The "Double-Pay"/"Buy-Back" Argument for Open Access is Invalid

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SUMMARY: There are many valid arguments for Open Access (OA), but the claim that researchers or their universities are currently "double-paying" to "buy back" access to their own research output -- by (1) paying for the conduct of the research, giving it to journals, and then (2) paying for subscriptions to access it -- is invalid. Researchers already have their own results, and so does their own university. What their university library subscriptions are paying for is to buy-in (not buy-back) the research output of other universities, exactly as with books written by authors from other universities. (Some research, universities and university libraries are funded by public funds, some not. Unless OA is to be limited to only that subset, that is not a sufficient rationale for OA either.)
   There is a valid "double-payment" argument, though, when it is not the payer (the researcher, funder, or university) paying twice, but the payee -- the publisher -- getting paid twice (not necessarily by the same payer): This is the "Trojan Horse" of paying a "hybrid Gold OA" publisher (i.e., not a pure Gold OA publisher but a subscription-based publisher who offers the option of making individual articles OA in exchange for a fee) at a time when the potential funds for doing so are still tied up in the university subscriptions that are already paying that publisher's costs in full.
   Publishers need only be paid once. If mandated Green OA should ever make cost-recovery from subscription payments unsustainable (because it makes university subscription demand disappear), then the resultant university subscription windfall savings can be redirected to pay for the peer review on the Gold OA model, with all access-provision and archiving off-loaded onto the distributed network of university OA Repositories.

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There are many valid arguments for Open Access (OA): It maximizes research usage and impact, it enhances research and university visibility as well as researcher and university income, it accelerates national and international R&D productivity and progress, it helps developing countries, it helps inform the general public, it is useful for education and training, it might eventually reduce university library subscription costs.

But the widespread claim that researchers or their universities are currently "double-paying" to "buy back" access to their own research output -- by (1) paying for the conduct of the research, giving it to journals, and then (2) paying for subscriptions to access it -- is both invalid and unnecessary.

If you ask those who are making this argument exactly what they mean, you will get two different answers, neither of them coherent or defensible:

(1) "I am salaried, and government-funded, to do my research. I give the report of my research findings to my publisher for free. Then I or my university must buy a subscription to the journal in order to access my results."

This is incorrect. You already have your own research results, and so does your university. What your university library subscriptions are paying for is to buy in the research output of other universities. And the ones to whom your publisher is selling your research are other universities, not your own.

This is no more "buy-back" or "double-paying" than it is to pay for the books written by authors from other universities. Or any other output that the university both itself generates and also buys in from other universities.

Nor does the fact that books sometimes generate royalty revenue change this picture: Most books generate negligible royalty revenue or none at all.

(It is relevant however -- not as a buy-back/double-pay argument, but as a conflict of interest -- that researchers, unlike other authors, ask for no royalty income from their publisher, and publish their articles purely for the sake of their research impact, not their royalty income. Hence this royalty-free author give-away writing is not a "work for hire," and publishers are unjustified in trying to prevent or embargo its authors' attempts to maximize access to it by self-archiving it free for all online.)

(2) "My research is funded by public funds; so is my university, and so is my university's library. Hence it is somehow buy-back/double-pay for them to be paying for subscription access to it too."

This no longer sounds like buy-back/double-pay but something much more complicated, with some grains of truth. But those grains of truth are only being buried or distorted in calling this buy-back/double-pay. Not only is a lot of published research not publicly funded, not only are neither university researcher salaries nor institutional library budgets all or wholly derived from public funds, but again, much the same argument could be made for books and other university outputs (even commercial ones) if the underlying problem were indeed the buy-back/double-payment one.

So unless you think that OA should only be accorded to research if -- and in proportion to the degree to which -- public funders or universities are literally drawing twice from the same pot, you may be narrowing OA to a smaller and more difficult-to-determine subset of OA's real target, which is all of peer-reviewed research. (And you may also be making an argument against either the public funding of R&D or the selling of its output: That may be arguable, but it is a far, far bigger argument than OA!)

There is, however, one "double-payment" argument that is valid, but it is not the one the buy-back/double-payment complainants have in mind: rather the opposite. For in this valid double-payment argument it is not the payer (the researcher, his funder, or his university) who is paying twice, but the payee -- the publisher -- who is getting paid twice (but not necessarily by the same payer)

I am referring to the "Trojan Horse" of paying an extra fee to a "hybrid Gold OA" publisher (i.e., not a pure Gold OA publisher but a subscription-based publisher who offers the option of making individual articles OA in exchange for a fee) at a time when the potential funds for paying for that fee are still tied up in the university subscriptions that are already paying that publisher's costs. Hence universities or funders who opt for optional-Gold in a hybrid OA journal today must find extra funds to pay that optional-Gold OA fee (e.g., by redirecting money from research funds), even while all publishing costs are still being fully covered by subscriptions.

But this is not the kind of "double-payment" that the buy-back/double-pay complainants are agitating against: On the contrary, this is the kind that they are (prematurely, and unwittingly) agitating for.

The resolution of the "double-payment" puzzle is very simple: Publishers need only be paid once. Today they are mostly being paid (once, via subscriptions), for providing both (1) the peer-review service and (2) the paper and online editions. As long as the subscription market covers the costs, the only thing researchers need do for immediate OA is to self-archive the final, peer-reviewed drafts of their own published articles in their own university OA Repositories (Green OA); and the only thing their universities and funders need do is to mandate that they do so.

If and when Green OA should ever make cost-recovery from subscription payments unsustainable (because university subscription demand disappears), then the resultant university subscription windfall savings can be redirected to pay for the peer review (on the Gold OA cost-recovery model). And both the paper and online editions, for which there is (ex hypothesi) no longer any demand at that time, can be terminated (along with their expenses), off-loading all access-provision and archiving onto the distributed network of university OA Repositories that has already assumed the access-provision role de facto, in virtue of providing Green OA.

That's a tad more complicated than "buy-back/double-pay," but it is coherent, reflective of the facts and factors (actual and hypothetical) involved, and leads to the same outcome: 100% OA (first Green, and perhaps eventually Gold), but without any fuzziness, double-talk, or unsupportable arguments.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum