Open Access News

Last week, STM released a briefing document for members only.  Yesterday it made it OA.  As Michael Mabe, the STM CEO, wrote to Stevan Harnad, who had asked for permission to post excerpts on his blog:

Yes, please use the quotes with our permission. If you want to refer to the whole document please link to it on our website [here].

If you are interested in posting the full document on your website you have permission to do this - with the proviso that any modifications/commentary must be prominently noted and distinguished from our document and that you link it to the original on the STM site.

Thanks for the chance to post “background context and objectives”. Perhaps you could note to your ePrints site the gist of my emails, namely:

1. Our document was originally intended as briefing for a STM member-publishers to help them develop policies and a greater understanding of the current environment
2. STM welcomes open discussion of these matters and will be interested to learn about any comments you receive
3. That I’d like to reserve the opportunity to comment at a later date if it seems that would be helpful

Thanks to Michael Mabe for releasing the document, and thanks to Stevan Harnad for seeking and obtaining permission to post excerpts.  See Stevan's response to the document, using paraphrases instead of quotations, and his update, using quotations.

Here's my selection of the key excerpts from the document:

Briefing Document (for Publishing Executives) on Institutional Repositories and Mandated Deposit Policies

Scholarly publishers recognize that Institutional Repositories (“IRs”) serve a number of useful purposes for universities and research institutions. If properly conceived and executed, they can help disseminate knowledge and promote institutions to funding agencies and recruits. IRs can usefully highlight and capture the research output of the institution, identify and post theses, dissertations, research data, historical images and illustrations from institutional archives, and serve as vehicles for electronic coursepacks.

Scholarly publishers are willing to work with institutions on opportunities to showcase research supported by the institution as long as publishers’ investments in the primary tasks of supporting scholarly communications can be maintained....

Publishers become concerned when IRs involve themselves in publishing and distribution activities currently being done efficiently and effectively by the scholarly publishing community. When this happens, a parallel publishing system is created that lacks the quality controls and value-added processes publishers already employ. If IRs become primary publishing outlets, many are concerned that key elements of today’s scholarly communication system such as quality controls, preservation standards, and the discoverability of research, will suffer.

Publishers rely on copyright transfers or publishing licenses from authors for the rights they need to ensure that the funding sources for the scholarly communications process-- which have enabled them to make more information available to more people in more ways than at any time in human history-- are not undermined by the availability of alternative versions. In return, authors’ manuscripts are improved, enriched, promoted, and branded as part of a web-based peer-reviewed journal publishing system developed and maintained by publishers. This longstanding value-given-for-value-received partnership is vitally important to publishers. Grants of broad and ill-defined rights by authors to IRs risk undermining the ability of both sides to continue this successful relationship. Many are concerned that authors are not adequately briefed on the unintended consequences of such actions. Where these conflicts exist today, many publishers and authors face dilemmas as to how they can effectively proceed with publication decisions - to the detriment of scholarly communication....

As an executive in the publishing industry, you may be asked to comment on news and developments in the academic community about these IR policies, which are sometimes also less accurately described as “authors’ rights” or “open access” policies....

Key points for internal review:

• What publishing rights are necessary to support our business model(s)? E.g. subscription models will generally need at least exclusive publishing rights while author-pays models may not
• In our journal publishing agreement(s), do we offer rights to authors for IR postings? If not, under what terms and conditions might we?
• What distinctions do we draw between pre-print servers, voluntary IRs, and mandated IRs in terms of copyright policies and business model(s)?
• Where do our business strategies and copyright policies fall in the policy categories below? (Note that the categories are not mutually exclusive and that different policies may fall into different categories):
  • Intramural Policies: We allow posting of final or near-final versions of articles on an Intranet site with no public access permitted;
  • Extramural Policies: We allow posting of early versions of articles on an Internet site with public access permitted and journal-specific embargo periods;
  • Linking Policies: We allow posting of final versions of articles on a publisher web site with links from institutional sites
  • Sponsorship Policies: We allow posting of final versions of articles on an institutional site and/or our own site and/or other repository site with direct financial support of agency, institution, author or sponsor

Key points to consider in possible interactions with the media:

• More scholarly journal literature is more visible and more accessible to more individuals now than at any time in history, principally because of the efforts and investments of publishers....
• Posting on an institutional repository is not the same as publishing in a journal — journals have established editorial policies and perspectives, peer review systems, editing, tagging, and reference-linking services
• If not carefully conceived and managed, IRs can become nothing more than alternative, free-access parallel (but inferior) publishing and distribution systems which risk undermining the incentives and ability of publishers to invest in managing the peer-review of research and to provide and maintain the well-organized infrastructure necessary to publish, disseminate and archive journal articles
• IRs require investment and management. They should be undertaken only if they have a clear mission and purpose other than merely offering an alternative parallel publishing and distribution system
• Researchers should be fully briefed about possible adverse and long-term effects on scholarly communication before granting broad and ill-defined rights to IRs
• Faculty authors should retain the freedom to choose how and where to publish
• Universities proposing to obtain rights from their faculty should also work with publishers to avoid adverse effects on the system of web-based peer-reviewed journals which currently underpins today’s unprecedented rate of scientific advancement....

