Open Access Archivangelism

"Open access will bankrupt us,
publishers’ report claims"

Times Higher Education Supplement
1 June 2012.

It would be useful if those who negotiate with publishers could unite behind a simple response to this kind of publisher FUD about "bankruptcy":

The survival of the publishing industry and of peer review are neither at issue nor at risk when Green OA self-archiving of their peer-reviewed research output is mandated by institutions and funders.

What publishers are exercised about is insuring their current revenue streams and modus operandi from any risk of downsizing.

Institutions and funders, in negotiating with publishers, should stop behaving as supplicants -- as if publishers were doing the research community a favour that we daren't risk provoking them into withdrawing from us. That's nonsense.

Nor should institutions and funders negotiate with publishers as if it were the duty and responsibility of the research community to insure the sustainability of publishers' current revenue streams, come what may.

Institutions and funders should go ahead and mandate Green OA, universally, for the sake of research and research access.

Subscriptions are paying the full cost of publication, handsomely, today.

If Green OA makes subscriptions no longer sustainable as the means of covering the remaining costs of publication, publishers will adapt.

And for those publishers who don't wish to adapt to a downsized business, their journal titles will migrate to publishers who do.

That's all there is to it.

No contingencies between subscription price negotiations and institutional Open Access policy; nor about embargo length.

Institutions and funders: Don't discuss mandates with publishers. It's none of their affair. Just discuss subscription prices.

Institutions and funders: Whether or not some publishers have a policy embargoing OA self-archiving, go ahead and mandate immediate deposit, decide how long an embargo on making the deposit OA you want to allow, and state that limit.

Authors can do the rest for themselves, especially with the help of the institutional repository's email-eprint-request Button for individual users wishing to request an eprint of an embargoed deposit for research purposes during any OA embargo period.

The worst possible thing for institutions or funders to do is to adapt their OA mandate to what publishers claim are their "needs" to ensure protection from bankruptcy: Publishers will survive OA. And the journal titles whose publishers pull out because they are not content with the downsized business will survive too.

Sizing Up Downsizing.
Research is not publicly funded, conducted and published in order to subsidize the revenue streams of the research publishing industry.

Research publishing is a service-provider for research, researchers, their institutions and the funders for whose benefit the research is being done: the tax-paying public.

And the "culprit" in the downsizing of research publishing -- who is at the same time the benefactor of which research productivity and progress are the beneficiary -- is the online medium and the economies and efficiencies it has made possible.

In other words, Bell Labs, DARPA, Google and Tim Berners-Lee

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

Stevan Harnad