Sustainability in open access publishing: The ecancer case study

Innovative business models to complement or replace traditional models of funding academic publishing are currently proliferating. Not relying solely on one source of funding is a key factor in sustainability. Pay what you can afford (PWYCA) is a new model for article processing charges (APCs) providing both a revenue stream and an opportunity to raise awareness of the cost of publishing amongst authors. Treating a journal as part of an overall enterprise rather than as a stand‐alone business contributes significantly to its sustainability.


INTRODUCTION
Over the past 20 years, there has been a rapid expansion in the number of open access journals, particularly in the field of medicine. It has been reported that, globally, in 2014, 19% of articles were open access immediately upon publication, a figure that rises to 34% after 2 years (Research Information Network, 2015). However, these are estimated figures based on indexed content; the real figure is likely to be far higher as many non-indexed journals are open access. The biomedical field has been a leader in the take-up of the open access (OA) model, making up 35.5% of the total OA article output in 2011 (Laakso & Björk, 2012). The highest number of article processing charge (APC) payments in the UK is made to Health and Life Sciences journals (Research Information Network, 2015). There are, therefore, more opportunities for medical journals to sustain themselves through APCs compared to journals in other disciplines.

Key points
• Innovative business models to complement or replace traditional models of funding academic publishing are currently proliferating.
• Not relying solely on one source of funding is a key factor in sustainability.
• Pay what you can afford (PWYCA) is a new model for article processing charges (APCs) providing both a revenue stream and an opportunity to raise awareness of the cost of publishing amongst authors.
• Treating a journal as part of an overall enterprise rather than as a stand-alone business contributes significantly to its sustainability.  (Crompton, 2015). Notably, in the mid-2000s, predictions of journal advertising revenue were inflated beyond their actual potential (Dylla, 2014). It quickly became apparent that advertising would not provide a sustainable income for an online-only journal, and this income stream was quickly discarded. ecancer does acquire a very small income through advertising some conferences and events on the website but is otherwise ad-free.

DIVERSITY OF FUNDING SOURCES
With advertising a poor prospect, ecancer identified a new activity that could attract income in the form of sponsorship and thus contribute towards the journal running costs as well as a new and faster way to inform its users of the latest developments in the field of can- capabilities for outreach and equalized our audience. In the resulting competitive market for attention, audience expectations are high, while the range of audience backgrounds and incomes is increasingly diverse. The PWYCA model is a reflection of the needs and goals of this audience and an endorsement of the importance of reciprocity.
Importantly, it is a reflection of the larger values of the millennium, which has already seen surprising changes in fundraising strategies at every level, including crowdfunded clinical trials.
ecancer recently took part in dissemination efforts for such a trial, publishing an editorial by the authors of an initiative that will be the first publicly crowdfunded clinical trial in the United Kingdom (Augustin, Krishna, Kumar, & Pantziarka, 2015). We invite a reciprocal relationship with our authors as well as making their findings freely accessible to the public, who are increasingly invited to access research information, interact with research, and support research directly. This creates a circular flow of benefit that we believe is at the core of sustainability.
Not relying solely on one source of funding is also a key factor in sustainability. Because Gold OA often involves providing discounts and waivers to authors from LMICs, supporting those authors does incur extra costs for the publisher. Also, many universities and scholarly societies are finding the costs of paying APCs on top of continuing to pay for subscription fees hard to meet (exacerbated by the growth of hybrid journals that has led to a practice known as 'doubledipping'), which raises doubts as to the viability of the Gold model (Research Information Network, 2015). The ecancer model means that the journal is not relying mainly on APCs to sustain itself but has other diverse sources of funding.
Thus, we are not relying on the PWYCA model as a business model on its ownalthough it brings some money into the organization, we do not feel that it is a robust enough stream of income to support our journal entirely, and it would be optimistic for publishers to rely solely on this to pay their costs. However, that being said, the PWYCA model is still at an early stage, and experiments with it have yielded very positive results in some other fields. An interesting example is the Data Science Handbook, whose authors found that they expanded the readership of their book by up to four times and also earned much more revenue than they expected (Chen, 2015). The authors made the point that the PWYCA model can be used as a very effective marketing tool as well as generating income.
It is also worth pointing out that we saw the introduction of the PWYCA concept as a way to make it more obvious to authors how much it actually costs to publish an article (from submission to online publication). Thus, we arrived at the suggested donation of £1,000, which is roughly the cost of staffing, editing, typesetting, producing, and promoting a paper. Many authors are not aware of the real costs involved in running a journal, and raising awareness of this among ecancer authors, who had not been charged since the launch of the journal 7 years previously, would hopefully positively enhance their perception of the quality of the product.

THE FUTURE
The ideal financial future of ecancermedicalscience is one in which all authors who can afford to, contribute their open access funding directly towards the cost of publishing their articles. We do not envisage this ever being the majority of our authors as a core goal of the journal is to support authors who want the results of their research to be open access but cannot afford to pay an APC, whether this is because they are from an LMIC or because their work is not funded.
One example of the importance of free publication is the Repurposing Drugs in Oncology (ReDo) project http://www.redo-project.
org/ (Pantziarka & Cairns, 2014 Therefore, ecancermedicalscience will continue to rely on charity, sponsorship, grants, and income from our educational activities in order to carry on providing a free publishing service to those who need it. We will make sure that the journal keeps up with advances in scholarly publishing as this is important to our authors and readers. In recent years, we have brought in innovations such as Article Level Metrics, which provide users with the ability to track articles across the internet and gain a real-time insight into what impact each article is achieving. The journal also has a professional article management system, has rigorous peer review standards, and is indexed in all the main repositories. This is an extremely important service that all journals should provide but is especially important in the medical field due to the impact on patients and society as a whole. All articles are marketed through social media, and press releases are regularly sent out. All authors are invited to be filmed talking about their paper, a service we usually carry out at conferences, which offers them more publicity for their work. It is essential that the journal offers the highest-quality service possible to its authors and readers.

CONCLUSIONS
It is possible to build a competitive, attractive publishing model on the ideals of self-sufficiency and fair access. The key is to innovate and to take advantage of new technologies, policies, and developments in the world of scientific research and publishing. Treating a journal more as part of an overall enterprise rather than as a standalone business contributes significantly to its sustainability as it can be supported by cross-allocation of organization funds. We have found that a diversity of income streamsand a diversity of offerings is required to achieve sustainability. Following these principles, ecancer has grown from a core team of three in 2007 to a current total of 22 members of staff.
The success of ecancer proves that it is possible to publish a quality academic journal at very low cost to the scientific community it serves. Not only is every piece of content on the website free to access, but the wide variety of media, the multilingual content, and the unrestricted nature of the journal's copyright licence enables the free flow of scientific communication, which is ultimately of benefit to all. Publishers of scientific journals, and particularly medical publishers, have a responsibility towards scientists and society as a whole to ensure that the content they publish is as rigorously peer reviewed as possible and as easily shareable as possible.
As Jennifer Hansen, from the Gates Foundation, put it at the COASP15 open access publishing conference: 'What we do is complicated, the reasons we do it are not'.