Open Access Archivangelism

As there is a concerted disinformation campaign now underway on the part of some (but not all) members of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) "PRISM" coalition, an anti-OA lobby faithfully following the high-priced pit-bull script that AAP purchased from corporate image trouble-shooter Eric Dezenhall in January 2007 for the express purpose of combatting Open Access, I would like to bring some simple home truths to the attention of all interested parties (for free):

(1) Peer-Reviewed Journal-Article Authors Give Journals Their Articles for Free: No Royalties. The authors of peer-reviewed journal articles, unlike all other authors, donate their articles to journal publishers for free, allowing the publisher to sell their articles for a (subscription) fee that goes exclusively to the publisher: Not a penny of royalty revenue, salaries or fees is sought or received by these authors (or their funders, or their employers) out of the total income that their publishers earn from selling their articles. This is not "work for hire." The only thing these authors ask in exchange for granting to their publishers the right to sell their articles is peer review, to ensure and certify their article's quality.

The authors' research and writings are funded by government research grants and/or by salaries from their employers (mostly universities).

(2) Peers Review for Free. The peers who review the papers that these authors submit to journals likewise donate their expertise and time for free. Not a penny of compensation for their services is sought or received by the peer reviewers (or their employers) from the journal publisher. The only thing the peers ask in return for donating their services to the journal is a fair management of the peer review process, in order to ensure and certify quality.

The peers' reviewing work and time are funded by salaries from their employers (mostly universities).

(3) Publisher Revenues from Institutional Subscriptions Are Currently Paying the Full Cost of Managing the Peer Review, Several Times Over. The cost of managing the peer review process is recovered by the journal publisher out of a small portion of the income earned from selling subscriptions to the paper and online edition of the journal (mostly to authors' institutions).

That is the status quo today: The costs of managing peer review are covered, many times over, by selling -- mostly to the authors' institutions -- paper and online access to the articles donated for free by the authors, with the peer review donated for free by the peers.

These authors, however (who are also the peers, as well as the users, and whose progress and careers depend on the uptake of their research by other author/researchers) have never been satisfied with leaving their research accessible only to those users whose institutions could afford subscription access to the journal in which it was published. In the paper era, if a would-be user lacked subscription access, they would write to the author to request a reprint, which the author would then mail to the requester, at the author's own expense.

Then email made it faster and cheaper to send eprints to requesters by email. And finally the web made it possible to self-archive the eprint in the author's institutional repository, making it openly accessible to all would-be users who could not afford access to the publisher's version, without the bottle-neck of an email exchange. This is called Open Access Self-Archiving or "Green OA."

The funder and university Green OA mandates that are the target of the anti-OA lobby are simply the effort on the part of researchers funders and universities to maximize the benefits of the research that they themselves have funded and salaried, by ensuring that all of it is deposited in an OA repository, freely accessible online to all those would-be users webwide who cannot afford paid access.

Sixty-two percent of journals have already endorsed this new means of maximizing access to research in the online era, while 38% still seek to block or embargo access. But this is not what the anti-OA lobbying is about, because the proposed and adopted funder and university Green OA mandates can allow access embargoes (with semi-automatized email eprint request buttons to tide over access needs during the embargo period).

The anti-OA lobbying is instead based on the remarkable (and alarming) claim that OA mandates will destroy peer review, and thereby scientific quality.

But just a little reflection should make not only the falsity but the self-servingness of this claim completely transparent:

(4) If Institutional Subscriptions Are Ever Cancelled, Peer Review Management Costs Will Be Paid Out of the Institutional Subscription Cancellation Savings. If and when institutional subscriptions were ever cancelled unsustainably as a consequence of Green OA, the cost of peer review could easily be paid for directly by institutions, on behalf of their employees, per paper submitted, out of just a fraction of the very same funds they have saved from their institutional subscription cancellations. All access and archiving would then be provided by the network of institutional OA repositories instead of the publisher, who would only provide the peer review. This is called "OA publishing" or "Gold OA."

The Gold OA cost-recovery model is premature today, when there is still a healthy demand for the paper edition and the publisher's online edition. But it is the natural and obvious answer to the question of what will pay for managing peer review if and when that demands disappears and subscriptions become unsustainable.

Hence what the anti-OA lobby is actually worrying about is the loss of their subscription revenues, not the loss of peer review. So far, however, there is no evidence that Green OA has caused any subscription cancellations at all. The demand for both the paper edition and the publisher's online edition are still healthy. But the real question is whether the demonstrable benefits of OA to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders and the general public are to be renounced in order to protect journal publishers from a possible risk to their revenue streams.

This is not about peer review at all, but about an industry trying to resist adapting to technological developments in the online era merely in order to maximize its own interests, at the expense of the public interest.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum