Open Access News

Think of...this essay as an extended answer to the question, “Why do I write about library access at all --and why don’t I stick to open access?”...I would not dissuade anyone from focusing on open access to scholarly articles (with or without capital “O” and “A”) and improving both “green” and “gold” aspects of such access. That’s important work. Peter Suber sustains a high level of clarity and completeness in discussing and advocating both forms of open access; Charles W. Bailey, Jr. and (more recently) the bloggers at OA librarian add to that effort, as do others. Many other librarians and scholars are engaged in creating and building OA journals (“gold” OA) and encouraging scholars to deposit their articles in OAI digital repositories (“green” OA). More power to them. Library access involves more and, in some ways, less than open access....

The current journal model is broken. Too many STM journals cost too much money, and increase in price at too rapid a rate....The current model, with several large commercial publishers dominating the field of STM publishing and charging what they believe the market will bear, is unsustainable: It is already breaking down, with even the wealthiest libraries canceling large numbers of journals....I am not arguing that these publishers don’t add value. Clearly, they do. I am arguing that the subscription model simply will not stand: That it is already breaking down and will continue to break down, probably at an accelerating rate....

Green OA...[improves access but] does nothing to address the financial breakage --which means it fails to address library issues, vital to long-term effective access. Worse, some green OA evangelists regard library issues as irrelevant and even treat with disdain library efforts to improve green OA....

Open access journals can relieve cost pressures on libraries. Open access journals can reduce the cost structure of the entire scholarly publishing enterprise. Libraries may even be sensible candidates to carry out the modest organizational tasks involved in publishing an electronic-only open access journal. But open access journals aren’t growing rapidly --and aren’t displacing commercial journals to a noticeable extent. Some argue that a complete shift to open access journals could even increase costs to some libraries or universities, but that analysis assumes two questionable points: [1] It assumes a very high cost per published article, at least $1,500, even though some open access journals that charge author-side fees have considerably lower fees....[2] It assumes that all open access journals will be paid for by direct author-side charges, even though most open access journals don’t currently charge author-side fees (and many subscription journals do charge author-side fees), and even though author-side fees could reasonably be built into research grants.

There are several possible reasons for the slow growth of open access publishing. One factor may be the astonishing level of “untruthiness” set forth, on an ongoing basis, by many within the scholarly publishing community: For example, arguments that open access journals will undermine peer review, reduce editorial quality, or in some other manner damage scholarship.

PS: Like Walt, I've argued that some OA initiatives help scholars without helping libraries and that long-term we have to help both.