Open Access News

Here's something you don't see everyday:  a journal editorial accompanied by a press release and call for supporting signatures:

Rick Anderson, Open access - clear benefits, hidden costs, Learned Publishing, April 2007.  Excerpt:

It is the stated goal of the open access (OA) movement, in its various declarations, working groups and projects, to make scientific research articles freely available to all via the Internet....

There is no question that OA offers potentially significant benefits to society. All other things being equal, free public access to scientific information is clearly a good thing. But all other things are never equal, and to know whether and to what degree any particular OA solution is really a good thing requires a calculation not simply of its benefits, but of its net benefits once costs are taken into account.

Like any distribution system, OA incurs costs. A decision to make content freely available does not make the costs of publication disappear, but only shifts them from the library or end-user to some other party. In the case of an OA journal, costs are most commonly borne by authors....

The costs of self-archiving are no less real, but are less obvious and direct. Setting up a repository costs money, as does its ongoing maintenance. More serious is the impact on publishers, which - to the degree that their content is archived immediately, completely, and in an easily found venue - will quickly lose the ability to charge for that content. It is highly likely that rational individuals and libraries will cancel subscriptions to journals whose content is immediately, freely, easily, and reliably available at no charge....

The danger in saying that OA self-archiving is not publishing and therefore cannot harm publishers is that, if unchallenged, it may lead the general public - including policy-makers - erroneously to believe that publishers have nothing to fear from OA. In fact, mandates that result in widespread and effective OA will inevitably drive at least some publishers out of business, whether or not such an effect is intended by those who promote OA.

All of which begs an important question: so what? It is not the business of the scholarly information community to keep publishers profitable, but to produce and provide access to information. A solution that provides universal access without supporting publishers may be perfectly acceptable. There are two problems with this stance, however:

1.    It assumes that publishers add no value to the scholarly information chain, and can therefore be harmed with impunity and without concern for negative consequences to the scholarly community in general.

2    It assumes that, in fact, publishers are not a part of the scholarly community, but rather entities from outside that community that enter the scholarly information space solely for the purpose of taking profit out of it.

In fact, most STM publishers are not profit-seeking corporations from outside the scholarly community, but rather learned societies and other non-profit entities, many of which rely on income from journal subscriptions to support their conferences, member services, and scholarly endeavours - as well as the peer-review and publishing activities that will remain important in a self-archiving environment. In other words, a publishing system that undermines the ability of publishers to make money in the marketplace thereby may also undermine scholars and scientists in their ability to do their work....

Even granted that damage to publishers is an inevitable consequence of effective OA, though, could that damage be an acceptable price to pay for the public's free access to scholarly content? The answer to that question is beyond the scope of this statement....

[F]rom which is the public likely to benefit more - free and universal public access to articles based on less medical research, or more medical research?...

In summary: OA offers real benefits to society. However, the net value of those benefits cannot be determined unless its costs are computed as well. The purpose of this statement is not to call on participants in the scholarly information chain to fight against OA, but only to move forward while taking full account of costs as well as benefits, and to work towards solutions that offer a net benefit to society....

Comments.

1. A decision to make content freely available does not make the costs of publication disappear, but only shifts them.... No serious OA proponent has ever said that it makes costs disappear.  OA does shift costs, and some shifts are better than others.  But OA does more than shift costs; it also reduces them.  As I've pointed out often, OA journals dispense with print (or price the optional print edition at cost), eliminate subscription management, eliminate DRM, eliminate lawyer fees for licenses and enforcement, reduce or eliminate marketing, and reduce or eliminate profit margins. In their place they add back little more than the cost of collecting author-side fees or institutional subsidies.
2. In the case of an OA journal, costs are most commonly borne by authors.... This is untrue and I'm surprised to see it asserted in an ALPSP journal with the unusually strong ALPSP endorsement represented by the call for signatures.  For it was an ALPSP-sponsored study that showed that only a minority of OA journals charge author-side publication fees.  For more detail on the majority of OA journals that charge no fees, see my article from November 2006.
3. The danger in saying that OA self-archiving is not publishing and therefore cannot harm publishers is.... The argument that OA archiving might not harm publishers has never been based on the claim that OA archiving is not "publishing".  It has been based on the evidence from physics, the field with the highest levels and longest history of OA archiving.  Not only have the American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) seen no cancellations to date arising from OA archiving, they both host mirrors of arXiv, the premier OA archive for the field.  (Now for my standard demurrer:  while there's no evidence yet that high-volume OA archiving will kill subscriptions, it might really have this effect in some fields and, if it did, it would still be justified.)
4. It assumes that publishers add no value to the scholarly information chain, and can therefore be harmed with impunity.... I've seen different views on this.  Speaking for myself, I've never denied that journals add value. To me the question is not whether a journal adds value but how to pay for the most essential kinds of added value without creating access barriers for readers.
5. [F]rom which is the public likely to benefit more - free and universal public access to articles based on less medical research, or more medical research?... This is a misleading way to put the question and doesn't take into account the perversity of spending $55 billion of public money each year on unclassified research without the tiny investment needed to make the results available to all who could use, apply, build on, or benefit from them. (How tiny? The cost of implementing the NIH's policy, $2-4 million/year, is about 0.01% of its $28 billion/year budget.)  The cost of OA is a bargain.  Studies by John Houghton and others have shown that diverting a bit from the research budget in order to make all funded research OA hugely amplifies the return on investment: "With the United Kingdom's GERD [Gross Expenditure on Research and Development] at USD 33.7 billion and assuming social returns to R&D of 50%, a 5% increase in access and efficiency [their conservative estimate] would have been worth USD 1.7 billion; and...With the United State's GERD at USD 312.5 billion and assuming social returns to R&D of 50%, a 5% increase in access and efficiency would have been worth USD 16 billion."
6. [We ought to] move forward while taking full account of costs as well as benefits, and to work towards solutions that offer a net benefit to society.... I agree and am glad to make the case for OA turn on the net benefit to society.  However, I doubt this will make the debate any easier to resolve than it has been up to now.

Update. Also see the comments by William Walsh.