Open Access News

Lee C. Van Orsdel and Kathleen Born, Serial Wars, Library Journal, April 15, 2007.  Excerpt:

In a year filled with drama and hyperbole, the serials marketplace churned toward a future whose shape is the subject of fierce debate. Forecasts from commercial publishers touting collapse and disaster seemed oddly out of sync with the profits they enjoyed —around 25 percent on average. Nevertheless, in a market where prices continued to rise and bundled content continued to sell, some of the very publishers whose fortunes are made in scientific, technical, and medical (STM) journals all but declared that the open access (OA) movement is apocalyptic in scope and will lead to the end of journals as we know them.

Open access is no longer a subtext in the annals of the journals industry. It stands alone as an alternative to the existing system of journal publication, which most say is unsustainable in its current form....

Libraries want relief from journal prices that are patently outrageous and defy cost-benefit justification. Authors want impact, and OA articles get cited much more often. Scientists want faster and easier access to others’ research, but a recent paper, “UK Scholarly Journals: 2006 Baseline Report,” found that half of all researchers in Britain have problems securing access to needed articles. Universities want a better return on their investment in intellectual capital, authors, peer reviewers, and editors. Taxpayers want to be able to read the research they sponsor.

STM publishers vigorously defend the adequacy of the current system, downplaying the extent of concerns like those above and questioning the merits of the OA movement. However, they have made concessions to scholars who want their work to be open access by allowing them to archive a version of their peer-reviewed articles on the web or in an institutional repository after an embargo. They have also made concessions on the business side of things. They have designed hybrid OA programs in an effort to control economic risk while experimenting with a new business model....One could say that publishers and OA proponents have made strides in finding common ground. So what caused publishers to ratchet up the rhetoric of opposition over the winter months?

Support for OA is accelerating worldwide, and therein may lie the answer. The very speed of its growth must be alarming to publishers. For example, almost 2600 peer-reviewed journals are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals—a 25 percent increase over the year before—and over 200 of the titles are tracked for impact by Thomson-ISI. Despite strong publisher opposition, five of Britain’s eight Research Councils adopted self-archiving mandates for the recipients of their research grants. Policy discussions in Europe, the United States, and other regions around the world may lead to similar mandates, potentially affecting a huge percentage of articles published by the top scientific houses. Publishers seemed to take particular notice when administrators at many prestigious American universities threw their weight behind the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), a sweeping legislative proposal with an OA mandate. The universities’ involvement brings the issue right to the doorstep of the scholars/authors whose lack of awareness of market issues has always worked in publishers’ favor....

This year’s Periodicals Price Survey [at the end of this article] looks at these and other factors shaping the journals marketplace....

If some publishers think the OA movement will rob them of their livelihoods, you can’t tell it from their balance sheets. According to a September report from Outsell, a market research company, the top ten STM publishers bring in almost 43 percent of the revenue in a market that totals just over $19 billion....

Librarians aren’t waiting to see what kind of price relief the OA movement might bring. They are beginning to ask hard questions about the relationship between the value of a journal and its price. In January, University of California (UC) Libraries disseminated a pilot study on value-based journal pricing. UC used the Bergstrom-McAfee calculations for value-pricing as the basis of the study but included other metrics as well, such as the university system’s contributions to the publishing process (author, editor, reviewer services), cost savings to publishers from economies of marketing and selling to consortia, and normative range of cost increases for the industry as a whole, defined by the Producer Price Index....

UC will push for more than a conversation. The stated goal of the study is actively to influence the journal pricing market.

The UC study underscores the message to heavy-hitting publishers that intransigent pricing policies are driving customers to seek pricing relief one way or another. Either the current system flexes to address concerns over price and access, or a new system will take its place....

The practice of self-archiving that is at the heart of these [national OA] policies is the same one already permitted by most publishers. The difference is the mandate. Publishers know that most scholars don’t archive unless someone makes them do it. Mandates would force them do it. Publishers fear that once the practice of postpublication archiving becomes widespread, a rash of subscription cancellations will follow, embargoes notwithstanding.

Open access initiatives in the United States and Europe exemplify the policy mandates that publishers most fear. In this country, the FRPAA is waiting to be reintroduced in the Senate. FRPAA would enforce open access of articles that result from any government-sponsored grant program of a certain size within six months of publication, pushing the free information principle into all areas of federally funded research. Also under consideration in the Congress is a set of recommendations from two advisory groups to strengthen the National Institute of Health’s self-archiving policy from a request to an edict that grantees deposit research articles in PubMed Central. The recommendations also call for shortening the embargo period from 12 to six months, but that proposal is not expected to pass.

The strongest OA momentum at this writing seems to be in Europe, where the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, has been aggressively pursuing policy development around the issue of access to scientific information. Last year’s Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe advised a mandate for open access to research funded by the EU. In the lead up to a February 2007 conference to review recommendations from the study, over 19,000 individuals and representatives of institutions around the world signed a petition urging their adoption. In addition, a preconference poll showed that 86 percent of principle investigators with current EU grants favored open access to the findings they plan to publish. The conference failed to produce the mandate favored by petitioners and poll respondents, but the EU left the door open for further guidelines. This result was less than OA proponents hoped for and no doubt less than publishers feared.

Faced with mounting evidence that OA directives are rapidly gaining support, a coalition of publishers last winter turned to shock language and political hardball to try to keep them from passing. Two of the strategies backfired. As reported in Nature (1/25/07), the Association of American Publishers (AAP) hired a notorious PR firm for between $300,000 and $500,000 to launch a campaign of disinformation against FRPAA. Both the AAP and the publishers associated with the story (American Chemical Society, Elsevier, and Wiley) were skewered in the scholarly and public media as a result. Then in February came the announcement of the Brussels Declaration, ten “self-evident” principles from STM publishers about science publishing. At the time of writing, the declaration wasn’t faring much better in its reception than the above-mentioned PR debacle. Taken together, these acts indicate, pundits suggest, that war has, in essence, been declared by publishers on policy-driven OA initiatives.

In 2007, academic libraries saw overall journal price increases just under eight percent for the second year in a row. U.S. titles rose nine percent on average; non-U.S., 7.3 percent....Expect overall price increases to be in the seven percent to nine percent range for 2008 subscriptions....

Also see the annual Periodicals Price Survey data at the end of the article.

Comment.  This is an excellent picture of where OA stands today.  If you have colleagues who want to know what's been happening and only have time for one article, give them this URL.