Open Access News

Even a modest move towards making research results freely available could deliver $628million a year in economic and social benefits to the nation.  The claim is made by the first study to weigh the cost and benefit of a shift away from the system of scholarly communication based on expensive journals that are restricted to subscribers.

"There's a lot of interest internationally in this report to the federal Department of Education, Science and Training because people haven't done it before," said lead author John Houghton of the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies.

Assuming a 5per cent increase in access and efficient use of research results, the report estimates a $151million annual benefit for public sector R&D, $88million for higher education R&D and $12million for research funded by the Australian Research Council.

The findings come as the ARC and National Health and Medical Research Council consider adopting open access policies to encourage - but not require - grant recipients to disseminate their results widely....

Over 20 years the benefits of adopting a full system of open access digital repositories - making research widely available free of charge - would outweigh the $10million annual cost by 214:1, the Houghton report concludes....

The report has been seized upon by open access lobbyists such as Stevan Harnad of the American Scientist Open Access Forum, who used its conclusions to urge Harvard University to adopt a policy requiring academics to put their work in open access repositories. Queensland University of Technology is believed to be the first institution to have adopted such a policy....

[Colin Steele] called for senior university managers to get serious about open access and for the research quality framework to be used as an opportunity to make freely available the best work of Australia's scholars and scientists. Mr Steele questioned the value of so much public money being spent on big-publisher subscriptions.

But Mark Robertson, Asian president of Blackwell Publishing, the world's largest publisher specialising in academic societies, defended the industry.

Mr Robertson pointed to massive investment in web technology for subscribers and a host of open access experiments.

"What's interesting about the whole open access issue is that it's driven by librarians, whereas the actual researchers are not taking it up in huge numbers at the moment," Mr Robertson said....

Lawrence Cram, ANU deputy vice-chancellor for research, also sounded a cautious note. He thought a rapid take-off of open access would have to wait on the development of search engines more sophisticated than Google. He opposed any edict that academics use open access, especially an edict built into the RQF, and expressed surprise at the degree of benefit claimed for easier access by the Houghton study.  "Market forces are moving scholarly publication to increasingly open formats and I think it is better to let time take its course rather than mandate and run the risk of introducing another Betamax-type technology," Professor Cram said.

Comments.  I'm delighted to see the Houghton-Steele-Sheehan study get attention in the mainstream press.  Taxpayers need to realize how much the return on their investment in research could be amplified by a transition to OA and how how much they are paying for every delay in that transition.  Here are a few responses to the critics.

1. If Mark Robertson is saying that the hybrid OA journal experiments are reasons to delay an OA mandate, he has things exactly reversed.  These experiments have a low uptake from authors and do very little to enlarge the body of OA literature or improve the return on the public investment in research.  The low uptake is not due to author opposition to OA; on the contrary, the evidence shows that an overwhelming majority of authors are willing make their work OA.  But when authors have to choose between paying a publisher to make their work OA and making their peer-reviewed manuscripts OA themselves, at no charge, it's no wonder they don't flock to the publishers' offers.  Hybrid OA journal experiments are welcome, even if they prove to be ineffective at solving the access problems now facing authors and readers.  But they're not welcome if they are ineffective and used as excuses to delay to derail more effective remedies.
2. Lawrence Cram is confused about what OA is and why it's useful. (1) OA doesn't require search engines any better than those we have now --though it will benefit as search engines improve, like all other online content.  On the contrary, OA was useful 15 years ago, long before Google was launched, when arXiv began transforming how physicists and mathematicians communicate with one another.  (2) OA isn't a format, like Betamax.  It's a kind of access compatible with all file formats and all operating systems.  It's as if Cram objected to freedom of speech on the ground that we haven't yet agreed on a standard for ebook readers.  (3) Market forces are not producing significant amounts of OA.  They are producing no-risk, low-output OA experiments that (as Robertson showed) are more useful for protecting publishers from what they fear than for providing researchers with what they need.  When the gain to the public is on the order estimated by Houghton, Steele, and Sheehan (benefits 214 times greater than costs after 20 years), taxpayers and responsible government officials should be first to demand an end to the dawdling.