Open Access Archivangelism

[Background: See "Pre-Emptive Gold Fever Strikes Again"]

A Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) article (29 April) writes:

"The research councils are looking at what more they can do to support open access to research results after an independent study found that their current policies were having a 'limited impact'."

First, the SQW/LISU study is simply incorrect in opining that current Green OA deposit mandates (when adopted and monitored) are "having a 'limited impact'." As objective deposit-counts for the NIH mandate have shown, the NIH deposit rate jumped from 4% to over 60% within a year of mandate adoption. Much the same is true for university self-archiving mandates.

Rather, the ambivalence seems to be largely originating from EPSRC, the last of the adopters of the least clearcut of the seven UK research council policies. What EPSRC had finally mandated was not unequivocal deposit, like the other six councils, but rather a hybrid between Green OA deposits and Gold OA journal publishing.

"The councils have previously baulked at requiring all council-funded researchers to deposit papers in openly available repositories."

This is incorrect: Six of the seven UK research councils have required all fundees to deposit all published articles in an open access repository: Only EPSRC leaves it open whether (1) to publish in a subscription journal and deposit in a repository or (2) to publish in an open-access journal (and pay publishing fees, if any). This is the EPSRC policy:

EPSRC Council agreed at its December [2008] meeting to mandate open access publication, but that academics should be able to choose whether they use the so-called green option (ie, self-archiving in an on-line repository) or to use the gold option (ie, pay-to-publish in an open access journal).

It is interesting how the divergent view of the last and most ambivalent -- but also the biggest -- of the councils to adopt a mandate is now being presented as the new prevailing view among the seven. (Is it, really? And has EPSRC really thought it through, or are a few strongly held opinions ruling the roost?)

"Now, after a study by SQW Consulting concluded that open access is increasingly popular with UK researchers and that institutions are setting up their own repositories, the councils... will have to tread carefully because open access threatens to undermine the business model of publishers and learned societies."

This sounds like a non sequitur. OA is becoming increasingly popular with researchers and institutions (and at least 6 of the 7 funders) and yet now funders must "tread carefully" because of publishers' business interests? How did publishers' business interests get into this?

(I suspect that in the case of EPSRC, this may partly be driven by an ongoing experiment in paying pre-emptively for Gold OA publishing in (part of) the physics community: Instead of just mandating Green OA deposits and letting subscriptions continue to pay for publication until and unless Green OA makes subscriptions unsustainable, the SCOAP3 consortium of institutions is simply redefining their institutional subscription fees as "institutional Gold OA publishing fees" in exchange for the publishers providing Gold OA. It is virtually certain that this ill-thought-out experiment cannot and will not scale beyond parts of physics, but meanwhile it is yet another retardant on the growth of Green OA mandates. Here it is not just publishing-lobby self-interest, but institutional serials-budget myopia that are (each for its respective reasons, both of them irrelevant to the primary interests of the research community) doing the all-too-familiar conflation of the journal-affordability problem with the research-accessibility problem, to the great disadvantage of the latter.)

"The study also reports that more than three quarters of 2,100 council-funded researchers surveyed were unaware of the councils' current mandates."

It would seem that a more straightforward remedy for unawareness of funders' grant fulfillment conditions would be to increase the awareness of fundees and their institutions of the conditions on the funding they have received -- and to monitor and reinforce compliance with those conditions, just as with other grant fulfillment conditions. It would seem an unusual remedy to instead spend scarce research funds on paying publishers to do what fundees are neglecting to do, for free, as a condition of their funding.

"Paul Gemmill, chair of the research outputs group at Research Councils UK, said the next stage was to decide whether a specific model should be adopted. He said the process would involve learned societies, publishers and academics."

How did the publishing community come to thus dominate a research community issue? (Both publishers and learned-society publishers are publishers.) This is really quite puzzling. One can quite well understand why they would try to do so, but how did they succeed? Could it be that the publisher-budget defenders and the library-budget defenders are making common cause with pre-emptive Gold OA, at the expense of cost-free Green OA and the interests of the research community and research itself? Or is this just blind a-priori ideology (regarding "publishing reform") in place of the direct of interests of research that are the real concern of the research funding councils (as well as the research community itself)?

"Open-access advocate Stevan Harnad, professor of electronics and computer science at the University of Southampton, said scarce research money should not be used to pay open-access journal fees, where the costs normally borne by the publisher are picked up by funders."

The costs of publishing are borne by subscribing institutions, not by funders.

"'If good sense were to prevail, funders and universities would just mandate repositories,' he said."

What he said was:

"If good sense were to prevail, funders and universities would just mandate Green OA for now, and then let supply and demand decide, given universal Green OA, whether and when to convert from subscriptions to Gold OA, and for what product, and at what price."

For now, subscriptions are paying for publication, and what is needed is more Green OA, not a new non-research expense (Gold OA publication fees) on which to squander the little research money there is to go round. Wait till universal Green OA actually causes subscriptions to become unsustainable (if and when it ever does do so) and then the subscription cancellation savings themselves can be used to pay for the Gold OA -- that's then, when it's actually needed, rather than using research money to pay for Gold OA pre-emptively, now, when Gold OA is not even needed yet.


Drawn by
Judith Economos
(feel free to use to promote OA and to bait "pit-bulls")

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum