Open Access News

Peter Suber has collected some reactions to the anti-FRPAA letter that came out last week, and the example from Jonathan Eisen is particularly depressing....(UPDATE:  Shortly after posting this, I was impressed and pleased to get a brief email from Eisen in which he agreed that his tone was "over the top".  He said that he had changed the tone of his post, and I see that he has indeed done that).  In his listing of the nefarious relationships of the signatories, he mentions that Robert R. Rich is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Immunology.  He is also VP and Dean of Medicine at my university.

As it happens, I ran into Bob late Thursday morning when we were both on our way to the monthly lunch that our president hosts for the deans.    I mentioned the letter and he told me that it would be going out later that day.  We chatted a bit on the elevator about the complexities of the issues.   The topic came up during the lunch and there was a bit of lively discussion.  There was some good natured teasing of each other about being on the wrong sides of the issue. 

We've talked about all of this on several occasions, and I've noticed that Bob always frames his discussion by saying that he supports exploring new economic models for publishing (for example, he's had positive things to say about PLoS and the quality of their journals, though he's not yet convinced about their long term viability); what he seems to object to the most in FRPAA is what he perceives as a federal mandate to change the economic model without sufficient attention given to how the professional societies are going to manage the transition.  He and I may disagree on the merits and consequences of the legislation, but it is clear that his position is far from a kneejerk, anti-open access, anti-change point of view....

As I've said many times before, we need to find the places where we can establish alliances with the societies and come up with strategies to promote the issues that we agree on, and not let the disagreements divide us. 

So let me make a concrete proposal:  The Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL) and the Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology (FASEB) should establish a one-year commission to investigate the alternatives, options, and implications for removing subscription revenue from the funding streams of society-published scientific journals.  The commission should include no more than ten individuals, half chosen by the executive body of each organization.  The organizations should provide sufficient funding for four in-person meetings during the course of the year, along with some funding for staff support (data-gathering, coordinating logistics, etc.).  Results should be presented at the 2008 AAMC meeting (as well as other appropriate venues).

The commission should be charged with identifying all possible alternate funding streams and constructing scenarios that would explore how likely the generation of such fundings streams could be.  FRPAA should be off the table, since the lines in the sand have already been clearly drawn.  The ultimate goal of the commission should be to identify, as concretely as possible, the real implications of removing subscription revenue so that we can have constructive debate on the cost/benefits involved in making radical changes to the current system. 

Let me be clear:  I firmly believe that funding scholarly communication via subscription revenue is an anachronism and that the societal benefits of changing the systems are worth pushing this as far we can.  But I also believe that the scientific societies play a critical role in the advancement of knowledge and that there is an equally important societal benefit in making sure that they remain viable as we go through this transition....

Finally, I believe that the open access partisans, along with many of my librarian colleagues, have made a serious tactical mistake in placing ourselves in such unyielding opposition to the scientific societies.   Those societies that have maintained their publishing programs as low-cost independent entities should be applauded by librarians, even when we disagree on the open access issues.  The day that Marty Frank sells the APS publishing program to Elsevier because he doesn't think he can successfully keep it alive on its own anymore is a day when we all lose.