Open Access News

...[O]pen-access advocates have set their sights on...encouraging researchers to demand the right to distribute the published versions freely and immediately. Ann Wolpert, director of libraries at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has launched an initiative that she says will clearly assign rights to the author in a way that would satisfy funders. Wolpert has drawn up a document that researchers can add on to the rights agreement the publisher gives them to sign. Similar agreements have been drafted by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition and the MIT-affiliated Science Commons. “I look at it as responding to a request by faculty members to simplify their lives,” says Wolpert. “They say ‘it is crazy that we are supposed to read and understand these publishers’ agreements. Give me something that I can just staple to any agreement, so I can comply with NIH or Wellcome Trust policy’.”

But publishers’ groups argue that the agreements being drafted go much further than is necessary to comply with current policies. Wolpert’s document, for example, would allow authors to publish the final, formatted version of their paper anywhere on the Internet, as many times as they like, immediately after publication. “This isn’t a balance of rights. This is giving MIT all the relevant rights,” says David Hoole, head of brand marketing at Nature Publishing Group....

Sally Morris, chief executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, [is not in favour of making the final, edited version of a paper freely available everywhere.] “The final version is where publishers add value,” she says. On 27 June, Morris’s group, along with the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, wrote to Wolpert outlining their concerns and proposing a meeting....

John Cox, a consultant to publishers and academic societies who is based in Chichester, UK, says that the value of papers as they appear on journal websites is often underestimated. “It’s not just the copy-editing, but the infrastructure that is provided: the linking to citations, indexing, alerting services, the presentation of the product on the screen to the reader.” But he argues that the desire to post final versions across the web is misguided because the version published on the journal website will always be definitive. “It becomes, if you like, part of the minutes of science,” he says. “That is deeply embedded in the scientific research culture.”

Comments. I support the effort to get OA for the finished, published version. But here are a few comments on the effort to get OA for the prior version, sometimes called the "final version of the author's manuscript", which has undergone peer review but not yet copy editing.

1. If it's true, as Sally Morris says, that "the final version is where publishers add value", then publishers should have little or no objection to OA for the final version of the author's manuscript, which is the version on which all the major funder policies focus (NIH, Wellcome Trust, RCUK, CURES, FRPAA). But on the contrary, we see publishers lobbying hard to block these funder policies.
2. John Cox is right about the many kind of value added by publishers and right that the published version is more desirable than the author's final version. But it doesn't follow that providing OA to the author's final version is misguided. OA to that version is still very useful to authors, who need the increased visibility and impact, and to readers, who need barrier-free access.
3. If the published version is so clearly superior to any previous version, as both Morris and Cox assert, then that's another reason for libraries to continue their subscriptions even after inferior versions are OA, and hence another reason to scale back the argument that OA mandates (for these inferior versions) will kill subscriptions.