Heidelberger Appell Abgepellt

Matthias Spielkamp [MS] has just participated in an International Copyright Conference in Berlin (May 7-8) and is participating in a radio debate on open access today (May 9). MS has cast some revealing new light on the original source of Roland Reuss's animus against Open Access (OA) in the Heidelberg Appeal, which Reuss co-drafted. (The following exchange with me [SH] is posted with MS's permission.)

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SH: The Heidelberger Appell is all based on pure misunderstanding.

MS: It is indeed. Reuss is not talking about journal articles. He says he is not even talking about OA. He says that he "does not want to be forced to publish" his works (classics editions, in his case) [books] in any form other than what he chooses himself. Why does he say that? Because he apparently had the experience that one of his funders demanded that a classic edition he was going to publish in cooperation with a mid-size book-publisher be made OA a year after publication. The publisher said he would not produce the book under these circumstances.

SH: Matthias, first, thanks so much for at last discovering and revealing the original source of the misunderstanding!

Second, it is still Reuss's fault, for having immediately launched a petition that made this scattershot attack on all forms of free online access without taking the trouble to see and separate what is benign and desirable from what is not (and what is and is not OA's target).

Third, it sounds as if the fault here lies also partly with the research funder. I will state it very bluntly: At a time when (Green) OA for OA's primary target content -- refereed journal articles -- is still not yet mandated by most institutions and funders, hence articles are not being made OA, even though they are all, without exception, author give-aways, published solely for research impact, there is no excuse for (or sense in) research funders targeting books instead, for being made OA.

Books are a far more complicated, far less uniform, and far less urgent case insofar as OA is concerned. Not all (nor even most) book authors want to give their books away free online today. Nor is it yet apparent whether there is a viable, sustainable economic model for book publication if it turns out (as it might -- the evidence is far from clear yet) that book cost-recovery is not viable if the book is made free online (at least not for book publication that still generates a printed book too). A funder that arbitrarily insists on book OA today -- when what is unambiguously and urgently needed is journal article OA -- has no more clearly thought through the meaning and priorities of OA than Reuss did, and this should be clearly and fairly stated too.

(Note that it is not that I am at all against book OA, by the way. I actually believe it is already the right solution today for esoteric scholarly and scientific monographs that have difficulty finding a publisher, and for which the only edition will be the online edition. I also think that for some -- though not all -- print books, a free online version may not hurt -- and may perhaps even help -- sales of the print edition. But there is still a lot of testing and evidence needed before authors and publishers can be confident of that. And last, I think that the power and potential of making journal-articles OA will encourage more scholars and scientists to report their important findings rapidly, via journal articles, and to make those articles [Green] OA. What later becomes of their elaborations and syntheses in the form of books is a far less urgent matter for research progress at this time.)

MS: The "Heidelberger Appell" gives the impression that it's talking about OA, when it is not. Reuss is not at all interested in journal publishing. He is talking about books, about being "the author" whose autonomy must not, under any circumstances, be subjected to any conditions made by the funder. It may be feudalistic (I think it is) but it is understandable if it renders impossible a project of his. It's not about royalties, it's about models that rely on multiple-volume book subscriptions where a publisher wants to recoup his investments. Some of them don't even make a profit; we're not talking about Springer / Wiley / Elsevier here.

SH: I agree. And the right thing to do is to make it crystal clear when one is talking only about books, and not about journal articles, nor OA nor OA mandates. This is what Reuss has not done, but rather the contrary.

Funders and institutions too, for their part, must make it crystal clear that OA's primary target is refereed journal (and conference) articles, and that those are the only targets of Green OA self-archiving mandates.

MS: The problem is that everyone (including myself) read his Appell as an attack on open acces. Was this the biggest mistake of all? I don't think so, because politicians perceive it the same way so, a riposte was appropriate.

SH: The mistake was definitely Reuss's, for not specifying his target. (Both Reuss, in his "Con Crema (Open Access als Enteignung)" and his fellow-author Uwe Jochum ("Open Access gepusht") write very specifically against "Open Access" in the side-bar of the Heidelberg Appeal.) But it is partly also the fault of the German research institutions and research funders, for falling behind the rest of the world, in not mandating Green OA self-archiving of journal articles (and even trying awkwardly and idiosyncratically to insist on OA for a few books, which no institution or funder elsewhere has done).

If the “Alliance of German Scientific Organisations” had done as other funders and institutions worldwide are doing or preparing to do, which is to unambiguously identify OA's target content -- refereed journal articles -- and to mandate that they be self-archived to make them OA (as Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft has more-or-less done), then this systematic misunderstanding and confusion would not have been possible.

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(1a) Book and newspaper article authors. There are creators of digital content intended for sale who are afraid that all the rampant piracy might mean a risk to their livelihood. To a certain extent they may be right. No one knows yet whether all the free availability of books and newspaper articles  will make it harder for their authors to make a living. Some say books sell better if they are freely available online, others say the opposite, and no one knows yet for sure (and it may vary from book to book). Something similar might be true of newspaper articles, in either direction.

(1b) Book and newspaper article publishers. In addition to the creators of the book and newspaper content (book authors and journalists), the publishers of books and newspapers -- their interests completely aligned with those of their authors -- ask the same questions and have the same worries; and these worries may likewise have some validity. No one knows yet for sure.

(The same as the above can be said for both the creators and the publishers of music, video and software content.)

(2a) Peer-reviewed journal article authors. But there is also a completely different kind of content, whose creators do not make their living by selling it: on the contrary, their salaries and careers depend on how much their writings are read, used, applied, built-upon and cited. These are researchers -- scholars and scientists in all disciplines, when they are not publishing books but peer-reviewed journal articles. They do not write for royalties or fees; they write for the sake of maximal uptake, usage and impact of their research fundings. They are employed by their universities and research institutions, and funded by their research funders, to do research with maximal impact on the productivity and progress of research itself. They in fact have the opposite worry from the worries of the writers in (1a) above: They want to make their writings freely available to one and all online, but many of them are afraid to do it, because they are afraid it may be illegal, as in (1a) and that their publishers will sue them or refuse to publish their writing if they make it freely accessible online.

(2b) Peer-reviewed journal article publishers. In fact, these authors are wrong: the majority of the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals, across all disciplines and languages have already given their authors of their published articles the formal green light to make their final, peer-reviewed drafts freely accessible online, either immediately upon acceptance for publication (63%) or after embargo periods of various lengths (a further 34%). So less than 3% of journals have not yet endorsed their authors' right to make their final draft freely accessible online in some form or other.

It is true, however, that although most of the publishers of these journals (2b) have endorsed making it freely accessible online, most authors do not yet do it -- partly because they don't know that they can, and partly because they are not sure how or why to do it. Meanwhile, research impact continues to be lost, daily, because access to peer-reviewed research is mostly still restricted to those researchers whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which the research appeared. And no institution can afford to subscribe to all, most, or even many of the 25,000 peer-reviewed journals: only a small fraction of them. This means that many researchers cannot access research that they would otherwise use, which in turn means that those articles are losing their potential research impact. We know this, because in studies in field after field, comparing articles in the same journal and year that have and have not been made free online ("Open Access" OA), we find without exception that the OA articles are cited substantially more.

Now here is the heart of the profound misunderstanding pervading the Heidelberg Declaration: It treats the authors and writing in (1a) and (2a) as if their interests were the same, whereas they could not be more different! (1a) are non-give-away authors, writing for income; for them, users who access their work without paying are a potential loss to their livelihood (because of loss of royalty income). (2a) are give-away authors, writing for impact, and users who cannot access their work because they cannot afford to pay are a potential loss to their livelihood (because of loss of research impact).

The Heidelberg Appeal has completely conflated (1a) and (2a) and insists on treating it all as (1a). And it must be said that they are aided and abetted in this by some publishers in (2a), who include those who have not endorsed authors making their articles OA as well as those who have endorsed it for public relations purposes, recognizing the benefits of OA for research but without wishing to see it prevail: So they adopt a "green" policy, endorsing their authors making their articles OA, but they lobby vigorously against research funders and institutions adopting policies that require their employees or fundees to make their articles OA (Green OA self-archiving mandates).

And that is the reason peer-reviewed journal articles (2a) -- even though they are all, without a single exception, author give-aways -- are treated exactly as if they were revenue-seeking publications, exactly the way most books, newspaper articles, music, video and software (1a): Because for publishers, they are revenue-seeking in both cases!

Hence there is an author/publisher conflict of interest in (2), in contrast to the congruence of interest in (1). There is a natural way to resolve this author/publisher conflict of interest, and it certainly is not -- as the Heidelberg Appeal would entail -- to treat research as if it too were revenue-seeking writing, to the detriment of research progress and impact: 

The remedy is universal Green OA mandates, adopted by all research institutions and funders. Currently, institutional subscriptions are paying all the costs of journal publication. If universal OA ever makes journal subscriptions unsustainable, then journals can convert to the Gold OA model, with the institutions paying for the publication costs of their research article output by the individual article, out of their windfall journal subscription cancellation savings.

What must on no account be allowed to happen is for research progress and impact to be sacrificed in order to protect publishers from the risk of an eventual transition to Gold OA, or to force institutions to pay for Gold OA now, when subscriptions are still paying the bill (and at a price that will almost certainly diminish under the cancellation and cost-cutting pressure of universal Green OA).

The Heidelberg Appeal also does its share of conflating Green OA self-archiving and Gold OA publishing, which of course blurs the picture even further, and adds even more to the confusion. But it must be said that the Green/Gold confusion is alas far more widespread than just the minds of the drafters of the Heidelberg Appeal.

Some journal-article authors are paying for Gold OA publishing today, in which the author (or author's institution or funder) pays for publication and the user has free access online, but this is done voluntarily by authors (or their institutions of funders); it is not imposed on them. No one is proposing to impose it on them. It is rare. And, most important, it is not necessary in order to provide OA. Subscriptions are already paying the full costs of publication today. Green OA self-archiving is sufficient to provide OA, and it costs nothing to the author or the author's institution or funder.

But what the drafters and signatories of the Heidelberg Declaration ought to ask themselves is this: If the problem is consumer piracy, depriving authors of their revenue through free (and illegal) online access, why are these particular authors paying to make their articles freely accessible online instead of worrying about unpaid access like the authors of books? 

The answer, of course, is that research is not published for royalty income but for research impact, and OA maximizes research impact. And this is so important to this very distinct category of authors -- the authors of the 2.5 million articles a year published in the planets 25,000 peer reviewed journals -- that far from worrying about not "profiting therefrom," some authors are even willing to go so far as to pay (needlessly) to make their articles freely accessible to all users.

This fact should already ring a bell clearly to signal the fact that not all articles and all writings can be treated on the model of authors seeking profit from paid access.

And the reason it is not necessary to pay for Gold OA publishing today is that Green OA self-archiving can be mandated by the funders and institutions of the researchers. These mandates are steadily growing, and that is the real reason why some journal publishers are trying to make a common cause with book authors and book publishers, against both book piracy and OA, under the pretext of protecting authors' rights, even though in reality this goes against the interests of journal article authors as well as research itself.

Newspaper publishers and newspaper article authors are facing a problem similar to the one faced by book authors and publishers. But in this respect book and newspaper-article authors and publishers are again alike, yet they all continue to be profoundly unlike the authors of peer-reviewed journal articles, who are not facing a threat from the possibility of free online access, but an enormous and unprecedented opportunity to maximize the access and impact of their research, to the benefit of research itself, its institutions and funders, and the public for whose benefit and with whose funds much research is done.

Books are indeed being made freely accessible online, often without regard to copyright and the interests of the authors; but research journal articles are being made OA by their authors, under OA mandates from their institutions and funders, and mostly with the endorsement of their publishers (with almost-OA solutions that have almost the same effect for the minority of exceptions, without violating copyright).

Most importantly, only non-give-away book and newspaper-article authors are interested in using copyright to restrict access to their work to those who pay: give-away journal article authors do not.

German research organizations do want to accelerate this process: That is what Green OA self-archiving mandates are for. But this applies only to give-away research articles, not to the none-give-away content with which this is all being hopelessly (and partly deliberately) conflated and confused by the drafters of the Heidelberg Appeal.

Free access is definitely not all seen in the same way by literary, artistic and scientific authors. User piracy of authors' books is very different from author give-away of their own journal articles. The authors of research journal articles see free online access to their writings very, very differently from the authors of books, for reasons that should by now be evident.

Those who are calling for "Freedom of Publication and the Safe-Guarding of Authors' Rights" are book authors and book and journal publishers, not the authors of research journal articles.  Moreover, there is absolutely no "freedom of publication" issue at all, for anyone, book-authors or article-authors. That is a pure red herring.  As noted, research journal authors are not interested in using copyright to prevent free online access; they are interested in providing free online access, to maximize the impact of their research

To put the few signatories of the Heidelberg Appeal against OA into context, one should compare it with the tens of thousands of researchers who are signing the petition for the EC to mandate Green OA self-archiving.

The preamble to MS's radio debate asks:

[Werden] bestimmen statt der Lektoren künftig die anonymen Betreiber von Webservern, was publiziert wird und was nicht? 

No, for peer-reviewed research, OA does not mean that "anonymous website administrators" will decide what is and is not published: The peer-reviewers (and journal editors) will continue to decide -- indeed that is what peer-reviewed research publication is (and the peers review for free). Publishers will continue to administer the peer-review process, and as long as subscriptions are sustainable, subscriptions will pay the costs of that. If ever they are cancelled because of OA, then the self-same cancellation savings will be used to pay publishers for the administration of peer review.

None of this has anything to do with books or newspaper articles.

Verliert, was kostenlos zu beziehen ist, nicht zugleich auch seinen Wert? 

No, the fact that peer-reviewed research is freely accessible in no way entails that it has lost its value -- on the contrary, it has maximized the impact of that same value. (What are these silly slogans?)

Wie wertvoll ist uns noch das gedruckte Wort?

The value of (and market for) the analog vs digital versions of works is an entirely different matter and unrelated to the special case of peer-reviewed journal articles (except to note that as long as there is genuine need and demand for the print edition, the subscription model is safe!).

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum