SUMMARY: Research quality is ensured through peer review, which is performed by the research community for free. Publishers manage the peer review process; in exchange they get to sell subscriptions to the paper edition as well as to the online edition of their journals. Supplementing paid subscription access for those would-be users who cannot afford the publisher's version by self-archiving the author's version brings substantial positive effects to research, researchers and the tax-payers that fund them in terms of increased research usage and impact. Self-archiving has had no detectable negative effects on subscription revenues to date, even for the two publishers (American Physical Society and Institute of Physics) in the fields that have been practising self-archiving the longest and most (15+ years). The way to test whether the FRPAA self-archiving mandate will ever have any effect on subscriptions is to adopt it and monitor its effects yearly, not to keep denying and delaying its already demonstrated benefits to research on the grounds of hypothetical risks to publisher revenues. Research is not publicly funded and conducted in order to immunise publisher revenue flows against all risk but in order to maximize research productivity and progress.
The latest
AAP/PSP critique of the latest US Public Access Bill (
FRPAA) makes the same points (already
rebutted two years ago) that they made in their prior critique of the
NIH Public Access Proposal.
Peter Suber has already sounded the right overall note by way of reply in OA News (see his
10 detailed points, much the same as mine, below):
(a) There is zero evidence that mandating self-archiving reduces subscription revenue.
(b) But even if self-archiving were ever to reduce subscription revenue, surely what is in the best interests of publishers' current revenue streams should not over-ride what is in the best interests of research and of the public that funds it.AAP/PSP: "The proposed legislation would require the majority of recipients of U.S. federal research agency funds to make their findings free within six months of publication. Publishers argue that the legislation, if passed, will seriously jeopardize the integrity of the scientific publishing process, and is a duplicative effort that places an unwarranted burden on research investigators."
AAP provides no evidence of how making research findings accessible for free to would-be users who cannot afford access would "seriously jeopardize the integrity of the scientific publishing process." AAP merely stipulate that it would.
Nor is it clear why AAP is speaking on behalf of researchers about "unwarranted burdens". Surely enhanced research usage and impact is not an unwarranted burden for research and researchers?
AAP/PSP: "According to the publishers, the provisions of S.2695 threaten to undermine the essential value of peer review by removing the publishers' incentive and ability to sustain investments in a range of scientific, technical, and medical publishing activities."
Translation: "Self-archive and I may not want to publish journals any more."
Peer review is done by researchers, for free. Whoever funds the management of peer review and the certification of its outcome is a journal publisher. There is no evidence that self-archiving reduces subscription revenue but even if there should ever be such evidence it certainly does not follow that research and researchers should renounce the demonstrated benefits of self-archiving. If/when some publishers should ever become dissatisfied with reduced subscription revenues, their journal titles can migrate to other publishers who are not dissatisfied, or to
Open Access ("gold") Publishers.
Surely demonstrated benefits (
increased research impact) for research, researchers and the public that funds them are not to be sacrificed in order to insulate publishers from an undemonstrated hypothetical risk to their current subscription revenues.
AAP/PSP: "The proposed legislation comes at a time when increased public access to government-funded research is already occurring in a voluntary and highly effective manner through a variety of publisher-initiated mechanisms and cooperative approaches."
"Highly effective" for whom? The fact is that many researchers cannot afford access to much needed research, and the proof of this is the fact that when subscription access is supplemented by author self-archiving, research usage and impact increase dramatically.
(Note that the issue is not primarily public access to research, but researcher access to research, in order to maximize the benefits of research to the public that funds it.)
AAP/PSP: "Americans have easy access to scientific and medical literature through public libraries, state universities, existing private-sector online database, as well as through their professional, academic, or business affiliations, low-cost online individual article sales, and innovative health literacy initiatives such as patientINFORM."
The primary objective of Open Access is to provide access to researchers, worldwide, for the sake of research uptake, usage, applications, and progress, by way of a return on the public's investment in the research. Researchers do not now have nearly as much access as they need, because no research institution can afford all or most of the journals in which the research appears. The demonstrated impact advantage of self-archived research is the direct evidence of the substantial access shortfall there is for research that is not self-archived.
Paid or library access is certainly not what OA is about or for. OA means online access, free for all would-be users.
AAP/PSP: "The Cornyn-Lieberman bill would create unnecessary costs for taxpayers"
This is complete nonsense.
Self-archiving costs are negligibly small.
AAP/PSP:
"[it would] place an unwarranted burden on research investigators"
Again complete nonsense. Self-archiving takes a few keystrokes:
Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving. AAP/PSP: "[it would] expropriate the value-added investments made by scientific publishers-many of them not-for-profit associations who depend on publishing income to support pursuit of their scholarly missions, including education and outreach for the next generation of U.S. scientists"
Nothing whatsoever is "expropriated": Publishers can continue to sell subscriptions and licenses for their paper and online editions, exactly as before. The author's self-archived final draft is not a substitute but a supplement, online only, for all would-be users who cannot afford the publisher's version. And so far there is no evidence whatsoever that self-archiving reduces subscription revenues at all, even in the areas that have been doing self-archiving the longest (15 years in high energy physics, even longer in computer science) and that are already at or near 100% self-archiving for years now.
Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. Technical Report, JISC Survey:
"[W]e asked the American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) what their experiences have been over the 14 years that arXiv has been in existence. How many subscriptions have been lost as a result of arXiv? Both societies said they could not identify any losses of subscriptions for this reason and that they do not view arXiv as a threat to their business (rather the opposite -- in fact the APS helped establish an arXiv mirror site at the Brookhaven National Laboratory [and shortly the IOP will host one too]).
Not-for-profit publishers (e.g. Learned Societies) do not differ in any way insofar as any of these considerations are concerned: There is abundant evidence that self-archiving increases research usage and impact and no evidence that it reduces subscription revenue. And research is not funded, conducted and published in order to generate revenue for publishers, let alone in order to guarantee their current revenue streams and insulate them from any risk. In particular, what has already been demonstrated to be in the best interests of research outweighs what has not even been demonstrated to have any negative effects on the interests of publishers.
AAP/PSP: "If enacted, S.2695 could well have the unintended consequence of compromising or destroying the independent system of peer review that ensures the integrity of the very research the U.S. Government is trying to support and disseminate."
Pure nonsense. See prior reply about peer review, done for free by researchers (the peer reviewers); publishers merely administer it, and for any publishers who may no longer wish to administer it, other publishers will be happy to do so in their place.
AAP/PSP: "publishers invest hundreds of millions of dollars each year in publishing and disseminating peer-reviewed journals. These investments ensure the quality of U.S. taxpayer-supported scientific research by subjecting all articles to a rigorous technical review by experts in specialized fields prior to publication and pay for the development of technological innovations that enable broad web dissemination."
Quality is ensured through peer review done by the research community itself; and the peers review for free. Publishers merely
administer the peer review, and in exchange they get to charge for the paper edition as well as the online edition. There is no evidence whatsoever that self-archiving diminishes their revenues from any of this, and if/when it should ever do so, the solution is certainly not to
not self-archive, and thereby deny research of self-archiving's substantial benefits in terms of research uptake, usage, applications, impact and progress.
The solution -- if/when subscription cancellation pressure were ever to happen -- would be to cut costs and adapt, scaling down to the new, smaller but still essential niche of peer-review service provision that will remain for peer-reviewed research journals in the PostGutenberg age even if no one wants to pay for the paper edition or the publisher's official online version any more because the author's self-archived draft is enough. The solution is certainly not to deny research, researchers and the public that funds them the benefits of the research impact and progress that self-archiving brings them.
AAP/PSP: "Mandating that journal articles be made freely available on government websites so soon after their publication will be a powerful disincentive for publishers to continue these substantial investments."
At the moment,
over 90% of journals have given immediate author self-archiving their green light. If some publishers are not happy with conferring this benefit on their authors' research, there are plenty of other publishers for their journal titles to migrate to (including the new breed of
Open Access "gold" publishers).
AAP/PSP: "publishers are concerned that S.2695 would result in a significant loss of revenue from subscriptions, licensing, and individual article sales, thereby making it difficult for them to sustain and recoup the investments they make in support of scientific communication."
There is no evidence whatsoever that self-archiving has reduced subscription revenue in the very fields that have been doing it the longest and the most (see above). So this publisher concern is purely hypothetical; and the actual effects to date contradict the hypothesis.
But if/when there should ever be a subscription revenue decline, the remedy is to adapt, cut costs, drop inessentials, and downsize to the new PostGutenberg niche for peer-reviewed journal publishing. The remedy is certainly not to sacrifice research impact in order to sustain current publishing revenues instead of adapting to the new technological contingencies opened up by the newfound possibility of providing Open Access to all research.
AAP/PSP: The proposed bill was introduced on the first anniversary of the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) adoption of its Public Access policy, which encourages the posting of journal articles based on NIH-funded research within 12 months of publication on its existing PubMedCentral database -- a policy that gained PSP/AAP member publisher support and yet remains in its early stages of government-led implementation. A departure from the NIH's voluntary approach, the Cornyn/Lieberman bill would mandate that 11 federal agencies create new systems and data repositories to enforce internet posting of government funded research within six months of publication. As the NIH's implementation of the policy has not yet progressed to the point where its impact can be assessed, publishers view the introduction of the Cornyn-Lieberman proposal as premature."
(1) The NIH policy can be and has been assessed, and it is a failure: The level of compliance with its non-mandatory "invitation" to self-archive is less than 4% after a year. The spontaneous self-archiving baseline worldwide and across disciplines is 15%!
(2) Meantime, self-archiving mandates (such as those of the
Wellcome Trust,
CERN, and
several universities) have been tried, tested, and shown to be successful in generating high compliance rates, exactly as the JISC author surveys had reported they would be:
Swan, A. and Brown, S. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An author study. JISC Technical Report, Key Perspectives Inc:
"The vast majority of authors (81%) would willingly comply with a mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional or subject-based repository. A further 13% would comply reluctantly; 5% would not comply with such a mandate."
(3) Research is funded, conducted and published in order to be taken up, used, and applied as soon as it has been validated by peer review. Research is not funded, conducted and published to be embargoed so as to guarantee publishers' current revenue streams.
AAP/PSP: "No evidentiary record exists, and no impact studies have been conducted, to document the long-term cost to tax payers of government agencies developing yet another system to promote public access.
Surely it is not the business of American Association of Publishers to concern itself with the cost to tax payers of providing open access to government-funded research. But studies have indeed been done, across disciplines, and they have found that self-archived research has substantially higher research impact (25% - 250+%), and this translates into substantially
higher return on the tax payers' investment in research than what they are getting for their research money today.
Competitively speaking, it also means higher salaries and more research income for the early self-archivers. And all, as noted, at a negligibly tiny cost per paper in terms of either author keystrokes or distributed institutional self-archiving costs.
So it is a self-serving red herring for publishers (in reality fretting about their own current revenue streams) to portray this as a "tax payer" issue.
AAP/PSP: "Moreover, no consideration has been given to what the impact of this government mandate will be on publishers and scholarly societies ability to maintain their broad base of library and other customers worldwide and invest in independent peer review systems."
The purpose of research and research funding is not to ensure publisher revenue streams, but to conduct, use and apply research, to the benefit of the tax payers that fund it. Peer-reviewers (researchers) review their peers' research for free. Journal editors merely
manage the peer review process, and the true costs of managing peer review can and will certainly be paid out of just a small portion of institutions' own annual windfall subscription cancellation savings -- if and when subscription revenues were ever to collapse catastrophically as a consequence of universal self-archiving.
But at the moment there is not even the slightest sign of a subscription decline: just speculations about doomsday scenarios, intended to hold self-archiving, with all its demonstrated benefits to research, researchers and tax-payers, at bay, so as to protect publishers' current revenue streams from a hypothetical risk.
Surely the rational thing to do is to mandate the self-archiving now, and then review its effects on publishers' revenues yearly, rather than to deny its certain benefits to research on the grounds of its hypothetical risks for publishers. (The delay has already been unconscionably long and wasteful of research impact and progress, and will be all the more embarrassing in historic hindsight.)
AAP/PSP: "Responsible major U.S. government policy revisions must be based on a solid, researched understanding of the long-range impact of any policy changes. This perspective is conspicuously absent from the proposed legislation, which would cause severe harm to the publishing community, scientific societies, and taxpayers."
The long-range effects should be investigated empirically. The positive effects of OA self-archiving for research, researchers and the tax-payers that fund them have already been empirically tested and found to be substantial. Meanwhile, there have been no detectable effects of self-archiving on subscription revenues at all so far, even for the two publishers (American Physical Society and Institute of Physics) in the fields that have been doing it the longest and most (15+ years).
The way to test the long-range effect of the FRPAA self-archiving mandate on subscriptions objectively and empirically is to adopt the mandate and monitor its effects annually, not to deny or keep delaying its already demonstrated positive effects on research impact on the basis of undemonstrated hypothetical negative effects on publisher revenues.
AAP/PSP: "publishers and scholarly societies urge that an independent study be conducted to measure the potential impact that any changes to the existing NIH policy or the adoption of the proposed Cornyn-Lieberman legislation would have on scientific quality, the peer review process, and the viability of numerous journals and societies--as well as the additional costs that would need to be shouldered by taxpayers."
To do the study in question amounts to adopting the self-archiving mandate and testing and reviewing its empirical outcome annually. All else is merely filibuster and bluster.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
