Open Access Archivangelism

Unfortunately, far too much of what is stated in "coglanglab's" well-meaning blog posting about Conyers' Bill H.R. 801 is simply incorrect, starting with its title:

"Congress Considers Killing Open-Access Journals"

No, the Conyers Bill H.R. 801 is not considering killing open-access journals; it is considering killing NIH's right to mandate that its fundees must deposit their published journal articles in an open-access repository -- articles that have been published, for the most part, in non-open-access journals. The Bill has nothing to do with open-access journals.

"A recent movement has led to the creation of open-access journals, which do not charge access fees. This movement has gained traction at universities (e.g., Harvard) and also at government agencies."

The "open-access journal movement" has indeed been gaining some traction, but this has next to nothing to do with either the Conyers Bill or the Harvard and NIH mandates, which have nothing to do with open-acesss journal publishing: Harvard and NIH mandate that faculty and fundees deposit their published journal articles in an open-access repository -- articles that are published, for the most part, in non-open-access journals.

"NIH recently required the researchers they fund to publish in journals which are either open-access or make their papers open-access within a year of publication."

No, the NIH did no such thing. It required the researchers they fund to deposit their published journal articles in an open-access repository -- articles published, for the most part, in non-open-access journals -- and to make those deposits openly accessible within a year of publication."

Fortunately for the for-profit journal system, Congress is considering H.R. 801, which would forbid NIH and other government agencies from implementing such policies."

The issue has nothing to do with for-profit vs. nonprofit journal publication. The publishers lobbying against the NIH policy include not only for-profit publishers but nonprofit publishers such as the American Chemical Society and the American Physiological Society.

"The conceit of the bill is that NIH is requiring researchers to give up their copyrights, though of course researchers hardly ever -- and, as far as I know, never -- retain the copyrights to their works. Publishers require the transfer of the copyright as a condition of publication."

The "conceit" of Conyers Bill H.R. 801 is that the government should not be allowed to require researchers to make their research open access even when the research has been supported by public funds because that could interfere with the publishers' right to make a return on their investment.

(The Conyers Bill will fail because the public investment in research is incomparably greater than the publisher's, because the government's contractual conditions on that funding predate any agreement the fundee makes with the publisher, and because repository deposit can be mandated even without requiring that access to the deposit be immediately made open access: The repositories' semi-automatic "Request a Copy" Button can tide over would-be users access needs during any embargo.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Reply to: Conyers, John (2009) A Reply to Larry Lessig. The Huffington Post. March 6, 2009.

Congressman John Conyers (D. Mich) is probably sincere when he says that his motivation for his Bill is not to reward contributions from the publishers' anti-OA lobby: He pretty much says up front that his motivation is jurisdictional.

Here are the (familiar, and oft-rebutted) arguments Rep Conyers refloats, but I think he is raising them less out of conviction that they are right than as a counterweight against the jurisdictional outcome he contests because it is his committee that he feels ought to have decided the outcome of the NIH Public Access Bill. (By the way, the original Bill was anything but secret as it made its way through the House Appropriations Committee, then the House, then the Senate, as Peter Suber's many OA News postings archived along the way will attest.)

Rep. John Conyers:
"[O]pponents [of mandating Open Access to publicly funded research] argue that, in reality, it reverses a long-standing and highly successful copyright policy for federally-funded work and sets a precedent that will have significant negative consequences for scientific research."

(1) Not a Copyright Policy: There is a longstanding federal policy of not allowing federal employees to transfer copyright for research that they do as part of their paid job. It would be quite natural, and no "reversal" at all, to extend this to federal fundees as well.

(2) A Self-Archiving Precondition: But in fact the NIH Public Access Policy does not even do that! It doesn't extend or reverse anything with respect to copyright. It simply requires NIH fundees to make their published articles OA as a (prior) condition of receiving NIH funding, by self-archiving their final drafts free for all online.

(3) Evidence of Positive Consequences: The actual consequences of self-archiving to date have all been positive ones, for research progress: enhanced visibility, access, uptake, usage, applications and impact for research findings.

(4) No Evidence of Negative Consequences: The "significant negative consequences" to which Mr. Conyers alludes (on the prompting of the publishing lobby) are the hypothetical possibility -- for which there so far exists no actual evidence whatsoever -- that OA self-archiving will cause subscriptions (largely institutional) to be cancelled catastrophically, making them unsustainable as the means of covering the costs of peer review.

(5) Subscription Collapse Would Itself Free the Institutional Windfall Savings to Pay for Peer Review: But the answer to that hypothetical conjecture is that if and when institutional subscriptions were ever to collapse unsustainably, the costs of peer review would be paid for out of the same institutions' self-same subscription cancellation savings -- per outgoing published article instead of per incoming subscribed journal (and with a lot of money saved all round, for products and services that would no longer need to be provided or paid for if the market for subscription was no longer there, such as the print-on-paper edition and its distribution, as well as the online edition): The premise of subscription collapse, after all, is that users will prove so satisfied with the final peer-reviewed drafts self-archived worldwide by their authors under global self-archiving mandates, that there will no longer be any market for subscriptions to the publisher's print or PDF version; hence only the peer review itself would be left to pay for out of all the windfall cancellation savings.

(6) Peer Review Alone Costs Far Less: Nor are those peer-review costs high, since not only do researchers give their papers to publishers for free to sell, but researchers also perform the peer reviewing for publishers for free! So all that's left in the online age is a competent specialist (editor) to choose the peer-reviewers and to adjudicate the referee reports and revisions to ensure they meet the journal's quality standards, plus software to track referee reports, send reminders, and manage the correspondence with the referees. Once it is found acceptable for publication, the author's final draft is simply certified as having been published by that journal.

Rep. John Conyers:
"These opponents argue that scientific journals expend their own, non-federal resources to manage the peer review process, where experts review academic publications. This process is critical because it provides the quality check against incorrect, reckless, and fraudulent science and furthers the overall quality and vigor of modern scientific debate. Journal publishers organize and pay for peer review with the proceeds they receive from the sale of subscriptions to their journals, thereby adding considerable value to the original manuscripts of research scientists."

All true. But no argument at all against Open Access self-archiving mandates! As long as subscriptions remain sustainable to cover the peer review costs, along with all the other products and services that are currently bundled in with it (producing and distributing the print-on-paper edition as well as the online PDF edition), things continue exactly as they do now (and as they have done for over a decade in the few fields, such as high energy physics, where OA self-archiving has been going on spontaneously at close to 100% levels already with no detectable effect on subscriptions).

And if ever subscriptions fail, peer review will be paid on the OA publication-fee model that some OA journals such as PLoS and BMC already use today -- but paid for out of the universal windfall cancellation savings, instead of out of extra funds, poached from somewhere else (often scarce research funds themselves!), as now.

In other words, the ominous talk about a threat to peer review is patent nonsense.

Rep. John Conyers:
"The policy Professor Lessig supports, they argue, would limit publishers' ability to charge for subscriptions since the same articles will soon be publicly available for free. If journals begin closing their doors or curtailing peer review, or foist peer review costs on academic authors (who are already pay from their limited budgets printing costs in some cases), the ultimate harm will be to open inquiry and scientific progress may be severe. And the journals most likely to be affected may be non-profit, scientific society based journals."

The reason this is patent nonsense is that it invokes catastrophic subscription cancellations as the threat, but completely ignores the fact that the ones who are saving money on the incoming journal subscription cancellations are the researchers' institutions -- the very same ones who would then have the money to pay for the (far lower) costs of peer review alone for their own researchers' outgoing articles' peer-review costs, after the hypothetical collapse of subscriptions.

Regardless of whether journals are for-profit or nonprofit, it is clear that research is not an activity that is being funded and conducted in order to provide revenue for those journal publishers! The journals are produced to provide a service to research, researchers, and especially the public who funds the research and for whose benefit the research is being conducted -- a service currently being paid for in full by institutional subscriptions. If and when the only publisher service there is a market left for is peer-review alone, and not the other products and services it is co-bundled with today (and has been ever since Gutenberg), then the peer review will simply be paid for up front, and there will be plenty of saved money out of which to pay for it.

To try instead to keep holding back OA, now that the online medium has made it not only possible, but optimal and inevitable -- and to hold OA back despite its demonstrated direct benefits to research, just in order to indemnify publishers' current subscription revenues and modus operandi against hypothetical risk is rather like trying to keep coal-fed steam engines or horse-drawn carriages in service in order to insure the revenues of stokers and the hay industry -- except it's more like trying to do that with hospital ambulances. (And that's no less true when it is "Learned Society Publishers' 'Good Works'" that are being invoked as the justification for holding up the ambulance than when it's just commercial publishers' purported greed.)


Reference

Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration.


Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

(Thanks to Peter Suber's Open Access News.) Note that the Harvard proposal is to deposit institutionally and export centrally. Bravo!

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Harvard Medical School (US* proposed-institutional-mandate)
http://hms.harvard.edu/hms/home.asp

Institution's/Department's OA Eprint Archives
[growth data]
http://repository.countway.harvard.edu/xmlui/handle/cr1782/137

Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy

http://focus.hms.harvard.edu/2009/030609/publishing.shtml

...Many [NIH-funded] scientists are still learning what it takes to comply with the NIH public access policy... Some researchers also wonder how they can make their work publicly accessible even if it is not funded by the NIH.

These issues could be solved by a new open-access policy under discussion in the Harvard medical community. A team at the Countway Library [at Harvard Medical School] has developed a two-pronged strategy to help scientists smoothly manage the latest changes in scholarly publishing and further expand the open-access model at Harvard.

A longer-term solution is an HMS-wide open-access policy and repository to streamline NIH-funded article deposits and to showcase the range of scholarly contributions by medical, public health and dental faculties...

A voluntary online repository called HMScholar already exists at the Countway website....

Under an open-access policy, the system would automatically make the NIH-required submissions to PubMed Central and enable the University to track NIH compliance better.

The policy would be similar to those adopted last February by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and in June by the Harvard Law School. The online collection would be integrated with the new University-wide open-access institutional repository DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard) in Cambridge, said Amy Brand at the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication. Plans call for DASH to use the Countway mechanism for deposits to PubMed Central....