of the current situation in
which some today trust subscription journals more than Gold OA journals.
To many, money is a barometer of ethical purity.
There is also the issue of US government researchers, who certainly
could not accept payments. This likely goes for other governments’
employees.
Which publishers would be better-positioned to bid for papers? Large,
multi-national publishers — they have scale, work in multiple
currencies, and have deeper pockets to withstand an extended bidding
war. Which publishers would have an easier time dealing with the
administrative overheads of such a system? Large, multi-national
publishers. There are already many forces working toward large-scale
consolidation of journals and books under the auspices of large,
multi-national publishers. Paying authors could add another.
Even if all these issues could be addressed, how much could we pay
authors before other complications and costs emerged? Remember that in
the US, any individual receiving more than $600 from an organization in
any year is required to submit a tax form prior to payment and file a
1099-MISC to the IRS at tax time. Publishers would have to collect tax
documents beforehand, and issue 1099-MISC forms for their authors to
pass along to the IRS. This amount of paperwork and overhead, with
dozens to thousands of authors per paper, would be difficult and costly
to maintain. Errors would occur, forms would be lost, etc. And gathering
tax forms from all the authors prior to publication, while certainly
possible, seems unlikely to speed research along the path to
publication.
In fact, it may be that after exploring the potential to get paid,
some researchers would begin to prefer publishers who didn’t pay them.
After all, they would be competing only on the quality of their
research, not on distracting elements driven by the payment scheme. At
the same time, publishers and editors would start to prefer authors who
waived their payments. The mutual benefits would be real — nobody
would have tax headaches, papers would be published sooner, and
the science rather than the complexity of paying authors (available
budget, processing) would be the focus again. Overall, not being paid
may be preferred by both parties. Because the strong incentives around
publication would remain, there would still be good reasons to get works
published soon and in strong journals.
We already have seen a hint of this scenario — when Company of
Biologists paid peer reviewers $25, the program was discontinued when
reviewers themselves asked to stop being paid. It turns out it was more
trouble to arrange to receive the payment in terms of time and effort
than the $25 was worth to them. It’s easy to imagine researchers feeling
similarly, especially after taking the time away from their labs or
wards to publish a paper.
Indirect incentives allow authors to shift risk to publishers for
publishing their papers, and allow editors and researchers to focus on
core scientific and intellectual issues. Paying authors would add a
great deal of expense to academic publishing, while tempting authors to
game the system, play the market, push the limits, and incite bidding
wars.
Perhaps the current practice of “paying it forward” is better for everyone all around.
What If Academic and Scholarly Publishers Paid Research Authors? | The Scholarly Kitchen
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