Comments

• I've endorsed the comments Stevan Harnad made on 1/13.  To save time and space, I'll add just a few others here.
• "Scholarly publishers are willing to work with institutions on opportunities to showcase research supported by the institution as long as publishers’ investments in the primary tasks of supporting scholarly communications can be maintained."  No one expects publishers to work with universities when it would undermine their investments, and I applaud their willingness to work with universities in other circumstances.  On the other side, no one should expect universities to slow down the pursuit of their own missions, to generate and share knowledge, just to protect publisher investments, even if they welcome opportunities to work with publishers in other circumstances.
• "Publishers become concerned when IRs involve themselves in publishing and distribution activities currently being done efficiently and effectively by the scholarly publishing community. When this happens, a parallel publishing system is created that lacks the quality controls and value-added processes publishers already employ."  OA repositories do not perform peer review and therefore do not duplicate what publishers do or provide a "parallel publishing system".  The STM document itself acknowledges this toward the end when it says, quite rightly, that "Posting on an institutional repository is not the same as publishing in a journal...."
• "If IRs become primary publishing outlets, many are concerned that key elements of today’s scholarly communication system such as quality controls, preservation standards, and the discoverability of research, will suffer."  Two points:  (1) If the objection is that OA repositories will start to perform peer review, then publishers can relax.  I see no evidence that this is happening.  If the objection is that green OA itself will undermine peer review, then I've answered that objection at length elsewhere.  (2) Is STM is seriously saying that non-OA literature facilitates preservation and discovery more than OA literature? 
• "Publishers rely on copyright transfers or publishing licenses from authors for the rights they need to ensure that the funding sources for the scholarly communications process...are not undermined by the availability of alternative versions."  Today most non-OA publishers already allow authors to deposit their peer-reviewed postprints in OA repositories.  Most of these publisher policies prohibit deposit of the published editions, and therefore permit "the availability of alternative versions".  Moreover, many of the leading OA policies, such as the NIH policy, give publishers the option to replace the author's manuscript with the published edition, if they wish.  Hence, in most cases publishers either consent to the coexistence of multiple versions or have the option to prevent it.
• "Grants of broad and ill-defined rights by authors to IRs risk undermining the ability of both sides to continue this successful relationship...."  I've addressed the "undermining" claim elsewhere.  But I don't understand the "ill-defined rights" claim.  Is STM saying that it would have no problem with policies that ask authors to retain sharply-defined rights?  FWIW, most of the policies I've seen that ask authors to retain rights are focused and precise in the rights they ask authors to retain, and the rest could easily be revised to tighten up the rights request.  If the objection is that these policies ask for "broad" or overbroad rights, then that's worth discussing further.  I've argue that these policies are justified and that most TA publishing contracts demand overbroad rights.  (See my June 2007 article on the joint STM/ALPSP/AAP/PSP paper on balancing author and publishing rights.)
• "Many are concerned that authors are not adequately briefed on the unintended consequences of such actions."  Many or most authors already know that many or most publishers fear that green OA will reduce their revenue or even undermine peer review.  I wouldn't mind briefing authors on those fears if we could also brief them on the answers to those fears and the rationale for OA.  To put this another way, authors are not adequately briefed on the unintended consequences of signing exclusive rights over to publishers who will use those rights to limit access to their work.
• "[IRs] should be undertaken only if they have a clear mission and purpose other than merely offering an alternative parallel publishing and distribution system."  The (primary) purpose of an IR is to provide OA to its contents, and the purpose of OA is to remove access barriers for readers and enlarge the audience and impact for authors.  OA repositories would not be necessary (for these purposes) if all journals already provided OA their contents.  But today we're far from that point and therefore OA repositories are still necessary.  The imperative that IRs should not be undertaken merely to offer "an alternative distribution...system", or merely to offer OA, seems to rest on the imperative that authors and universities should put publisher interests ahead of their own interests.  That principle is unargued and unwise.  It's also subject to table-turning:  authors and universities could demand, with the same justification, that publishers put author and university interests ahead of their own.  But in fact green OA makes this table-turning unnecessary:  green OA means that authors and universities don't have to demand that TA publishers convert to OA.  OA policies like those at the NIH and Harvard even make it unnecessary to demand that TA publishers permit green OA; the policies obtain all the rights they need from authors, and publishers are left free to decide whether to publish work by those authors.
• "Faculty authors should retain the freedom to choose how and where to publish."  I agree and have argued that this principle is entirely compatible with OA.
• "Universities proposing to obtain rights from their faculty should also work with publishers to avoid adverse effects on the system of web-based peer-reviewed journals which currently underpins today’s unprecedented rate of scientific advancement."  Publishers proposing to obtain rights from faculty (through publishing contracts) should work with universities to avoid adverse effects on authors' ability to authorize OA for their work and stimulate an unprecedented rate of scientific advancement.

Update (1/26/09).  Dorothea Salo has posted an open letter to STM, protesting the way it cited her work in the briefing document and left the impression that she supports its conclusions.  Excerpt:

...I repudiate your inclusion of this article in your briefing in the strongest possible terms, and should be obliged were you to remove mention of it from your document entirely. While I do indeed raise questions about the “expense and utility” of institutional repositories, I do so in hopes of encouraging libraries to make greater commitments of resources to them, in hopes of increasing their return on investment.

I object most strenuously to your misinterpretation of this position as expressing concern about “misuse and dangers” of IRs. IRs are not a misuse of library or institutional resources, and they do not pose dangers to the scholarly-communication process —only to outmoded business models and those who cling stubbornly to them....

Update (1/28/09). STM has agreed to remove its reference to Dorothea Salo's work from its briefing document.

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