Open Access News

JISC has posted a response (undated) to publisher criticism (1, 2) of John Houghton's January report on the economic impact of OA.  The publisher criticism was organized by the Publishers Association, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers.  

The JISC response quotes publisher objections and then replies, in the style of a long email.  That makes it difficult to excerpt --hence, read the whole thing.  But here are some passages, all from the JISC replies:

...JISC and the report authors [Houghton et al.] were pleased to meet with publishers and their representatives on 27th March. At this meeting a number of valuable suggestions were discussed for further work in the area of scholarly publishing. There are now active discussions on this topic underway involving JISC, publishers, the Research Information Network RLUK, SCONUL and others....

JISC concurs with Professor Danny Quah, Head of Economics at the London School of Economics, who sat on the study steering group, and noted:

“The report addresses an important and difficult problem, and is clearly the result of a lot of very careful thinking about the issues. The methodology is sound and the analysis is extremely detailed and transparent. The multi-stage model of production that is used is complex, and does require calibration according to a large number of parameters, many of which are necessarily estimates, where possible taken from published sources or the wider literature. If demonstrably better estimates become available then these could improve that calibration still further. The report represents the best evidence so far on the questions it addresses.”

On the issue of consultation: ...

2. Publishers do not typically make their cost data openly available, for commercial reasons. Therefore there was no reason to expect them to do so in this case, furthermore informal discussions early in the study confirmed this impression.

4. The study is transparent. The assumptions / estimates are listed at the end of the report, together with the sources used as a base for those estimates. Where the report notes that a figure is an “Authors estimate”, this is usually a conservative figure based on several sources from the literature, which are listed in the references section and can be specified if needed. The research that was undertaken was very detailed and during the research it was not possible to find any estimates that could be evidenced that were more valid than those within this report. Of course if there are other estimates that are demonstrably valid that could have been used here then the authors would like to hear more about those. Detailed responses are provided below to specific comments.

5. A version of the model is online for people to try out their own estimates, and publicise the results. One way of testing out the methodology thoroughly would be for publishers to undertake this process. As far as we know this has not happened so far and we would encourage this now to take place in order for us all to move forward with understanding the implications of the work....

It is increasingly clear that serious questions can be asked about the sustainability of the subscription model from all perspectives; as this paragraph makes clear, the ‘author pays’ model would appear to scale better with higher levels of R&D expenditure anyway.  JISC is committed to helping all actors to find sustainable alternatives that are cost-effective for the UK in the context of rapidly changing technology. The recent UK Government “Digital Britain” report notes that for the creative and publishing industries, “if digital distribution and copying costs are lower so too are digital revenues from the product or the advertising impact; often, in current business models, an order of magnitude lower. New business models need to evolve for that environment. The role for regulation or intervention is not to prevent the emergence of new business models or to preserve old and unsustainable ones. It is to contribute constructively to the transition.” ...

On self-archiving mandates: There does not appear to be any evidence that self-archiving destabilizes peer-review, this is backed up by subject areas such as some areas of the Physical sciences where self archiving has been largely universal for almost ten years. To add to this, Open Access models have potentially significant advantages for peer review, in making it easier for all reviewers to easily check references and follow leads, which under the subscription model is only possible if the reviewer’s home institution has access to the material cited....