{"id":312,"date":"2013-11-08T13:24:19","date_gmt":"2013-11-08T00:24:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/?p=312"},"modified":"2013-11-08T13:24:19","modified_gmt":"2013-11-08T00:24:19","slug":"loyalty-cards-for-scholarly-publishing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/2013\/11\/loyalty-cards-for-scholarly-publishing\/","title":{"rendered":"Loyalty cards for scholarly publishing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Two things I&#8217;ve come across recently which I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve seen before:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;Each article published in ACS journals during 2014 will qualify the corresponding author for ACS Author Rewards article credit. Credits issued under this program, at a total value of $1,500 per publication, may be used to offset article publishing charges and any ACS open access publishing services of the author&#8217;s choosing, and will be redeemable over the next three years (2015-2017).&#8221;<br \/>&mdash;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.acs.org\/content\/acs\/en\/pressroom\/newsreleases\/2013\/october\/acs-extends-new-open-access-program-designed-to-assist-authors.html\">American Chemical Society extends new open access program designed to assist authors<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;Under [IOP&#8217;s] new programme, referees will be offered a 10% credit towards the cost of publishing on a gold open access basis when they review an article.&#8221;<br \/>&mdash;<a href=\"http:\/\/ioppublishing.org\/newsDetails\/changing-the-way-referees-are-rewarded\">Changing the way referees are rewarded<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>(I&#8217;m presuming, though it&#8217;s not explicit, that these credits are additive, so if you published 2 toll-access articles with ACS you&#8217;d get $3,000 credit, and if you refereed 10 IOP articles you&#8217;d get to publish 1 article on a gold open access basis for free.)<\/p>\n<p>I find this fascinating. The obvious catch for scientists is the same as any loyalty card: in order to use it you&#8217;ve got to keep shopping at the same company. It&#8217;s great psychology, because humans are notoriously reluctant to ignore the opportunity for a discount, so:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Someone who&#8217;s got credit owing will be less likely to publish in some other journal even if the final cost-to-author is equal and even if that other journal is a better fit for the particular article. (How <em>much<\/em> less likely I don&#8217;t know, but I do think it&#8217;d be a factor.)<\/li>\n<li>Someone who&#8217;s got credit owing for OA publication would probably be more likely to pay the extra to publish OA rather than to publish toll-access for free but not get to use that tempting credit. (This might at least have a small side-effect of getting more people experience with the benefits of publishing open access.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Both of these are obviously what the companies in question are banking on. I&#8217;m a bit concerned about what this pressure to publish with the same old big companies will mean for science &#8211; partly about competition, as in the world of supermarkets, but also partly the journals where articles should be finding their best fit. (Perhaps the whole &#8216;impact factor&#8217; issue has meant that no-one&#8217;s ever considered <em>only<\/em> subject scope in that regard, but this definitely adds another confounding factor.) But given the clear financial benefits to the companies, I expect to be seeing more scholarly publishing reward cards popping up in future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two things I&#8217;ve come across recently which I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve seen before: &#8220;Each article published in ACS journals during 2014 will qualify the corresponding author for ACS Author Rewards article credit. Credits issued under this program, at a total value of $1,500 per publication, may be used to offset article publishing charges and any [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[231,4,111],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":314,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions\/314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}