Feedback on the Brussels EC Meeting on Open Access

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SUMMARY: (1) It would be a great strategic error if the EC allows the publishing industry lobby to draw it back into further talks and studies, instead of implementing the OA self-archiving mandate (EC A1) proposed in January 2006, and since implemented by the ERC and reinforced by EURAB.
      (2) The other aim of both the publishing lobby and the Gold OA publishing lobby is to focus the EC on the issue of "funding of research on publication business models and on the scientific publication system" instead of on the issue of providing access.
      (3) The research publishing industry is not the industrial dimension of research: the R&D industry is. R&D's revenues are orders of magnitude bigger than those of the publishing industry, and it shares in the current, actual loss of research access and impact that OA is meant to cure -- a cure the publishing industry lobby is (successfully) endeavouring to prevent:
      (4) The substance of the recommendation of the EC petition and its 22,000+ signatories (so far), including 1000+ official organisation signatories -- universities, research institutes, scientific academies, R&D industries, etc. -- is that OA self-archiving (Green OA) should be mandated. The voices raised for OA were not about funding Gold OA, and certainly not about diverting scarce research funds from research to paying publishers for Gold OA.
      (5) The research community rightly resists OA Mandates being coupled in any way with the redirection of scarce research funds, away from research and toward the payment of Gold OA publishing fees. There is no need at all to couple the EC OA mandate with the diversion of any funds from research to pay Gold OA fees today. There is no reason for the mandate to make any reference to Gold OA fees at all. The mandate should be a Green OA self-archiving mandate. That is all.

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The EC proposes to "contribute to the debate among stakeholders and policy makers by encouraging experiments with new models that may improve access to and dissemination of scientific information [and by] funding of research on publication business models and on the scientific publication system"

The five suggestions I shall make below about the Brussels EC Meeting on Open Access are controversial, but I am quite confident that the points are valid. My confidence comes from having been involved in this for a very, very long time, having heard everything already many, many times over and having given it all a very great amount of thought (more thought than it deserved, because most of the misunderstandings are so transparent and elementary!).

(1) It would be a great strategic error on the part of the EC to allow itself to be drawn back into further talks and studies, instead of implementing the OA self-archiving mandate (EC A1) that was proposed in January 2006, and that has since been implemented by the ERC and reinforced by EURAB.

The talks and studies have already taken place, for years now, many times over. The EC is basically stepping back to the point where the UK Parliamentary Select Committee was in 2003: It too conducted an extensive inquiry, with all interested parties, and made the same recommendation as EC A1: Mandate OA self-archiving.

And the response was the same: publishing industry lobbying, the usual ominous warnings that mandating OA self-archiving will destroy journals and will destroy a multi-billion dollar industry, the usual conflation of Green OA and Gold OA (author OA self-archiving, Green, and journal OA publishing, Gold) and the usual attempt to delay, derail, filibuster in any way possible.

And the publishing lobby was successful in the UK -- for a while. It successfully got the ear of Lord Sainsbury, the UK Industry minister (just as it did the EC Commissioner!), But in the end, reason prevailed, and now we have 5 out of the 8 UK Research Councils plus the Wellcome Trust mandating Green OA self-archiving after all, and more mandates planned.

The publishing lobby will always say we need more studies and consultations. They have to, because they have absolutely no empirical evidence to support their Doomsday Scenario: There is not even evidence that self-archiving -- even where it has reached 100% for years now -- causes cancellations at all, let alone destroys journals. In the complete absence of negative evidence, and with all actual evidence positive -- for the benefits of OA to research, researchers, and the R&D industry -- the only thing the publishing lobby can do is to raise the volume on its dire but evidence-free predictions: and keep asking for more studies, for more evidence!

But what the EC should be asking itself is: What studies? and evidence of what? Surely the only way to test whether there is any truth at all to the hypothesis that mandating OA self-archiving will generate cancellations is to mandate OA self-archiving and see whether it generates cancellations! The EC does not fund all, most, or much of the contents of any individual journal. Hence it is enormously improbable that an EC self-archiving mandate will have any significant effect on any journal's subscriptions. But the only way to see whether it does, is to go ahead and adopt the mandate. Its effects can be reviewed and reconsidered after 1, 2, 3 years.

Instead doing nothing under the guise of "debate among stakeholders and policy makers [and] encouraging experiments with new models" is of no use at all.

(2) The other aim of both the publishing lobby and the Gold OA publishing lobby is to focus the EC on the issue of "funding of research on publication business models and on the scientific publication system" instead of on the issue of providing access.

The EC meeting was dominated, appallingly, by discussion of journal revenues and economics (to no effect whatsoever, as all that was said has already been said, countless times before, for nearly a decade now). There was next to no discussion of the daily, weekly, monthly cumulative loss of research access and impact that is continuing as we continue to talk about the same things over and over.

Recall that publishers' warnings about future loss of revenue are hypothetical, whereas researchers' loss of current access and impact is actual, and cumulative, and also means loss of revenue, from lost R&D industrial applications: losses on the public investment in research. The cure for that loss of access and impact, and of R&D industrial revenue, is to mandate OA self-archiving. It has nothing to do with the the economics of funding Gold OA journals.

The focus on funding journals is a red herring. What the EC needs to do is to mandate OA self-archiving. That is Green OA. It does not require funding anything: just mandating self-archiving.

Publishers are publishers, whether they are non-OA publishers lobbying against OA and self-archiving, or Gold OA publishers lobbying against Green OA self-archiving mandates. How and why did the EC manage to get diverted from the problem of research access (for which the solution is to mandate Green OA) to the problem of journal economics?

(3) The research publishing industry is not the industrial dimension of research: The R&D industry is. And the R&D industry and its revenues are orders of magnitude bigger than those of the publishing industry. And the R&D industry shares in the current, actual loss of research access and impact that OA is meant to cure -- and that the publishing industry lobby is (successfully) endeavouring to prevent.

Why is the EC inviting and listening so intently to the views of the publishing industry regarding access to research, instead of listening to the views of the R&D industry (along with the views of the research community itself)? As I have said many times before, this is worse than the tail wagging the dog: It is the flea on the tail of the dog, wagging the dog.

(4) The substance of the recommendation of the EC petition and its 24,000+ signatories (so far), including 1000+ official organisation signatories -- universities, research institutes, scientific academies, R&D industries, etc. -- is that OA self-archiving (Green OA) should be mandated. The voices raised for OA were not about funding Gold OA, and certainly not about diverting scarce research funds from research to paying publishers for Gold OA.

Gold OA cannot be mandated. There seems to be some profound confusion about that, even among the proponents of the EC Recommendation: The only ones who can be mandated to do anything by a funder are the fundees: the researchers funded to do the research.

There seems to be an incoherent idea afoot that, somehow, it is publishers who are to be mandated to do something. Publishers know very well that they cannot be mandated to do anything, but they are quite happy to draw out the consultations and "studies" on topics like embargoes and PDFs in order to give the impression that that is what this is all about.

What this is about is mandating OA by mandating that authors self-archive their own final drafts of journal articles immediately upon acceptance for publication. The embargo question is only about the date at which those deposits should be made Open Access. (Till then, the deposits can be made Closed Access, but their metadata are still visible webwide, and individual eprints can be requested by users via email.)

But the all-important thing now is not the allowable length of this embargo, but mandating the deposit. The EC has allowed itself to be distracted from what this is all about, in order to focus instead on embargoes and on funding Gold OA! That can go on forever; meanwhile, daily, weekly cumulative loss of EU research access and impact continues, and with it loss in EU research productivity, progress, R&D applications, and R&D revenue.

Mandate Green OA self-archiving and then return to the endless consultations on embargo lengths and Gold OA funding! But don't allow Green mandates and OA to be filibustered still longer with these studies and consultation that lead nowhere but to more studies and consultations, as EU research access and impact keep hemorrhaging needlessly.

Last point:

(5) One genuine (and valid) point of resistance on the part of the research community (rather than the publishing community) against OA Mandates concerns their being coupled in any way with the redirection of scarce research funds, away from research and toward the payment of Gold OA publishing fees. There is no need at all to couple the EC OA mandate with the diversion of any funds from research to pay Gold OA fees. There is no reason for the mandate to make any reference to Gold OA fees at all. The mandate should be a Green OA self-archiving mandate. That is all.

(In this respect, the Wellcome Trust mandate is a bad model to follow. The Wellcome Trust is a private charity and can do whatever it chooses with its funds. But diverting public research funds to pay needlessly for Gold OA publishing charges when it is not at all necessary -- because subscriptions are still paying for publication and Green self-archiving can be mandated to provide OA -- is an arbitrary and ill-thought-out step that can only generate research community resistance.)

The need for and benefits of OA are a certainty, as is the ability of Green OA self-archiving mandates to make all funded research OA. In contrast, all hypotheses about the way this will or should affect the future of research publication are mere speculation.

The publishing industry has been freely speculating -- with zero evidence -- that mandating Green OA will destroy journals and peer review. The way to counter such speculations is not to be frightened by them into inaction, simply because they are fierce speculations. The way to counter them is with plausible counterspeculations. So here is one: If and when mandated Green OA makes subscriptions unsustainable -- because all articles are OA and subscriptions are cancelled -- all the subscribing institutions will have vast windfall savings from their cancelled subscriptions: Those same institutional windfall savings will then be available for redirection to pay for institutional Gold OA fees for publishing their outgoing articles, without diverting a penny from research.

That will be the time to make the transition to Gold OA publishing, not now, when most journals are not OA, when subscriptions are paying for all publishing costs, when scarce research funds would need to be diverted to pay for any Gold OA publishing costs, and when what is urgently needed is not funds to pay for Gold OA: what is urgently needed is OA. And it is already attainable, via Green. All that needs to be done is to mandate it.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum