Open Access Archivangelism

On the premise that the Article Accessibility problem is solved, there is no longer any Journal Affordability problem left. Let us suppose (and hope) that researchers' institutions and funders soon mandate, at long last, that their employees/fundees (or their assigns) do the pathetically small number of keystrokes it takes to self-archive all their final, peer-reviewed drafts in their own Institutional Repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication.

That will generate 100% Open Access (OA).

Once it is no longer true that any would-be user is unable to access an article because his institution cannot afford the journal in which it happens to have been published, there is no longer any Accessibility Problem. Librarians' annual agony over which journals to keep and which to cancel within the constraints of their finite serials budgets (never anywhere near enough to afford all published journals) will be over. They can purchase as many as they can afford from among those journals for which their users indicate that they would still quite like to have them in-house (whether out of desire for the paper edition or for online add-ons, or out of habit, sentimentality, loyalty, civic-mindedness or superstition): Nothing important hinges on the choice or the outcome once it is sure that no potential user is any longer doing without (hence no research or researcher is any longer needlessly losing impact because of access denial).

To ever have thought otherwise is simply to have conflated the Accessibility and Affordability problems: Accessibility was always what made Affordability a problem at all.

And before the inevitable, tedious question is asked about how the essential costs of peer-reviewed journal publishing will continue to be covered if/when subscriptions become unsustainable, please consult the prophets.

(Publishing will adapt, cutting the costs of the inessentials, downsizing to the essentials, possibly right down to peer-review service-provision alone; those irreducible essential costs will then be covered on the OA cost-recovery model, out of a fraction of the annual institutional windfall savings from the institutional journal cancellations. Till that income stream is released, however, OA Publishing is OA-Publicatio Praecox...)

Stevan Harnad
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/

Richard Poynder has done it again: In his latest essay "Open Access: Beyond Selfish Interests" he characteristically takes the OA debate and developments several layers deeper than the one at which most of the usual suspects customarily think and reason. Not that I agree with his (implicit) conclusions (implicit, because, being a carefully dispassionate journalist, he does not actually express his opinions, though he most definitely has them!).

But I won't do a critique, because his essay is just too good to harry with niggles. Read it and make up your own mind. But please remember that Richard is not a researcher, salaried by an institution and funded by a grant to write up his findings. In short, this is not OA writing, but writing from which the author endeavours to earn his living. Yet Richard is performing an invaluable service for OA, and for the history of research communication and publication. He is taking a big risk by blogging his writing instead of selling it to a publisher. I hope his grateful readers will do the right thing beyond selfish interests. (Otherwise we risk losing this splendid resource, which would be -- dare I see it -- rather like the tragedy of the commons!)

Stevan Harnad
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/