SUMMARY: Some publishers have suggested that because a 6-month embargo on Open Access self-archiving by authors is too long for researchers and too short for publishers, the FRPAA should instead pay publishers to provide the Open Access immediately. This is fine if the research funders have the extra cash to pay whatever price publishers are currently charging for this (it varies from under $500 to over $3000 today) or to impose a standardized cap on the price and pay that. But otherwise it makes more sense for authors to self-archive for themselves, at no cost, now, exactly as proposed by the FRPAA, and to allow the market to decide the price, if and when subscription revenues should ever prove unsustainable. There is no evidence at all of subscription revenue decline yet, as a consequence of self-archiving, even after 15 years in the fields where self-archiving has been practised the longest and effectively reached 100% years ago. The FRPAA should mandate that the deposit of all articles must be immediate (upon acceptance for publication), with only the Open-Access-setting (vs. Closed Access) open to embargo (capped at 6 months) from the 6% of journals that do not yet endorse immediate Open-Access-setting. Semi-automatized email-eprint requests made possible by the institutional repository softwares can provide for the needs of the researchers during the embargo period for articles in those journals.
(From Peter Suber's Open Access News)
Springer's unexpected response to FRPAA
Peter Suber: "I've learned --and Jan Velterop has confirmed-- that Springer has sent a letter to Sen. Susan Collins, chair of the Senate committee considering FRPAA, raising an unusual objection to the six-month embargo allowed by the bill. The letter argues that six months is too short to satisfy publishers and too long to satisfy researchers. In its place, Springer proposes a policy that would require full-text open access immediately upon publication --provided that the policy makes clear that publishing in peer-reviewed journals is an inseparable part of research and therefore that the funds for doing so (article processing fees) will be available to researchers as a special overhead on their publicly-funded research grants. The letter proposes that the new policy might be phased in after a short grace period to give publishers a chance to modify their business models."
The Federal Research Public Access Act (
FRPAA) proposes to mandate that all federally funded researchers must not only publish their research findings in journals (as they already must), but they must now also make all the peer-reviewed journal articles in which those findings are reported openly accessible (OA) to all the potential users of those findings -- by self-archiving them free for all on the web (within at most 6 months of publication).
A publisher (Springer) has now recommended to the sponsors of the FRPAA that because a 6-month embargo on self-archiving is too long for researchers and too short for publishers, the FRPAA should instead mandate
immediate self-archiving and pay the
publishers to do it in place of the authors. The recommendation does not mention the amount that the publishers should be paid, but currently publishers are charging between $500 and $3000 or more for making articles OA (Springer charges $3000).
I would like to make some comments on this suggestion. Please note that they contain some nested contingencies:
(1) If the federal funding agencies have the extra cash, and are willing to pay publishers whatever amount they ask today (or to impose a capped amount of their own), and if the FRPAA can be successfully passed as an immediate-OA mandate in this way (i.e., no embargo allowed), this would be a perfectly fine outcome -- acceptable to research and researchers as well as to publishers.
(2) If, however, the federal funding agencies do not have the extra cash to pay publishers the amount they ask today (or an acceptable capped amount), and/or if the FRPAA cannot be successfully enacted into law if burdened with a commitment to pay publishers the amount they ask today (or an acceptable capped amount) for OA, then the suggestion that FRPAA should be revised to do so is just another way to delay or doom the passage of the FRPAA, and should be ignored.
(3) The present version of the FRPAA does not propose to pay anyone anything: it merely mandates that federally funded research must be made OA by the fundee, by self-archiving it, within (at most) 6 months of publication, in the fundee's own institutional repository (or a central one).
(4) To date there is no evidence at all that self-archiving reduces publisher subscription revenues; and the two publishers whose authors have been self-archiving the longest and the most, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics, have both reported publicly that they have (4a) no detectable subscription declines and are (4b) unopposed to an immediate (no-embargo) OA self-archiving mandate.
(5) The objective, empirical way to test whether or not there is any truth to the hypothesis of some other publishers that self-archiving will reduce subscription revenue -- and the only way to find out how much and how fast it would reduce subscription revenue if ever it did so at all -- is to adopt the FRPAA mandate now (both it and variants of it have been debated, delayed and deferred for 3 years now, with no new information or evidence forthcoming) and then to monitor its outcome annually, making further adjustments only as and when there is evidence that they are necessary.
(6) It is quite true that a 6-month embargo is bad for research, which is conducted in order be immediately used and applied once it has passed peer review, and that in many rapidly moving fields the very earliest "growth tip" of research is the most important of all. But if an immediate no-embargo OA mandate cannot yet be agreed upon, an interim way to minimize that damage to research is to require immediate deposit and to allow only the date at which access to the deposited full text is set to Open Access (OA) to be delayed (for no more than 6 months) where necessary (Closed Access until then).
(7) 94% of journals already endorse setting access immediately to OA.
(8) For the remaining 6% of articles set to Closed Access, the article's bibliographic metadata will still be visible and accessible to all immediately, and the self-archiving repository software provides a semi-automatic feature for individual would-be users to request -- and authors to provide -- an individual eprint of the full text by email, almost instantly.
(9) This immediate-deposit/delayed-OA-setting compromise is the preferable one if the federal funding agencies do not have the extra cash, or are unwilling to pay publishers whatever amount they ask today (or to impose a capped amount of their own) to provide instant OA.
(10) At the moment, institutional subscriptions are paying the costs of peer review. If/when subscription revenues were indeed ever to decline to unsustainable levels because of institutional cancellations, the institutional windfall savings from the cancellations would themselves be a natural candidate source for covering the peer-review costs for the institution's own research output, rather than any arbitrary amount requested from federal research funders today -- especially as subscription decline would first generate pressure toward publisher cost-cutting, downsizing and readjustment to the new reality of OA publishing, and hence a more realistic, market-driven figure for the true costs of peer review (which publishers merely manage, whereas researchers themselves actually perform the refereeing itself for free).
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
