Category Archives: Open Access and Institutional Repositories

Three things open access is not

Lots of news stories and emails flying around about open access in the past few weeks, and as I tried to think what theme might bring them together, I realized that I wanted to talk about three things that open access is not.  Here they are:

First, open access is not more prone to abuse than other types of publishing.  We hear a lot about “predatory” open access journals, and recently we have also heard a lot about fraud and retracted articles from traditional journals.  We need to connect the dots and realize that both systems can be abused, just as all systems devised by human agents can be.

Consider, for example, this story from the Chronicle of Higher Education about a researcher who apparently faked nearly 200 scientific studies.  The journals he published in were not top-of-the-line, but they were respectable, traditional subscription-based journals that libraries all over the world pay for.  The principal journal mentioned in the article, Anaesthesia, is published by Wiley-Blackwell and is part of the journal package that my library buys.  Were we the victims of a predatory subscription journal, or just of an increasingly slipshod system that often fails to live up to the claims made for top-notch editorial work?  Either way, the difference between the failures at Anaesthesia and those for which OA journals are sometimes blamed does not seem all that significant.

Indeed, reform of the system by which scholars are evaluated and rewarded is exactly the recommendation of this New York Times article about the rise in scientific retractions, and that accords nicely with some of the changes OA journals can facilitate.  After detailing the really alarming rise in retractions, the article quotes suggestions that one way to combat fraud is to stop evaluating scholars simply on the number of papers they publish and the reputations of the journals in which they are published.  They do not directly address the question of why these journals, with all of their professional editorial staffs, do not initially catch the fraud, which is increasing at a faster rate than the number of scientific articles is.  But their recommendations point in the same direction the OA movement has been going for a number of years — away from a focus on impact factors, which only rate journals, and towards a more flexible and article-based set of metrics that actually relates to the specific article and to the nature of its impact.  More about this in a minute.

The second thing that open access is not is just one thing.  Recently I have seen a lot of debate about what is and is not open access.  Much of this debate has centered on the Finch Report in the UK, which recommended a rapid transition to open access publishing of research results, but put a heavy emphasis on gold OA, and specifically that subset of gold OA in which publishers are supported by article processing changes paid in advance of publication.  You can see one example of the debate this has caused here.

Note that I said that charging article processing fees is a subset of gold open access.  Much gold OA happens without such fees.  Some fully OA journals are simply supported by organizations, whether those are published by scholarly societies, by libraries (Duke’s are here) or by major funders such as those that support eLife.  Also, the new journal PeerJ is trying a different experiment in gold open access, financed by memberships.  Finally, the recent announcement about the SCOAP3 effort to flip the financing for all of the prominent journals in high-energy physics shows that radical new experiments somewhat different from those on which the Finch Report was focused can succeed.

The diversity of these forays into open access are important, and in my opinion there will be lots of different styles of open access for some time to come.  After all, the most effective effort at improving access to funded research in the US so far, the public access policy of the National Institutes of Health, relies to some extent, at least, on green open access, and never depends upon or requires the payment of article processing charges.  One of the reasons I especially like this new tool from SPARC, called “How Open Is It,” is because it allows one to evaluate openness on a variety of factors, and seems to recognize that openness is an ambition and a process, not one specific definition.

Failing to keep the diversity of open access efforts in mind leads to some unfortunate conclusions.  In a recent statement the American Historical Association “voiced concern” that open access would not work for the humanities and social sciences the way it has for the natural sciences.  This is a common complaint, but the myopia on which it is based is especially obvious in the AHA statement, which cites the Finch report and is focused entirely on “author pays” models of open access.  Nowhere does the AHA statement consider that green open access would produce significant benefits for historians without the difficulties about which the AHA is wringing its collective hands.  Perhaps this failure to see the whole picture is part of the reason that the AHA’s own flagship journal, the American Historical Review, does not facilitate author self-archiving, allowing only the pre-print versions of articles to be made accessible, which is nearly never an acceptable option for historians.   If the AHA really wants to keep up with the inevitable future, it needs first to change the policies at AHR.  The results, I predict, would help facilitate the transition to other models for history publishing.

The third thing that open access is not is just a business model.  In all the debates about which form of OA is best and how each form can be financed, we can lose sight of the fact that more than how we divide up a pot of money is at stake here.  Open access is also a statement about the values of scholarship; an attempt to introduce more transparency into the process of research and to encourage greater participation in its creation, financing, and evaluation.  Which gets me back to better metrics for assessing the quality and impact of scholarship.  The movement called AltMetrics is one of the most exciting thing about open access; it is a chance to use new tools to study the impact of specific articles on a more granular level, yet across a much wider field.

At Duke, we are very excited to have one of the pioneers in the move toward AltMetrics, Jason Priem, who co-founded the ImpactStory project, coming to speak in our Library for Open Access week.  Jason will talk on October 22 on “Altmetrics and the decoupled journal: an endgame for Open Access.”  His talk is described here.  Jason’s lecture is open to the public, and we hope many people — anyone with an interest in where the future of scholarship is headed and how we can break out of the cumbersome and unreliable system of evaluation that has accreted over the years — will attend.

How do you recognize a catastrophe?

When a financial analyst uses the term “catastrophic” in regard to the impact of open access on publishing giant Reed Elsevier, it is bound to attract some attention.  In a September 10, 2012 report from the firm Sanford Bernstein, senior analyst Claudio Aspesi did just that, and the reaction has been predictable.  “Catastrophe” has been in every headline (including mine!), from those that seem a little gleeful at the idea of bad things happening to the publishing company so many academics love to hate, to those that wish to defend the conglomerate.

Thanks to the kind permission of Mr. Aspesi, the complete report can be accessed here.

It is worth noting how the word is actually used in Aspesi’s report.  In assessing the overall prospects for Reed Elsevier, Aspesi notes that they are very dependent on the high profit margins at Elsevier, the academic publishing arm, so that a reduction in those profits might be “catastrophic” for the parent company.  He then goes on to explain why open access, specifically gold open access with the anticipated shift from subscription-based revenues to article processing fees (APCs), seems to threaten that high profit margin.  In the past, Aspesi has recommended that Reed Elsevier should spin off other parts of its company to reduce its exposure; a call that the company has rejected.

The bottom line for investors in the Berstein report is that the company rates Reed Elsevier to “underperform,” and pegs the target stock price at $6.45.  As this comparison report shows, other analysts put the target stock price somewhat higher.

To me the most interesting part of the report is its discussion of where article processing fees for gold open access journals are likely to go.

The fundamental conclusion in Aspesi’s report is that for Elsevier to maintain its current revenue through a complete transition from subscriptions to APCs — for that transition to be “revenue neutral” for Elsevier — the APCs charged to each author for publishing in an Elsevier journal would have to increase about 70%,  from current levels (for open access) at about $3000 per article to about $5,145 per article.  Aspesi does not think the market would bear this increase, and in that I think he is surely correct.

This discussion of APCs is fascinating, and there are several nuances we can add to it.  First, Aspesi notes that an option for Elsevier to maintain revenue in the OA transition without raising APCs this high would be to publish more articles.  The move to online certainly makes this possible, but the option has significant drawbacks, especially for a firm that depend heavily on its “brand” (as do university tenure and promotion committees).  Another possibility would be to recognize that not all journals are equal and charge differential APCs, based on the desirability of publishing in that particular title.  This raises the possibility that scholars would begin to shop around for journals with lower APCs for those articles that are not accepted into the top-tier journals.  We have not had much competition in the area of scholarly publishing in the past, but as different publishers charge different APCs, and those fees might even, perhaps, vary within one publisher’s titles, this possibility of competition, where cost and reputation are balanced together in the decision about where to publish, could grow.

In explanation of his conclusion that even with higher APCs it would be difficult for Elsevier to maintain its high revenues, Aspesi cites a simple fact — in the OA world, journal bundling would no longer be possible.  At present, Elsevier and others are able to sell lower-readership journals as part of “big deals” and at no additional cost to the company.  The OA world, however, imagines that each journal would have to stand on its own bottom, with revenue dependent on how desirable publication in that particular title is.  Aspesi’s discussion of what OA “big deals” might look like — various models for offering universities better pricing or “all you can eat” agreements for open access publishing — is fascinating but concludes that it would be very difficult to reach such deals and that they would not solve the problem of needing to increase APCs to cover costs.

One additional problem with increasing APCs for Elsevier journals, which returns to the issue of competition among journals, is the likelihood of downward pressure on APCs just as the transition would seem to force established traditional publishers to raise them.  The growth of OA megajournals like PLoS One, which already charges a much lower APC for articles it publishes than Elsevier does for its “sponsored articles,” may create such downward pressure.  So might some of the new models for open access, like eLife, which is supported by research funders and will not charge APCs, or PeerJ, which is building a membership model for OA.

The key to this analysis, and the problems it poses for Elsevier — whether catastrophic or not — is the cost per article.  Aspesi bases all of his projections on the assumption that it costs about $3,200 for Elsevier to publish each article, or, more significantly, $1200 per article submitted (850,000 submitted articles versus 316,000 published).  Many fully OA journals do not have such high costs, which is the reason they can charge lower APCs.  Aspesi acknowledges that Elsevier may be an expensive organization to run (not run on a “shoestring,” he says), but does not explore how or if those costs per article could be reduced.  Yet it seems to me that that is the key for survival for traditional publishers if they are to weather the transition to open access.

We can experiment with as many different pricing and funding models as we like, and I hope there are a lot, but we fundamentally need to have a conversation about how much it costs to publish a single scholarly article.  Those costs have been hidden in the byzantine structure of subscription prices and bundling, especially from the larger publishers.  That model has allow great opacity about actual costs, and for years universities have accepted that situation, which has now become clearly unsustainable.  But as we make the transition to open access, and gold OA plays a large part in the new paradigm, it will be harder and harder to avoid being open and honest about how much scholarly publishing really costs, and how some groups seem to be able to do it for so much less.

Wormwood gets a job

In his classic book The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis imagined the correspondence between Wormwood, a young apprentice demon, and his uncle, an older and more experienced tempter named Screwtape.  Uncle Screwtape advises Wormwood on how best to corrupt human kind, and the book has become beloved as a kind of reverse moral theology.  One can learn a lot about human foibles and weaknesses by reading how Screwtape and Wormwood conspire to exploit those weaknesses and lead humans ever deeper into corruption.

But what if Wormwood took a job?  As an academic publisher?  What would Screwtape advise him to do?  How best could he sow fear, uncertainty and doubt?  How best to exploit the weaknesses and vanities of academic authors and the hand-wringing timidity of librarians?  In this vision of the correspondence between Uncle Screwtape and the newly-employed Wormwood, Amherst College Librarian Bryn Geffert imagines that they would hit upon pretty much exactly the practices we actually see today.  His reworking of The Screwtape Letters was published as an essay in Inside Higher Education, and I link to it here because it really is too good to miss — deadly accurate and very funny.

Interesting, I think, to compare the correspondence between Wormwood and Screwtape with this actual dialogue about academic publishing going on The Economist website about whether and to what degree academic publishers add value to the work they sell.  I wonder if we will see similar arguments on both sites, the fictional parady and the serious debate.

Thanks to my friend Gary Draught for pointing out Geffert’s essay on his blog about Open Access called Alpha Omega.

Lions and tiger and bears, OA, or, scaring the children, part 1

Earlier this week I had the delicate task of replying to a researcher who had applied for funding for open access publication fees and telling her that our COPE fund could not be used to support her article.  The reason was that it was to be published in a journal that did not meet two of our basic criteria.  In order to ensure that our limited funds are well-spent, we will only fund article processing fees for journals that are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals and published by members of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.  These criteria may be imperfect surrogates for quality, but they have served us well in striving to be sure that we support high-quality, sustainable OA publishing efforts.

Because we have these criteria, there was an objective reason for our decision to deny this particular application, since the journal did not meet either of the requirements I just mentioned.  But I felt obligated to say more, so I forwarded the researcher a link to a discussion of whether or not the publisher in question was a “predatory” OA operation.  The concerns were real, although the article did not ultimately decide whether the problems it listed were the result of an awkward start up or intentional deception.  I told the researcher that she might consider a different venue, and I worried about her reply because I had been rather pushy, I thought.

The reply I received was both a relief and a surprise.  The researcher thanked me for my concern, said that she understood the decision about funding, and clearly indicated her intention to proceed with the publication as planned.  Her response got me thinking about the whole notion of predatory open access publishing.  How, I wondered, should libraries especially, when they administer OA funds, think about the predatory problem?

First, I think libraries are right to raise the issue.  We have always had a role in helping students and even faculty evaluate the quality of various publications, and doing so is an obligation when we are making purchase or other funding decisions, since we are obligated to spend carefully the funds our institutions entrust to us.  I really like the warning, couched in a modest and restrained tone, found in this blog post the University of Buffalo Libraries.  We should not be condemning all open access publishing, or otherwise shouting about the predators all around us, but we do need to answer inquiries honestly and spend our monies wisely.

Which brings me to a second reflection.  “Predatory” publishing is not exclusively an open access problem, and the problems included in that over-used phrase actually run the gamut from genuine attempts to defraud people to simple mismanagement.  Before there were OA journals there were journals published in traditional fashion that were merely shills for certain industries or which otherwise had unacknowledged selection criteria that conflicted with scholarly quality.  The victims of these types of journals were unwary libraries, who purchased subscriptions that ultimately ill-served their patrons and wasted scarce resources.

In an online age, criteria that are well-established in libraries for avoiding these predatory toll-access journals now must be shared more widely because researchers may unwittingly spend research funds on equally low-quality OA journals.  But to call this an open access problem is to blind ourselves to its full scope and is, I fear, often motivated more by the desire to bring OA itself into disrepute, to “scare the children,” as I like to call it, than it is by a desire to protect the entire system of scholarly communications.  We should not allow FUD (fear, uncertainty & doubt), which is often spread by institutions that are trying to preserve the problem to which they see themselves as the solution (to paraphrase Clay Shirky), to narrow our vision of a sustainable system of scholarly publishing.  The problem we  should be addressing is predatory publications, OA and subscription-based, and publishing ethics across the board.

One reason I think this point is so important is because of the danger inherent in a wide-spread panic over predatory OA journals.  The first source that alerted me to the potential problems with the publisher I was investigating earlier this week was a version of Jeffrey Beall’s list of predatory Open Access publishers.  In the particular case the concerns expressed there were, I think, fully justified.  But the version of the list I stumbled across (and which I cannot now locate) was, in my opinion, over-inclusive.  It included, for example, the publisher Hindawi.  I note that none of the versions I can find this morning do include that publisher; I hope they have been removed from all such lists.  My own opinion is that Hindawi is a perfectly legitimate publishing operation and it is one with which our researchers publish often and sometimes repeatedly.

As long as Hindawi meets our criteria for COPE funding, and it currently does, I will defer to the judgment of our authors when they choose to publish in those journals.  And I will continued to be afraid that the hue and cry over predatory OA publishing will tar perfectly legitimate operations.  The reason given  for concern over Hindawi on the list I saw was that they publish “too many” journals.  This is a highly subjective criteria, and it is really a legacy from older, print-based publishing.  So I repeat, we  should make our decisions about quality on the basis of neutral criteria that can be applied to any business model and not allow the legitimate concern over predatory practices to become a weapon used against only a single publishing option.

Finally, I think that there is a role here for deference to researchers, who are likely to know best what form of publishing suits their needs.  It is perfectly possible that the advantages of open access publishing or any other particular publishing venue will, in the minds of individual researchers, simply outweigh some of the concerns we might express about a publisher, especially when those concerns are subjective or in dispute.  The speed of research dissemination and the impact advantage that authors get from open access may make it a lot easier to overlook purely administrative problems, which probably plague any publishing enterprise in its first few years.  The authors themselves, who know their disciplines best, of course, and also have the responsibility to manage their own careers, should ultimately decide where they want to publish, as the researcher I conversed with this week did.  We need objective criteria and frank communication about real problems and concerns when we are expending the limit funds of our institutions.  But that is very different from telling researchers that the cannot publish somewhere, which we should never do, in my opinion.  It is also quite different from a panic or a witch-hunt or a FUD-fest, which will not serve anyone well.

How do you know?

It is hardly a surprise that my last few posts, dealing as they do with the economics of distributing scholarship and the potential impact of taking the issue of sustainability seriously across the board, would generate a good deal of criticism.  My usual response to critical comments is to simply approve them for posting and let the criticism stand so that readers can make up their own minds.  But there is one comment I do wish to respond to.  Interestingly, it was not one that was posted to my blog at all, although it was dealing with my post reporting success on the White House petition for public access to taxpayer-funded research and criticizing the report from the Association of Learned, Professional and Society Publishers about the alleged impact of such policies.

The discussion in question was forwarded to me by a colleague, and was taking place on an e-mail list to which I do not subscribe (so I cannot post a link here).  The specific challenge to which I want to respond related to my assertion that public access to scholarly articles is not the reason why libraries cancel journal subscriptions.  A former publishing executive, in a longer e-mail, asked how I knew this and accused me of making an unsupported assertion.  It is a fair question, and I am happy to report on how I know that public or open access is not the principal, or even a significant, driver of journal cancellations; doing so gives me the opportunity to link to a couple of valuable resources.

I know that public access is seldom, if ever, considered by librarians when dealing with subscription cancellations, first, because I have been a librarian for over twenty years and have been involved in or aware of a large number (larger than I would like) of cancellation processes.  Never once have I heard a librarian say “we can cancel that one because all the contents are available on various websites.”  First, that would almost never be true.  Second, deciding on that basis would not be serving our patrons’ needs, which is what we strive to do even when our budgets contract.

The second reason I know that public access is not a big factor in journal cancellations is because I recently read the report prepared by Elliot Maxwell for the Committee for Economic Development on The Future of Taxpayer-Funded Research: Who Will Control Access to the Results?  In that report, Maxwell takes a sustained and carefully documented look at many of the claims about the disasters that would befall for-profit publishing based on the National Institutes of Health public access mandate.  His overall conclusions are, first, that there is no evidence that such policies have adversely impacted the STM publishers who complained so vociferously about them and have twice tried to push legislation to have them reversed. Maxwell makes two salient points.  First, it is increasing prices, coupled with flat library budgets, that account for any rising rate of cancellations (which is the same point I made in my blog post).  And second, that at the same time they were predicting disaster to policy makers, for-profit STM publishers were painting a more glowing picture of the future to financial analysts about the prospect of a return to 4-5% growth rates as we move past the economic downturn.  As Maxwell says, “the last four years [he is referring to 2007 – 2011, a period which actually includes the worst of the downturn] have been marked by an increase in both the number and subscription prices of STM journals.” (p. 15)  While this may not be good news for libraries, it certainly casts doubt on the gloom and doom being forecast if public access mandates grow.  And it is further evidence that such mandates do not lead, contrary to the ALPSP report, directly to library cancellations.

Finally, the best evidence of the real reasons behind journal subscription cancellations is a more detailed survey commissioned by the publishing industry itself.  One of the problems with the ALPSP report is, as I said, that the question it asked was too vague and lacked context.  As it turns out, the Publishers Communication Group did a larger survey of cancellations between 2007 and 2011 that asked librarians about actual decisions they had made, rather than posing a hypothetical question.  When asked why they made a particular decision to cancel a specific journal, the thousands of librarians queried listed four principal reasons — budget cuts, low usage, faculty recommendations and the desire to end subscriptions to the same content in different formats (cancelling print to focus on electronic access).  These four reasons where cited for over 60% of the cancellations, while free public access was mentioned less than 5% of the time.

So this is why I think I know that public access does not directly lead to library journal cancellations.  But this is really a side-issue.  As I said in the original post, even if public access reaches a scale in which it does imperil journal subscriptions, that does not mean we should not pursue it.  The evidence for the value of open access is becoming overwhelming, and the claims that it will harm scientific research (as opposed to for-profit publishing) or prove unsustainable are increasingly easy to refute.  If I had my way (and I seldom do), the conversations about scholarly communications would move forward based on three broad principles:

  1. Open access is beneficial for researchers, for scholarship and for society.  We should be looking for ways to move toward more openness, not resisting those movements at every turn.
  2. Sustainability is a valid question for all methods of distributing the results of research.  It is unfair to complain that digital or open access models are not sustainable, but to ignore evidence of the same problem (such as the financial difficulties that led to the decision to close the University of Missouri Press) in regard to traditional publishing models.
  3. Libraries are not (necessarily) seeking the end of publishing as we have known it, but they are seeking better ways to use their budgets to support teaching and research.  The ideal situation would be a genuine effort amongst all the stakeholders to find the most efficient and sustainable ways to disseminate scholarship, and the partnerships between researchers, institutions, scholarly societies, publishers and libraries that will best move that goal forward.

How to say goodbye to a University Press

Ever since the University of Missouri announced on May 24 that it would end its subsidy of the University of Missouri Press, which seems to indicate its imminent closure, it has been interesting to listen to the reactions.  As Jennifer Howard says in her piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education, the response to this decision has been rather quiet, compared to howls of protests heard about earlier, similar decisions.  But there are three types of comments in reaction to the announced closure that I have heard, and each, I think, misses the point to some degree.

First, nearly all of those who have criticized the decision do so on the basis of the fine books that the University of Missouri Press has published over its 50 plus years in business.  The Press has published the collected works of Langston Hughes, Harry Truman and Mark Twain, for example.  This is a distinguished history of which the University should be proud.  But these books will continue to exist even after the Press ceases operations, and accomplishments in the past are not the point.  The question is whether or not the Press is capable of matching those accomplishments in the future.  The University seems to have determined that it is not.  There will surely be high-quality books in the future, but they will have to find other publishers and, perhaps, different platforms.

Second, some of the critics of the decision have suggested that it is foolish to close the Press to save such a small amount of money — the $400,000 per year that the University has been giving the Press for some time to cover its operating deficit.  But the question should not be how much money, but what value is returned on the money spent.  For its $400,000, the University sees about 30 books published each year, which means each title is subsidized at a cost of over $13,000.  These are expensive books from the University’s point of view, I imagine, and if this option is contrasted , for example, with the possibility of supporting three new tenured positions in literature, the value proposition looks quite different.

One rhetorical move that is very common in these debates is to contrast the small amount of press subsides with the high salaries of football coaches on the same campus.  While it has emotional appeal, this is a dangerous strategy because it highlights the value issue.  For better or worse, universities are mostly convinced that they see a significant return on investment from athletics; some even argue in many cases that these programs are self-supporting and return revenue to the institutions.  Demanding that universities take money from athletic programs to support presses may seem to have a certain high-brow appeal, but it emphasizes that some university presses cannot support themselves and do not provide, apparently, sufficient support to the universities’ missions either.  [A great deal more data about university sports subsidies and their relationship to library budgets can be found in this Inside Higher Ed essay by John V. Lombardi.]

In her book Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology and the Future of the Academy, Kathleen Fitzpatrick documents how university presses began their lives as places to publish the work done at their parent universities.  Only after a period of time did they begin to demand autonomy to broaden their lists and retain their profits (see pp. 175-187).  If they now are asking once again to be supported by those parent universities, presumably they must once again show how they support the specific mission of the parent.  If they do not do that, the return on investment is inevitably going to seem insufficient.

Finally, there is one other reaction to the Missouri announcement that misses the point, I think.  In his Chronicle blog post on The Consequences of Closing University Presses, Frank Donoghue moves very quickly from mourning the lose to asserting that digital publishing is not the solution for university presses.  Donoghue cites a ten-year old quote from Jenefer Crewe of Columbia University Press about how publishing costs are mostly due to human labor, so that digitally published books would probably lose as much money as printed ones do.  This is hardly a comforting thought, and does little to make the case that universities should continue to support the traditional model, whether the books are published digitally or on paper.  Indeed, it reminds me of the much older quote from Chester Kerr, long-time Director of Yale University Press, who said this back in the Sixties about university presses:

We publish the smallest editions at the greatest cost, and on these we place the highest prices, and then try to market them to people who can least afford them.  This is madness.

So it seems that we have known for years that the business of publishing small editions of beautiful academic books was unsustainable.  Even if digital publishing cannot reduce labor costs, surely it can reduce some of the expense of printing a book.  I wish some one would tell us what percentage of the costs really are printing, shipping, marketing and storage, so that universities could begin to develop new models based on solid numbers.  And Crewe’s speculation includes costs for infrastructure that are surely lower today then they were ten years ago, as well as for “selling subscriptions to libraries,” which might not be necessary if we think more broadly about the dissemination of scholarship.

The overall lesson here, I think, is that we need a broader conversation about how to distribute scholarship.  Neither the traditional press model nor an entirely open access digital solution is likely to be THE answer, although each will almost certainly be part of the answer.  Not all traditional academic publishers will survive, which is a reality both sad and necessary.  Nor will all digital publishing experiments survive.  But in both cases, some will, and as we move forward the best alternative is to be very transparent about costs, quality, service and value, and to be open to having diverse options striving, and sometimes thriving, side-by-side.

Saying the right things, then doing them

It is a sign of how behind I am in my reading that over lunch last week I finally got around to reading the speech/blog post by Kathleen Fitzpatrick about “Giving it Away: Sharing and the Future of Scholarly Communications.”  It is an  eloquent statement about how open access and the sharing of scholarship is really simply an extension of the core values of academia.  In the process of making that point, however, Fitzpatrick, who is Director of Scholarly Communications for the Modern Language Association, covers a lot of very practical ground, and the speech brims with passages that elegantly express what many of us wish we had said.

There are three points I want to pull out from Fitzpatrick’s talk, because they are relevant to what else I want to talk about:

First, she very neatly expresses the key point about dissemination of scholarship in a digital age when she writes that “Open access … is the cornerstone of the scholarly project: scholarship is written to be read and to influence more new writing.”  She goes on to quote the Budapest Open Access Initiative to the effect that the very old tradition of scholars sharing the fruits of their research without payment has now converged with a new technology, the Internet, to permit much greater impact at lower cost.  Access barriers that were necessary in the age of printed works simply are not needed any longer, and it is now more possible than ever to “share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich.”

Second, Fitzpatrick makes a powerful argument that open access is not a threat to the humanities, but may be their best hope.  She directly addresses the fear of a public who are often scornful of much of humanistic scholarship, which sometimes leads scholars to think about their audience as only a select group of fellow specialists.  To this reaction she replies,

 Closing our work away from non-scholarly readers, and keeping our conversations private, might protect us from public criticism, but it can’t protect us from public apathy, a condition that is, in the current economy, far more dangerous.

Improved access and impact, in short, are  good things for both individual scholars and, ultimately, their disciplines.

Finally, Fitzpatrick also addresses the complaint that open access business models are not sustainable.  She returns, by way of a response, to the argument Larry Lessig made some time ago that in the digital age it is not content that will be marketable as such, but services created around content that will be freely available.  Since Lessig outlined this “freemium” model, its success has been underscored many times, by companies like Red Hat, Dropbox and WordPress.

This last point in particular was in my mind when I heard, shortly after reading the speech, that the MLA was planning to change its publication agreement with authors in order to allow them to retain their copyright and to self-archive their final manuscripts in open access repositories.  It is great to see the largest of scholarly societies not only say the right things, but to put the values they espouse, which are, as Fitzpatrick reminds us, the basic values of the scholarly endeavor, into practice.  According to this article about the announcement in Inside Higher Ed, the immediate response to this change from literary scholars has been very positive.  And my favorite quote from that article reinforces Fitzpatrick’s discussion of providing services rather than trying to monopolize content.  In response to fears that self-archiving would undermine journal subscriptions, the MLA’s Executive Director said this:

We believe the value of PMLA is not just the individual article, but the curation of the issue. PMLA regularly includes thematic issues or issues where articles relate to one another. While there will be value in reading individual articles, that does not replace the journal. Further, the individual articles posted elsewhere could attract interest to the journal.

The MLA’s announcement, I think, poses important propositions that the scholarly world should consider.  Time will tell how the move plays out, and, as a lawyer, I would like to see the text of the new agreement.  But at least we can consider these three positive statements, rather than their negative counterparts that we so often hear, as the foundation of conversation going forward:

  1. Open access is not only possible, but is even vitally important, in the humanities.
  2. Open access, especially in its “green” form of author self-archiving, is not a threat to scholarly societies.
  3. The value of organized publishing efforts is in the services they provide around the content, not in the content itself (which, of course, the publishers do not create).

In regard to the scholarly content created by academics, Fitzpatrick’s speech is a reminder that closed-access publishing actually diminishes the value of such works, because that value depends on more readers and greater impact.  Scholarship no one can read has no value at all, obviously.  With their new publication agreement, the MLA is launching an experiment in increasing the value of literary scholarship by returning control over it to the authors.  They, after all, are in the best position to make decisions about what forms of dissemination best serve their own interests and those of humanistic studies in general.

A success, and a long road ahead

Last night the We the People petition to encourage public access to the results of taxpayer-funded research reached and exceeded its goal of 25,000 signatures, so we should expect a response from the White House.  Thank you all who signed the petition!  It is impressive to reach the goal in only half the allotted time.

If you have not signed, please do so anyway.  The more signatures on the petition the clearer it will be that this is an issue the White House should embrace during this election year.  And an ever-growing list of signatures will also help shape the response; we want substantive action here, not simply assurances of further study.

It is probably simply coincidence that on Friday the UK Publishers Association released a report purporting to show that public access to research articles after a six-month embargo, which is a move being considered by the seven Research Councils UK would result in large-scale subscription cancellations,  A press release linking to the report is here.  The timing of the report is clearly intended to influence the RCUK; indeed, a short comment on the Publisher’s Association website takes an extremely Chicken Little approach to the report, assuring policy makers that a six-month embargo from the RCUK would “cause publisher collapse.”

Public access advocates have been asserting for a while that the harm predicted by publishers if taxpayers could read the results of research they funded was overblown.  So now the Publishers Association has offered us evidence of a sort.  But there are a couple of problems with the report that should prevent policy makers and the public from accepting its assertions too readily.  And even after acknowledging that the report probably claims to prove too much, we might still ask, “so what.”

One problem with the report is that it is based on an excessively simple survey.  A single question was sent to 950 librarians, with 210 replies.  The question was just this: “If the (majority of) content of research journals was freely available within 6 months of publication, would you continue to subscribe?”  The problem, of course, is that there is insufficient context for librarians to make a reasoned response to this broad question.  What is a “majority?”  How available, and searchable, would these articles be?  And continue to subscribe to what?

This last question is particularly important, because the Publishers Association lumped together those responses that said they would cancel everything, which is a very small number, with those who said they would cancel some journals.  The two percentages are simple combined in the press release that announces impending disaster.  But surely the publishers realize that some cancellations are going to happen regardless of public access, due to their own pricing policies.  Libraries simply cannot continue to subscribe to everything when the prices of packages continue to rise at around 6% while library budgets shrink or remain flat.  Whether those cancellations are selective or devastating really has more to do with how publishers manage their bundling.  But public access is not the primary driver of cancellations, it is excessive price increases.

It is instructive that the report acknowledges that “more than one” librarian objected to the simplicity of the question and tried to provide a more nuanced reply.  In those cases we are told that the responses were “carefully assessed” in order to decide which broad category to put them in.  In other words, attempts to introduce nuance, and no doubt especially to discuss bundling and price increases, were dismissed in order to jam the replies into predetermined categories constructed to point to impending doom.

So it appears that the question was too broad, attempts by respondents to be more specific were brushed aside, and then different answers (some, inevitable, cancellations v. sweeping cancellations) were combined to create a picture of disaster with which to frighten policy makers.  But even if we acknowledge the flaws in this study, it is also useful to ask whether the result it predicts would really be a disaster.

The place to begin is with the recognition that neither libraries nor policy makers have an obligation to preserve a particular business model just because it has existed for a while, if it is not able to support itself in the face of rapid technological change.  To say that scholarship will dry up if some publishers go out of business is simply not true; scholarship will continue and it will find new ways, and likely more efficient ones, to reach those who want or need to read and use it.  This is already happening, which is why the publishers are so frightened in the first place.  Transformational change is coming, and if publishers cannot find a way to adapt, we should not worry over much, at least not to the point of failing to experiment with new options.  Certainly we should not let the prospect of traditional publishing becoming a smaller segment of the overall picture of scholarly communications dissuade us from adopting policies that will ultimately benefit researchers, students and the public.

The Publishers Association links this study to an argument that the only form of open access that should be encouraged is “Gold” OA, in which (sometimes) a fee is paid by the author in order for the work to be free for access for all readers.  Certainly fully open access journals, which is the real meaning of gold OA, have an important role to play in the future.  But note that only some of them are supported by author-side fees.  The new journal eLife, which hopes to rival Science and Nature, is supported by research funders and will not change publication fees.  And these kinds of fully OA journals are quite different, one suspects, from what the Publishers Association means by Gold OA.  They are most likely referring to open access to individual articles for which a special fee has been paid, while the other contents of the journal as a whole remain behind a subscription barrier.

In short, in their “embrace” of gold open access the Publishers Association is asking the public to pour more money into the inefficient system they have created, not less.  Gold OA will be part of the short term future, I believe, which is the only future we can dare to predict.  Green OA, including the kind of public access that both the White House and the RCUK are considering, will also be a part of the future, and is likely to prove the more sustainable option.  But the hybrid OA model on which the publishers want to pin their futures must be only a transitional step toward full gold OA; it is not a sustainable approach for even the short-term long haul.

Lobby the White House!

Admit it.  You seldom get a chance to lobby the White House, do you?  Even if you write lots of letters on topics of public interest, most of them go to newspapers or to your local representatives.  How often do you really get to bend Barak’s ear?  Here is your chance.

The White House has a petition program.  Anyone can begin a petition, and it becomes visible and searchable on the WH site if 150 people sign it.  If 25,000 people sign a petition in 30 days, the White House pledges that that petition will be circulated to appropriate officials (no, I cannot really guarantee that the President will read it) and an official response made public.  Although 25,000 signatures does not sound too hard, most petitions do not come close.

On May 21 a petition went public that asks the White House to act to make the articles that arise from Federally-funded research — that is research you and I pay for — publicly accessible.   Here is the text of the petition:

We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.

The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.

As many will recall, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy did a public request for information on this topic, its second and more detailed such request, at the end of 2011.  A report based on the responses to the RFI has been prepared and is circulating within the White House.  This petition is designed to ask the White house to act on that report, which we believe is favorable to the idea of public access.  In only two and a half days the petition has collected half of the necessary signatures, but it is important to keep the momentum going; it will be the 24,999th signature that will be hardest to get.

The technology blog Slashdot has this to say in support of the petition:

“You paid for it, you should be able to read the results of publicly funded research. The National Institutes of Health have had a very successful open access mandate requiring that the results of federally funded biomedical research be published in open access journals. Now there is a White House petition to broaden this mandate. This is a jobs issue. Startups and midsize business need access to federally funded technology research. It is a health care issue, patients and community health providers need access, not a few scientists in well funded research institutes, and even wealthy institutions like Harvard are finding the prices of proprietary journals unsustainable.”

Note that this quotation links to the Harvard Library Faculty Advisory Council’s memo to the faculty about journal pricing and suggests that the petition is one way to address the unsustainability of the current journal system.  I cannot help noting, however, that the Harvard group did not say, in that memo, that Harvard could not afford the journals; they said something more fundamental.  They said they were not getting sufficient value for the money they were spending under the current system and that their (substantial) resources could be better spent elsewhere.  This petition, like the Harvard statement, is about increasing the value, the return on investment, that the public gets from its support of scientific research.

For an entertaining argument in favor of public access, here is a fun video from Access2Research.

If you are a librarian and believe that the current system of disseminating research and scholarship is unsustainable, I hope you will read this blog post from the ACRL and consider signing this petition.

If you are a researcher and want faster, better scientific information and collaboration, I hope you will consider signing this petition.

If you signed the “Cost of Knowledge” Elsevier boycott, I hope you will consider signing this petition.

If you are a student and want to keep the costs of your education from rising even faster, I hope you will consider signing this petition.

If you are a businessman or entrepreneur and want to encourage innovation and job growth, I hope you will consider signing this petition.

If you are a taxpayer and believe you should get what you paid for, I hope you will consider signing this petition.

Of groundhogs and sequoias

Lately my life has had a certain resemblance to that of Bill Murray in the movie “Groundhog Day.”  Like Murray, I seem to be repeating the same pattern in my daily work life over and over.

The basic pattern is this.  I am asked, often with a colleague or two, to meet with a faculty member or group of faculty members.  Sometimes this is at my home institution, and sometimes it takes place on a campus I am visiting.  Wherever they happen, the conversations follow predictable lines.  Yes, we agree, the current system for publishing scholarly articles, dominated by a small handful of commercial giants, is inequitable for authors and does not serve the best interests of scholarship.  Yes, open access offers many benefits for authors, institutions and society.  From there we usually begin to detail the various ways that open access can be accomplished, including the challenges and advantages associated with each model.  We always have the sustainability conversation, in which I try to convey the sense that we are involved in lots of experiments right now but the one thing that seems pretty clear is that the traditional model of scholarly publishing is itself not sustainable (which most folks realize).

Often the faculty authors and editors with whom we talk have specific horror stories to tell, specific ideas about how to get scholarly publishing on a better track, and specific worries about how the transition will be made.

In spite of the repetition, I enjoy these conversations. I learn a lot from hearing about the particular experiences of authors and editors, and about their notions of what a better system would look like.

There is another, more important reason that I do not resent having to have these discussions over and over again.  I constantly remind myself that the ideas about publishing and open access are beginning to filter down into our faculties and they are beginning to turn their attention to how to change the system.  This is a remarkable development, and it is a reminder that the 11,447 scholars who have signed the Cost of Knowledge pledge to boycott Elsevier (as of this writing) are really just the tip of an expanding iceberg.  Many others have not signed that pledge, which is often mistakenly assumed to be just for mathematicians, but have become more aware of the problem and, more importantly, ready to seek alternatives, because of that public campaign.

I think we have reached a point where we are no longer having to sell the idea of open access.  There is widespread acceptance that that is the way that all or most scholarship will be distributed in the near future.  The discussions we are having now focus on specific advantages of OA, like altmetrics, the mechanics of the transition, and the ways in which costs can be managed.

One specific question that arises in every conversation is how the promotion and tenure process will have to change as open access becomes the rule rather than an exception.  Part of the answer is to point out that several forms of open access are entirely compatable with the traditional evaluation techniques in P&T processes.  But as digital scholarship becomes the norm for many researchers, there is a growing awareness that P&T is going to have to change to take account new forms of scholarship.  It is not open access per se that will drive this change in P&T, but rather these new approaches to scholarship for which openness is an added benefit.

In this context I was delighted to see the recently released “Guidelines for Evaluating Work in the Digital Humanities and Digital Media” from the Modern Language Association (there is a story about the guidelines here).  To be perfectly honest, there is little in the Guidelines themselves that is groundbreaking; they are commonsense suggestions about how scholarship should be evaluated, with some really good, specific attention to uniquely online aspects.

What is important here is not so much what the Guidelines say as who is saying it.  It is very important that the MLA, one of the oldest and largest scholarly societies in the U.S., is taking notice of the changes that are happening in scholarly communications.  As with the faculty open access conversations, this is evidence that change is penetrating the academy broadly and deeply.  The revolution in scholarly communications will not, in the end, by accomplished by librarians; it will be accomplished by scholars, authors and their scholarly societies.  That those groups are beginning to notice the need for change and to engage in the debates about how to accomplish it is a significant step forward.

I say “revolution” with tongue in cheek here.  Perhaps some of us once expected a rapid conversion, a flipped switch that would change the scholarly publishing world to open access, but that is not going to happen.  Our world will be changed through many conversations, lots of experiments (some of which will not succeed), and the growing activities toward change of scholars, universities and societies.  I recently talked with a colleague who expressed some doubt whether a career in academic librarianship really made a difference, and I assured her that, in my opinion, we need to see ourselves as sequoia farmers.  We make small contributions and sometimes see very little growth.  But over time (and, in this case, place) the progress is substantial and the results can be gigantic.  And just occasionally — I think we are in one of those moments — we get to witness a growth spurt.