Open Access Archivangelism

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has launched "PRISM" (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine), an anti-OA lobbying organization, to counteract the accelerating growth of OA and the dramatic success of the pro-OA Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA) lobbying organization in the US and the EC Open Access Petition in Europe.

See Peter Suber's splendid, measured critique of PRISM's statements in Open Access News (more to come in Peter's September SPARC Open Access Newsletter [SOAN]).

The blogosphere is also on the case. (See especially the brilliant caricature of the publishing lobby's arguments here.) Unlike the pro-OA lobby, which has a huge and growing public support base worldwide, the anti-OA lobby is up against the problem that it has neither a public support constituency, nor any ethical or practical case to build one on. It is simply an industry trying to favor its corporate interests over the public interest without quite saying so. Hence PRISM is now applying, quite literally, the "pit-bull" tactics recommended to them by the PR firm of Eric Dezenhall, namely, to pretend (i) that OA represents government interference in both the corporate sector and the research sphere and (ii) that OA puts both peer-review and scientific quality at risk.

Although the bickering and blogging and spinning on this will be frenetic, the actual issues behind it are extremely simple:

(1) Open Access (OA) (free online access to peer-reviewed research) maximizes access to research findings. It thereby also maximizes the uptake, usage, and application of research findings, hence research productivity and progress.

(2) OA is therefore in the best interests of research, researchers, research institutions (universities), research funders (private and governmental), the vast R&D industry, and the tax-paying public that funds the research and the research institutions, and for whose benefit the research is being conducted.

(3) OA might, however, be in conflict with the best interests of the peer-reviewed journal publishing industry, as it might reduce their subscription revenues or even eventually force them to downsize and change their cost-recovery model from subscription charges paid by the user-institution to peer-review service charges paid by the author-institution. (So far none of this has happened, but with the growth of OA, it might.)

(4) OA can grow in two ways:

Gold OA: publishers can make research OA by becoming OA publishers -- by providing OA to their online versions and/or converting to the OA cost-recovery model -- or,

Green OA: Researchers and their institutions can make research OA by self-archiving their own peer-reviewed, published journal articles in their institutional or discipline-based repositories.

(5) Researchers' institutions and funders cannot mandate the transition of publishers to Gold OA, but they can mandate their own transition to Green OA.

(6) Hence it is these Green OA mandates, being adopted and proposed worldwide, that are the real target of the anti-OA lobby.

(7) The anti-OA lobby's argument against OA and OA mandates is that they represent (7a) government interference in private-sector industry and (7b) they will destroy peer-reviewed journals, peer-review, and the research quality that peer-review certifies.

(8) The reply is very simple:

(8a) Inasmuch as research is publicly funded, it is for the funders to decide the conditions under which that public money is spent;

(8b) it is likewise up to the universities to decide on the conditions under which their employees publish their findings;

(8c) peer review is done by researchers for free; publishers merely fund the management of the peer review process;

(8d) if and when subscription demand can no longer sustain the cost of managing peer review, that cost can be covered through a conversion to the Gold OA cost-recovery model, with the OA institutional repositories themselves providing all the access and the archiving, and the Gold OA journals merely managing the peer review and certifying its outcome with their name.

That's all there is to it: The online era has made possible an obvious benefit for research, and the publishing lobby is trying to resist adapting to it. What needs to be kept clearly in mind is that research is not conducted and funded as a service to the publishing industry, but vice versa.

Fortunately, the very openness of the online era is to the benefit of the pro-OA lobby, as the specious arguments of the anti-OA lobby can be openly exposed and answered rather than being left to be voiced solely in closed corridors (lobbies), where their obvious rebuttals cannot be promptly echoed in reply.

Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Open Letter to Research Councils UK: Rebuttal of ALPSP Critique.

________ (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration.

Harnad, S. (2005) Critique of ALPSP'S 1st Response to RCUK's Open Access Self-Archiving Proposal.

________ (2005) Rebuttal of STM Response to RCUK Self-Archiving Policy Proposal.

________ (2005) Applying Optimality Findings: A Critique of Graham Taylor's Critique of RCUK Policy Proposal.

________ (2006) Critique of EPS/RIN/RCUK/DTI "Evidence-Based Analysis of Data Concerning Scholarly Journal Publishing".

________ (2006) How to Counter All Opposition to the FRPAA Self-Archiving Mandate

________ (2006) Critique of AAP/PSP Critique of FRPAA Proposal

A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy

Guide for the Perplexed: Re: UK Select Committee Inquiry

Critique of PSP/AAP Critique of NIH Proposal

Critique of STM Critique of NIH Proposal

Critique of Stanford/HighWire Press Critique of NIH Proposal

Critique of PSP/AAP Critique of NIH Proposal

Critique of APS Critique of NIH Proposal

Please Don't Copy-Cat Clone NIH-12 Non-OA Policy!

Critique of Research Fortnight article on RCUK policy proposal

Not a Proud Day in the Annals of the Royal Society

Feedback on the Brussels EC Meeting on Open Access

The Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA) Mandate: Rationale and Model

Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum