Open Access Archivangelism

"Disseminating research via the web is appealing, but it lacks journals' peer-review quality filter," says Philip Altbach in: Hidden cost of open access Times Higher Education Supplement 5 June 2008

Professor Altbach's essay in the Times Higher Education Supplement is based on a breath-takingly fundamental misunderstanding of both Open Access (OA) and OA mandates like Harvard's: The content that is the target of the OA movement is peer-reviewed journal articles, not unrefereed manuscripts. Professor Altbach seems somehow to have confused OA with Wikipedia.

It is the author's peer-reviewed final drafts of their just-published journal articles that Harvard and 43 other institutions and research funders worldwide have required to be deposited in their institutional repositories. This is a natural online-era extension of institutions' publish or perish policy, adopted in order to maximise the usage and impact of their peer-reviewed research output.

The journal's (and author's) name and track record continue to be the indicators of quality, as they always were. The peers (researchers themselves) continue to review journal submissions (for free) as they always did.

The only thing that changes with OA is that all would-be users webwide -- rather than only those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published -- can access, use, apply, build upon and cite each published, peer-reviewed research finding, thereby maximising its "impact factor." (This also makes usage and citation metrics Open Access, putting impact analysis into the hands of the research community itself rather than just for-profit companies.)

And if and when mandated OA should ever make subscriptions unsustainable as the means of covering the costs of peer review, journals will simply charge institutions directly for the peer-reviewing of their research output, by the article, instead of charging them indirectly for access to the research output of other institutions, by the journal, as most do now. The institutional windfall subscription savings will be more than enough to pay the peer review costs several times over.

What is needed is more careful thought and understanding of what OA actually is, what it is for, and how it works, rather than uninformed non sequiturs such as those in the essay in question.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum