Open Access News

Joseph J. Esposito, Open Access 2.0:  The nautilus: where - and how - OA will actually work, The Scientist, November 2007. 

The debate over open access to the scientific literature appears to be moving onto a new phase. Many continue to argue one side or the other of a binary choice: Either all research publishing should be open access, or only traditional publishing can maintain peer review and editorial integrity. Others, however, have moved beyond that false dichotomy, instead increasingly seeing various hybrid models emerging and new, often complex, business arrangements.

Partly this is a product of the apparent inability of open-access ventures to produce economically sustainable models. It is unclear whether BioMed Central, a privately held sister company of The Scientist, has broken even, and the Public Library of Science tax return from the fiscal year ending September 30, 2006, the most recent publicly available, indicates that the organization lost $1.4 million on $5 million in revenue. Even if sustainability, rather than profit, is the goal, this is not success.

The new hybrid models are also the product of shrewd thinking on the part of traditional publishers, whether in the for-profit or not-for-profit spheres, which are identifying new ways to hold onto revenues and, in some instances, even to augment them. We are entering a pluralistic phase, where open access and traditional publishing coexist, though they increasingly are finding their own distinctive places in the research universe and are less likely to compete head-on. To respond to the binary argument with which I began this essay, open access is a good thing, but it is also a small and inevitable thing....

Perhaps the most intriguing recent development is Reed Elsevier's announcement that it has developed OncologySTAT, an advertising-supported online portal for oncologists. Reed Elsevier will make its articles on oncology available on this portal at the time of first publication. Subscriptions to the underlying journals, hardcopy and electronic, will continue to be sold to academic libraries, but for users of the portal, the content would be free of charge....Thus we now have the same content being monetized through subscriptions to libraries and through the packaging of audiences to advertisers in an open access or almost-open access form.

Each market segment thus attracts its own business model. But will any of these models accomplish the first aim of many open-access advocates, namely increasing the dissemination of research?

Unfortunately for such advocates, open access does not appear to increase dissemination significantly. Here's one simple reason for that: Most researchers are affiliated with institutions, whether academic, governmental, or corporate, that have access to most of the distinguished literature in the field....

Another important reason open access does not significantly increase dissemination is that attention, not scholarly content, is the scarce commodity....

Open-access advocates would do well to consider what put those keywords into a researcher's mind in the first place. Very often the answer is the sum of all the marketing efforts of a traditional publisher, including the association with a journal's highly regarded brand. Certainly, awareness begins with researcher interest, but it does not translate into popularity without marketing....

This does not mean that open access is useless or adds no value when it comes to dissemination; what it does mean is that open access is most meaningful within a small community whose members know each other and formally and informally exchange the terms of discourse....

It is useful to think of a primary domain of open-access publishing as existing at the tiny center of scholarly communications, the innermost spiral of the shell of a nautilus, where a particular researcher wishes to communicate with a handful of intimates and researchers working in precisely the same area....

At its most basic level, an open-access service need not be much more than "a hard drive in the cloud," a place where content can be stored and others can access it....

For the new service the customers are authors, whose every whim will be satisfied with new features, until the cost of depositing articles appears to be negligible. Yes, there is a paradox here: Although open access is free to readers, its real beneficiaries are the authors, who use the service to communicate with peers....

Comment.  Even though my excerpt is long, the article is a lot longer and I've had to omit many of its major points.  Read the whole thing.  But because the article is long and I have a lot to say about it --and because I'm just stepping out the door to catch a plane-- I can only make a series of quick comments.  Apologies for their brevity.

I like the basic metaphor of the nautilus and the spiral of proximity to an author and the author's research topic.  But Esposito underestimates the benefits of OA to readers far from the center of the nautilus, especially interdisciplinary researchers who never would have known about the author or the author's topic without easy access (access for readers as well as search engines).  Likewise he underestimates the limitations on access even at affluent institutions or, conversely, overestimates how well conventional subscription journals have served the generality of researchers.  He underestimates the number of OA advocates and OA critics who acknowledge the prospect of long-term OA/TA coexistence, and tries to position himself as one of the first to see this prospect.  He seems unaware that some OA journal publishers are already making a profit, some charging publication fees and some not.  I share his view that OncologySTAT is a promising development that might trigger a promising trend (even if not fully OA), although there are good reasons not to be nearly as sanguine about hybrid OA journals as he is.  He assumes that scarcity of attention means that OA doesn't really improve dissemination, which doesn't follow.  He's right that scarcity of attention is a serious problem and one not directly helped by improved access, but he seems to assume that the best way to cope with information overload is to filter by ability to pay rather than (say) to filter by relevance on a more accessible and comprehensive corpus of literature.  He assumes that OA either bypasses peer review or bypasses relevance filters; but both assumptions are false.  He overstates the role of publisher marketing in giving researchers the terms and concepts on which they run searches.  He assumes that OA will undermine the role of publisher brands in helping authors identify literature worth reading.  He assumes that it's a "paradox" that OA helps authors and not just readers, when helping authors was part of the purpose all along.  I actually like his own model of an OA platform or repository, enhanced with alert services and user comments, but he underestimates the extent to which these needs are and can be filled by free and open-source software costing much less than he estimates.  (Yes, I acknowledge that FOSS has costs.)  And apart from cost, his fee-based OA platform is only attractive as another option alongside other vehicles for delivering OA, such as peer-reviewed OA journals and no-fee repositories, both of which have undergone steady evolution and refinement since their first, pre-internet appearance more than two decades ago.

Update. Also see the comments by Tom Wilson.

Update (6/15/08). Esposito has published an expanded version of this article in the Spring 2008 JEP.