Open Access News

Diane Harley (ed.), The University as Publisher:  Summary of a Meeting Held at UC Berkeley on November 1, 2007, Center for Studies in Higher Education, February 2008.  (Thanks to Chris Kelty.)  Excerpt:

...Laura Brown, Senior Advisor, Ithaka, and Former President, Oxford University Press...

The Ithaka study found that, in theory, universities want a fair marketplace for distributing information, but they lack a vision of what it should look like, as well as the collective will to address and harness needed resources. As a result, universities, through the publishing efforts and advocacy of their libraries, tend to support open access in response to the publishing question, leaving their presses to fend for themselves in the increasingly competitive world of commercial scholarly publishing....

Donald Kennedy, President Emeritus, Stanford University, and Editor-in-Chief, Science

Science is most concerned with the growth of the open access movement and the question of how to construct a business model that can work within an open access environment. Print can be profitable today, but making electronic dissemination pay is something that no one has really figured out yet. Consequently, with print, the revenue is greater; with electronic, access is greater.

In relation to an author-pays model, the charge can only be met if a scholar holds an NIH grant which, in effect, means only bio-medicine can afford to publish under the auspices of this model. It is unclear how long open access, such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS), will thrive once the grants like those from Moore Foundation run out. There are great open access journals in existence so we can only hope that someone finds a way to make them thrive as part of the marketplace.

There are several harsh realities about publishing a journal. Firstly, it costs just as much to reject a paper as to accept one, yet a journal receives no fees for the “dead weight” of rejected papers. Second,...journals are not compensated for the papers they reject nor are compensated for papers that are not cited....

Nick Jewell, Vice Provost-Academic Personnel, University of California Office of the President....

Journal subscription as it stands is an inefficient way of accessing information as you may only want two out of 20 papers. Electronic searching allows you to customize that information....

Catherine Candee, [Director, Publishing Services, California Digital Library]

We do not want to get stuck on the discussion of why a university would want to get into publishing; it does not make sense necessarily if it is just more of the same (especially since it costs $150,000 and takes two years to start a journal.) But it is useful to talk about the mission to support education and research. Publication is just one piece of that. Content is created and shared, which supports broader society. Universities can give back what they are supposed to give back. If we take that approach, then we have to ask ourselves if current publishing methods are serving the public. And the answer is “no;” they are falling behind what is needed. Most of the world does not have access to the research and cannot exploit the technology that is available so there is a problem. The question, then, is: what does it take to support education and teaching, and what role does the university have in this? This is a broader discussion than should the university be a publisher....

Jim Pitman, Department of Statistics, UC Berkeley

One huge misconception is that the only opportunity for publishing is the author-pays model. That is false. We publish 10 to 12 scientific journals. Some are traditional subscription, but we are starting open-access publications at the rate of two to three a year. It can be done for $10,000 inside of six months. If you have connections, you have human infrastructure (i.e., faculty who will publish). You need a community of scholars to contribute content and a respected association for quality control and peer review. It does not cost $150,000 and take two years if you have the infrastructure in place. Open source software/systems for e-publishing provide a sophisticated publishing platform (e.g., DSpace). You can have a whole portfolio of open-access journals and then have an income stream from elsewhere within the university to support them, instead of spending $27 million a year on subscriptions to commercial journals. Just take a million dollars of that and create the electronic journal platform. Peer review by the university is not needed; it would be foolish for the university to set itself up as the arbiter of what is worth printing. Universities can invite societies and associations to be reviewers, and instead just provide the platform for publishing. Universities have said “no” in the past to cooperation with third parties to create journals, but they need to rethink such collaborations....

Summary of Roundtable Discussion....

Attitudes about Openness and Access....

Diane Harley noted that...there are significant traditional differences from discipline to discipline in terms of how comfortable scholars are in sharing their work at its early stages in writing. In physics, astrophysics, and economics for example, sharing of well-developed preprints freely is the norm. In biology and history, the opposite is true.

Donald Kennedy agreed that there will be a multi-spatial connectivity for the new generation and Science has recognized that younger readers access the material online while older readers may wait for the print copy. But he also noted that younger scholars will continue to be quite conservative and guided by their mentors in the work world.

Shel Waggener concurred on some of these points. Today’s generation can follow a conservative model in the work world but expect to have another digital persona for other purposes. They expect a level of openness and access that the older generation would have been shocked to assume would be available and want to move through different environments easily without worrying about privacy. There are other parts of the picture besides age demographics according to Cliff Lynch. For example, the high achievers in any field may be more interested in finishing and disseminating their research in the field rather than worrying about formal publishing and tenure....