Open Access News

In The Access Principle, John Willinsky argues that since the knowledge conveyed in these publications is a public good, access to it should be broadened as far as possible....[Quoting Willinsky:]

In reviewing the case for open access, it makes more sense to focus readers' attention on ways of increasing access, rather than holding to a strict line on whether a journal article, a journal, or a publisher, for that matter, is open or closed. This may set me off somewhat to the margins of the open access movement....So my approach to open access is to hold to an access principle that could be put this way: A commitment to the value and quality of research carries with it a responsibility to extend the circulation of such work as far as possible and ideally to all who are interested in it and all who might profit by it....

However, Willinsky's argument on behalf of the ultimate goal of open access - the free availability of information online - falls short because it fails to weigh the benefits of such access against the costs in terms of other public goods....[His] definition, evidently more focused on a general spirit and direction than on the precise shape of the end result, places Willinsky in stark contrast to others in the open-access movement. These advocates are so dogmatically focused on promoting the purest form of open access that they dismiss any approach that falls short of their ideal. (According to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, research literature should be available free on the Internet, "permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.") Such single-mindedness has fostered an us-versus-them fundamentalism that could undermine the efforts of publishers to make content available according to their individual business and publishing models....

In 2004, a group of nonprofit publishers, including the American Physiological Society, founded the Washington DC Principles Coalition for Free Access to Science to express our commitment to innovative and independent publishing practices and support for the release of journal content on the basis of individual business and publishing needs. Some of these publishers make the electronic version of published articles freely available immediately, and most support making content available within 12 months after print publication. We also participate in efforts such as the Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative to provide access to research literature in the developing world, and we provide patients with access to articles on request....

The more extreme advocates of open access believe that the scientific literature should be free to the reader, but Willinsky recognizes that there is a cost associated with publishing. The question thus becomes how to recover this cost in a way that satisfies the need for access.

Willinsky believes that PLoS Biology, an open-access journal published by the Public Library of Science, has solved this problem. Its authors pay a $1,500 fee to have an article published, but this charge is a fraction of the real cost of publication. The remainder is covered by foundation grants from supporters of open access and by institutional membership fees....It is unlikely, however, that sufficient philanthropy exists to make up the difference between $1,500 and the true cost of publication for the more than 5000 journals indexed by PubMed. Consequently, in a world in which authors pay to publish, most journals will have to ask authors to contribute the full cost of publication, which for many will be more than $3,000....

The NIH asserted that its policy would avert the need for journals to move from subscriptions to "author-pays" publishing. Efforts are now under way, however, to make deposit mandatory within six months and require that grantees deposit the final published copy of their articles....The ready availability of content on PubMed Central could lead to subscription cancellations and accelerate the transition to an author-pays publishing model, the economic implications of which are not adequately evaluated by Willinsky.

A study at Cornell University estimated that author-pays publishing would increase that institution's expenses by $1.5 million annually....Spending some $200 million in support of open access should give Congress pause, particularly since the NIH budget has been cut this year for the first time in 36 years. At a time of shrinking budgets for biomedical research, does it make sense to spend scarce dollars on publication costs instead of on research to develop treatments and cures for disease? Willinsky makes the case for access to research literature as a public good, but the advancement of medical knowledge through research is also a public good. When there is not enough money to go around, the question facing us is this: How should we decide which public good is preferable

Comment. Six quick comments. (1) Frank tries to position Willinsky as a moderate and most other OA advocates as radicals. But we agree about almost everything. In any case, Frank doesn't agree with Willinsky either, say, about PLoS. What Frank is really trying to do is frame the question so that he can dismiss most OA advocates with name calling rather than answer their arguments. (2) I'm not very concerned to preserve my own moderate credentials. For it it's "extreme" to want research literature to be free for readers, as Frank says, then I'm proud to be extreme. Remember we're talking about articles that authors voluntarily publish without expectation of payment and, in most cases, with support from public funding. But for the record I've praised Frank's organization, the DC Principles Coalition, for the kinds of free online access that it supports and only challenged it to go further. I also make it a rule to praise steps toward wider and easier access even if they fall short of open access. (3) No responsible OA advocate has ever said that OA journals were costless to produce. The question is not whether scholarly literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than by charging readers and creating access barriers. (4) There are many reasons to think that the NIH policy will not undermine subscriptions. But if the compliance rate increases significantly, say, because of a mandate, then we don't know what will happen. If medicine is like physics, subscription-journals will thrive alongside high-volume OA archiving. If it's not like physics, subscriptions may suffer. But even in that case, it is justified to put the public interest in public access to publicly-funded research ahead of the interests a private-sector industry. (5) Frank relies on the discredited Cornell calculation, which assumes that all OA journals charge author-side fees and that all fees would be paid by universities. (6) Frank overstates the amount the NIH spends on its public-access policy more than one-hundredfold. In fiscal 2005, the agency spent only $1 million administering the program. Compare that to the $30 million/year that the NIH spends on subsidies to subscription journals like those published by Mr. Frank.

Update. Don't add the weight of the New England Journal of Medicine to Frank's opinion. I've just learned that the NEJM editor in chief, Jeffrey Drazen, in his capacity as a member of the Pubic Access Working Group, has voted to strengthen the NIH policy and make it mandatory.