Publishing Reform

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SUMMARY: Nature reports that Open Access (OA) journals are having trouble making ends meet. This is because institutional publication funds are currently tied up in subscription costs. What is urgently needed now is OA, to maximize research usage and impact. Immediate 100% OA can be reached via OA self-archiving mandates. If/when 100% OA self-archiving should ever generate institutional subscription cancellations, those same institutional windfall savings will be the natural way to pay for institutional OA publication costs. If/when there are signs that that is approaching, then would be the opportune time for journals to convert to OA publishing. Right now, there are no such signs, and it is OA that we need, urgently.

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Re: Butler, Declan (2006) Open-access journal hits rocky times. Nature 20 June 2006 doi:10.1038/441914a (See also Declan's Blog)

The reason Open Access Journals are having trouble making ends meet today is quite obvious: The funds for paying author-institution publication costs are already tied up in paying user-institution subscription costs.

Open Access (OA) itself is urgent, for research, researchers and the public that funds the research, because every day without OA means another day of needless loss in research usage and impact. But conversion to OA publishing is not urgent, indeed it is premature, while funds are already tied up in subscriptions.

What needs to be done now is for researchers, funders and institutions to mandate OA self-archiving -- i.e., require their researchers to deposit their published articles in their own OA Institutional Repositories, for the sake of maximizing the uptake, usage and impact of their research output. Self-archiving is a supplement to -- not a substitute for -- conventional subscription-based journal publishing.

If and when OA self-archiving should ever generate cancellation pressure on institutional journal subscriptions, then, and only then, need there be a conversion to OA Publishing. For then the institutional windfall savings from the cancellation of incoming subscriptions will be available to pay the costs of outgoing publication, which will be based on downsizing publishing to the essentials, such as peer review, cutting obsolete costs once the network of institutional repositories become the archivers and access-providers.

Right now, however, there is no sign of any cancellation pressure from self-archiving, even in the fields that have been practising it the longest (15 years in physics) and the subfields that already reached 100% OA some time ago. What is urgent now is to mandate OA self-archiving.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum