Professor Ian
Diamond
Chair, RCUK
Executive Group
Research
Councils UK Secretariat
Polaris House
, North Star Ave
Swindon SN2
1ET
Date: 22
August
Dear
Professor Diamond,
We
are responding to the public letter, addressed to yourself, by Sally
Morris
(Executive Director of ALPSP,
the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers),
concerning the RCUK's
proposed research self-archiving
policy.
ALPSP
says that the RCUK policy would have 'disastrous consequences' for
journals,
yet all objective evidence is precisely contrary to this dire
prediction. In
the point-by-point rebuttal attached (below) to this letter, we
document this
on the basis of the actual data and a careful logical analysis. Here is
a
summary:
ALPSP
argues that a policy of mandated self-archiving of research articles in
freely
accessible repositories,
when combined with the ready retrievability of those articles through
search
engines (such as Google Scholar)
and interoperability (facilitated by standards such as OAI-PMH),
"will accelerate the move to a disastrous scenario".
The disastrous scenario predicted by ALPSP is that an RCUK mandate would cause libraries to cancel subscriptions, which would in turn lead to the financial failure of scholarly journals, and so to the collapse of the quality control and peer review process that publishers manage.
Not
only are these claims unsubstantiated, but all the evidence to date
shows
the reverse to be true: not only do journals thrive and co-exist
alongside
author self-archiving, but they can actually benefit from it -- both in
terms
of more citations
and more subscriptions.
Moreover,
there is a logical contradiction in the position adopted by ALPSP. On the one hand, ALPSP maintains that
learned societies must be allowed to operate in a free market ("each
publisher must have the right to establish the best way of expanding
access to
its journal content that is compatible with continuing viability"). Yet
on
the other hand, ALPSP is in effect asking RCUK to protect learned
societies
from the consequences of a free market -- specifically the right of
those who
have funded and produced research to make their product readily
accessible for
uptake by its intended users.
What
no one denies is that today many researchers are unable to access all
the
research they need to do their work. As ALPSP itself acknowledges,
researchers
already have to make use of author self-archived articles in order to
gain
access to "otherwise inaccessible published articles," since no research institution can
afford
to subscribe to all the journals its researchers need.
In
short, due to the current constraints on the accessibility of research
results,
the potential of British scholarship is not being maximised currently.
Yet the
constraints on accessibility can now, in the digital age, be eliminated
completely, to the benefit of the UK economy and society, exactly in
the way
RCUK has proposed.
For
this reason, we believe that RCUK should go ahead and implement its
immediate-self-archiving mandate, without further delay. That done,
RCUK can
meet with ALPSP and other interested parties to discuss and plan how
the UK
Institutional Repositories can collaborate with journals and their
publishers
in sharing the newfound benefits of maximising UK research access and
impact.
(A
point-by-point rebuttal is attached below. A
longer analysis, signed also by some non-UK supporters, is
at http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/alpsp.doc
)
Yours
faithfully,
Professor Tim
Berners-Lee (University of Southampton)
Professor
Dave De Roure (University of Southampton)
Professor
Stevan Harnad (University of Southampton)
Professor
Nigel Shadbolt (University of Southampton)
Professor
Derek Law (University of Strathclyde)
Dr. Peter
Murray-Rust (University of Cambridge)
Professor
Charles Oppenheim (Loughborough University)
Professor
Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield)
Point-by-point
rebuttal:
ALPSP: a
policy of mandated self-archiving of
research articles in freely accessible repositories, when combined with
the
ready retrievability of those articles through search engines (such as
Google
Scholar) and interoperability (facilitated by standards such as
OAI-PMH), will
accelerate the move to a disastrous scenario.
This
hypothesis has already been tested and the actual evidence affords not
the
slightest hint of any 'move to a disastrous scenario.' Self-archiving
is most
advanced in physics, hence that is the strongest test of where it is
moving: Since 1991, hundreds of
thousands of articles have been made freely accessible and readily
retrievable
by physicists using the open archive called arXiv;
those articles have been extensively accessed, retrieved, used and
cited by other researchers exactly as their authors intended.
Yet when asked, both of the large physics learned societies (the
Institute of Physics Publishing in the UK and the American Physical
Society)
responded very explicitly that they cannot identify any loss of subscriptions to their
journals
as a result of this critical mass of self-archived and readily
retrievable
physics articles1.
ALPSP:
Librarians will increasingly find that 'good enough' versions of a
significant proportion of articles in journals are
freely available; in a situation where they lack the funds to purchase
all the
content their users want, it is inconceivable that they would not seek
to save
money by cancelling subscriptions to those journals. As a result, those
journals will die.
First,
neither research topics nor research journals have national boundaries.
RCUK-funded researchers publish articles in thousands of journals, and
those
articles represent the output of only a small fraction of the world's
research
population. It is therefore extremely unlikely that a 'significant
proportion'
of the articles in any particular journal will become freely available
as a
consequence of the RCUK policy.
Second,
as we know, some
physics
journals already do contain a
'significant
proportion' of articles that have been self-archived in the physics
repository,
arXiv -- yet librarians have not cancelled subscriptions: the journals
continue
to survive and thrive.
ALPSP: The
consequences of the destruction of
journals' viability are very serious. Not only will it become
impossible to
support the whole process of quality control, including (but not
limited to)
peer review, but in addition, the research community will lose all the
other
value and prestige which is added, for both author and reader, through
inclusion in a highly rated journal with a clearly understood audience
and rich
online functionality
Wherever
authors and readers value the rich online functionality added by
publishers
they will still wish to have access to the journal, either through
personal
subscriptions or through their libraries. This is obviously the case
for the
physics journals. Publishers who add significant value create a product
that
users and their institutions will pay for.
Researchers
who cannot access the journal version, however -- because their
institutions 'lack the funds to purchase all the content their users
want' -- should not be
denied access to the basic research results, which have always been
given away
for free by their authors (to their publishers, as well as to all
requesters of
reprints). Nor should those authors be denied the usage and impact of
those users.
Such limitations on access have always hampered
the impact and progress of British scholarship.
ALPSP: We
absolutely reject unsupported
assertions that self-archiving in publicly accessible repositories does
not and
will not damage journals. Indeed, we are accumulating a growing body of
evidence that the opposite is the case, even at this early stage. For
example:
[1]
Increasingly, librarians are making use of
COUNTER-compliant (and therefore comparable) usage statistics to guide
their
decisions to renew or cancel journals. The Institute of Physics
Publishing is
therefore concerned to see that article downloads from its site are
significantly lower for those journals whose content is substantially
replicated in the ArXiV repository than for those which are not.
And
what is the evidence supporting the assertion that 'the opposite is the
case'
and journals are damaged? None. As we know, the Institute of Physics
Publishing
(like the American Physical Society) has already stated publicly that
it cannot
identify any loss of subscriptions as a result of 14 years of
self-archiving by
physicists1.
Moreover, institutional repository software developers are now working with
publishers on ways to ensure that the usage of articles in repositories
is credited to the publisher.
ALPSP:
[2]
Citation statistics and the resultant impact
factors are of enormous importance to authors and their institutions;
they also
influence librarians' renewal/cancellation decisions. Both the
Institute of
Physics and the London Mathematical Society are therefore troubled to
note an
increasing tendency for authors to cite only the repository version of
an
article, without mentioning the journal in which it was later
published.
Librarians'
decisions to cancel or subscribe to journals are made on the basis of a
variety
of measures, citation statistics being just one of them2.
But self-archiving
increases citations,
so journals carrying
self-archived articles will perform better
under this measure.
Citing
the canonical version of an article wherever possible is a matter of
author
best-practice; it is misleading to cite momentary lags in scholarliness
as if
they were an argument against self-archiving. All of this can and will
be quite
easily and naturally adjusted, partly through updated scholarly
practice and
partly through institutional and publisher repositories collaborating
in a
system of pooled and shared
citation
statistics -- all credited to the official published version, as
proper
scholarliness dictates. These are all just natural adaptations to the
new
medium.
ALPSP: [3]
Evidence is also growing that free
availability of content has a very rapid negative effect on
subscriptions.
Oxford University Press made the contents of Nucleic Acids Research
freely
available online six months after publication; subscription loss was
much
greater than in related journals where the content was free after a
year...
[4] The
BMJ Publishing Group has noted a similar
effect...
[5] In
the USA, the Institute for Operations
Research and the Management Sciences ... made freely available on the
Web... noted
a subscriptions decline
In
all three examples whole journals
were made freely available, in their entirety, with all the added value
and
rich online functionality that a journal provides. This is not at all
the same
as the self-archiving of authors' drafts, which are simply the basic
research
results, provided by the author on a single-article basis. The latter,
not the
former, is the target of the proposed RCUK policy. It is hence highly
misleading to cite the effects of the former as evidence of negative
effects of
the latter.
(And
although the RCUK is not proposing to mandate whole-journal open
access, it is
worth noting that there is also plenty of evidence that journals have benefited
from being made freely available: Molecular Biology of the Cell's
(MBC's)
subscriptions have
grown steadily after free access was provided by its publisher, The
American
Society for Cell Biology3.
MBC also enjoys
a high impact factor and healthy
submissions by authors encouraged by the increased exposure their
articles
receive. The same has happened for journals published by other societies4.)
ALPSP: In
addition, it is increasingly clear
that this is exactly how researchers are already using search engines
such as
Scirus and Google Scholar... 'At this point, my main use of both
[Scirus and
Google Scholar] is for finding free Web versions of otherwise
inaccessible
published articles... Both Scirus and Scholar were also useful for
finding
author-hosted article copies, preprints, e-prints, and other
permutations of
the same article.'
Scirus, Google Scholar and the other search engines that retrieve open
access
articles serve the research community by enabling researchers to find
and
access articles they would otherwise be unable to read because they are
hidden
behind subscription barriers. These services help to maximise research
access,
usage and impact, all to the benefit of British science and
scholarship,
exactly as their authors and their institutions and funders wish them
to do.
ALPSP: In
the light of this growing evidence of
serious and irreversible damage, each publisher must have the right to
establish the best way of expanding access to its journal content that
is
compatible with continuing viability.
So
far no evidence of serious and irreversible damage inflicted by
self-archiving
has been presented by ALPSP. This is unsurprising, because none exists.
Publishers should do what they can to expand access and remain viable.
But they
certainly have no right to prevent researchers, their institutions and
their
funders from expanding access to their research findings either -- nor
to expect
them to wait and see whether their publishers will one day maximise
access for
them.
ALPSP: This
is not best achieved by mandating
the earliest possible self-archiving, and thus forcing the adoption of
untried
and uncosted publishing practices.
Self-archiving -- and what the RCUK is mandating -- is not a publishing practice at all: it is an author practice. And it has been tried and tested -- with great success -- for over 15 years without 'forcing the adoption' of any 'untried and uncosted publishing practices.' What UK research needs now is more self-archiving, not more delay and counterfactual projections.
ALPSP: This
in turn will deprive learned
societies of an important income stream, without which many will be
unable to
support their other activities -- such as meetings, bursaries, research
funding,
public education and patient information -- which are of huge benefit
both to
their research communities and to the general public.
Please contrast this
double-doomsday scenario ('self-archiving will not only destroy
journals but
all the other good works of learned societies') with the following
quote from
Dr Elizabeth Marincola, Executive Director of the American Society for
Cell
Biology, a sizeable but not huge society (10,000 members; many US
scientific
and medical societies have over 100,000):
"I
think the more dependent societies are on their publications, the
farther away
they are from the real needs of their members. If they were really
doing good
work and their members were aware of this, then they wouldn't be so
fearful......
When my colleagues come to me and say they couldn't possibly think of
putting
their publishing revenues at risk, I think 'why haven't you been
diversifying
your revenue sources all along and why haven't you been diversifying
your
products all along?' The ASCB offers a diverse range of products so
that if
publications were at risk financially, we wouldn't lose our membership
base
because there are lots of other reasons why people are members."3
This
perfectly encapsulates why we should not be taking too seriously the
dire
warnings from those learned societies who warn that self-archiving will
damage
research and its dissemination. The dissemination of research findings
should
be a high-priority service for learned societies, but not a commercial
end-in-itself that generates profit to subsidise other activities, at
the expense
of British research itself.
RCUK
should
go ahead and
implement its immediate-self-archiving
mandate, without any further delay, and then
meet with
ALPSP and other interested parties to discuss and plan how the UK
Institutional
Repositories can collaborate with journals and their publishers in
pooling
download and citation statistics, and in other other ways of sharing
the
benefits of maximising UK research
access and impact.
References
1. Swan, A
(2004). American Scientist Open Access
Forum 3
February, 2005
2. Personal
communication from a UK University Library
Director: 'I know of no HE library where librarians make cancellation
or
subscription decisions. Typically they say to the department/faculty
'We have
to save £X,000" from your share of the serials budget, what do you want to cut?'. These are seen as
academic
-- not metrics-driven --
judgements, and no librarian
makes
those academic judgements, as they are indefensible in Senate... [S]uch
decisions
are almost always wholly subjective, not objective, and have nothing to
do with
the existence or otherwise of repositories.'
3. The
society lady: an interview with Elizabeth
Marincola (2003) Open Access Now, October
6, 2003
4. Walker, T
(2002) Two
societies show how to profit by providing free access. Learned
Publishing 15, 279-284.
Copies also
sent to:
The
Lord Sainsbury of Turville Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for
Science
and Innovation Department of Trade and Industry
Professor
Sir Keith O'Nions Director General of Research Councils, Office of
Science and
Technology
Drs.
Astrid Wissenburg, RCUK Secretariat
Professor
Colin Blakemore, Medical Research Council
Frances
Marsden, Arts and Humanities Research Council
Professor
Julia Goodfellow, Biotechnology and Biological Research Council
Professor
Richard Wade, Particle Physics & Astronomy Research Council
Professor
Alan Thorpe, Natural Environment Research Council
Professor
John O'Reilly, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Professor
John Wood, Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils
Andrea Powell,
Chair of ALPSP Council (Director of Publishing, CAB
International)
