Lawrence Lessig, Tax-Payer "ReadyReturn" and Research Access

Lawrence Lessig, in Wired magazine, has written a brilliant allegory -- "Crushing Competition" -- on how a powerful status quo with profitable inefficiency can and will lobby to try to block anything that favours a competing efficiency.

Larry's example is California's withdrawal of a cheap, efficient tax-filing system -- "ReadyReturn" -- much praised by tax-payers, under pressure from lobbying on behalf of the tax-filing service industry. Larry's point is that there is not an inefficiency under the sun that cannot be defended, nor a potential benefit that cannot be blocked, if the government hews to this sort of pressure from the business status quo, protecting its current revenue streams at all costs -- to the consumer, to society, or to the planet itself. Larry casts this as government's being pro-business status-quo-preserving interests instead of pro-competition, change and efficiency.

This may all sound familiar to the Open Access community from the rocky fate of the RCUK self-archiving proposal, the still-birth of the NIH "public access" policy, and even the inbuilt birth-defects of the Wellcome Trust self-archiving policy (with its counterproductive 6-month embargo at science's all-important early-growth tip) -- although the Wellcome Trust, being a private charity rather than a government agency, has had a freer hand, and the result has been welcome and evident (and lately rightly rewarded with the SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications).

All the more reason that the distributed network of universities and research institutions should stop waiting for their cue from the government or a big research funder in order to mandate what is as surely in the best interests of research, researchers, and their institutions as the (defeated) California tax ReadyReturn is in the interests of the tax-payer. Indeed the tax-payer, being the research-funder, is the beneficiary here too, if self-archiving is mandated -- and the loser as long as it is not.

Distributed institutions have the advantage of not being fixed lobbying targets, the way governments are. Indeed, the only conceivable basis for hesitation by universities is fear of copyright infringement: This fear is groundless, but mandating immediate deposit of the full-text without mandating the setting of access privileges immediately to "Open Access" effectively moots the copyright issue completely, deflecting any embargo pressure from the deposit to the access-setting, and, most important of all, allowing semi-automated eprint-emailing -- directly by individual authors to individual eprint-requesters who discover the Closed Access full-text from its Open Access bibliographic metadata (author, title, journal, date, etc.) -- to tide over any delay period in setting full-text access to Open Access.

So, unlike governments, the world-wide network of universities and research institutions need not heed the lobby from interests vested in preserving the restricted-access status quo at the cost of needless research access-denial and impact-loss to research, researchers, their institutions, and the public that funds them. They can mandate immediate self-archiving immediately.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum