Michael T. Clarke, When Information Is Free, What Will It Be Worth?Chronicle of Higher Education, October 15, 2004 (accessible only to subscribers). A letter to the editor in response to Lila Guterman's 9/10 story (blogged excerpts) on the NIH plan. Excerpt: "The argument I did make is that if a critical mass of articles published in a journal were freely accessible elsewhere on the Internet [e.g. in PubMed Central], the current subscription model that has been used successfully by the scientific and medical community for 350 years would no longer be economically viable....Journals would be forced to recover the cost of publication by levying author fees. A move to this publishing system, known as the author-pays model, is precisely what open-access advocates are attempting to foist on scientific publishers through legislative mandate. And while it sounds good at first glance (who doesn't like the idea of everything being free for everyone?), this publishing model would introduce a number of problems with very serious implications for taxpayers, patients, and science itself....The third and most serious concern I raised is that an author-pays system would introduce an inherent, structural conflict of interest into the peer-review process, undermining the integrity of research. If an author whose research is being evaluated by a journal is also the principal source of that journal's income, we have a very serious problem." Clarke is the Senior Managing Editor of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
(PS: Three quick responses. First, Clarke knows that the NIH plan only calls for OA archiving, not for the forced conversion of non-OA journals to OA journals. But he argues that the former will lead to the latter. However, there are at least seven reasons to think that the NIH plan will not cause journals to lose subscribers; until Clarke can answer them, his worry seems to be groundless or speculative. Second, Clarke knows that Congress and the NIH are not pushing the idea that "everything [should be] free for everyone". So why weaken the argument with caricature? Third, the fear that OA journals will compromise on peer review in order to gather processing fees is understandable but completely answerable. Clarke could do more by responding to the answer than by repeating the objection.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/14/2004 01:54:00 PM.
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.
