Sian Harris interviews Brian Crawford in the April/May issue of Research Information. Crawford is the President of Publications division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and Chairman of the Executive Council of the Professional/Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP). He was chair of the PSP/AAP Executive Council at the time it hired Dezenhall Resources and launched PRISM. Excerpt:
What are your views on open access?
We [at the ACS] are in favour of various access models and think authors should have the right to choose. We don’t think that governments or others should mandate what authors do and require them to pay.
Immediately on publication each of our authors is given a link that they can put on their websites or funding body’s site free of charge. There is a limit of 50 downloads of their paper in the first year.
If the author wants to place the whole article on their website or funding body’s site then we have our ‘AuthorChoice’ model where authors pay to make their articles open access. Most of our revenue comes from subscriptions, with a bit from advertising. We don’t see many authors choosing the AuthorChoice option. We’ve had this model out for about a year and less than one per cent of papers are published this way. Not all authors have access to funds that they could use to pay to publish and most of our authors are pleased with the access that others have to their papers anyway.
We enable authors to submit their raw data too. We put this outside our firewall so it is open to non-subscribers too but we do not tag this information.
We left the matter of putting preprints in repositories to editorial discretion on the individual journals and the editors have chosen not to allow this. After publication there is the option to have the free authordirected link or to pay for open access. The society feels it is better to have the published version available.
Comments. I'll limit myself to three comments here. But for more comments on his OA position, see my blog archive.
"We don’t think that governments or others should mandate what authors do and require them to pay." Not a single OA mandate anywhere requires authors to pay anything.
"[L]less than one per cent of papers are published [in the AuthorChoice hybrid OA program]." As I've argued elsewhere, the reason is that the ACS hybrid journal program charges high fees and offers few benefits. It doesn't let fee-paying authors retain copyright or use CC licenses, and it doesn't promise to reduce its subscription prices in proportion to author uptake (hence embracing a frank double-charge business model). The uptake rate remains low despite the fact that the ACS requires participation, and payment of the fee, even for authors who only want green OA, not gold OA.
"We enable authors to submit their raw data too. We put this outside our firewall so it is open to non-subscribers too..." Peter Murray-Rust reported in April 2007 that the ACS claimed copyright on author data files.
Update. Also see the comments on Plausible Accuracy.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/15/2008 11:55:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
