SUMMARY: The UK Research
Funding Councils (RCUK) have
proposed that all RCUK fundees should self-archive on the
web,
free for all, their own final drafts of all journal articles reporting
their
RCUK-funded research, in order to maximise their usage and impact. ALPSP (a
learned publishers' association) now seeks to delay and block the RCUK
proposal, arguing that it will ruin journals. All objective evidence
from the
past decade and a half of self-archiving, however, shows that
self-archiving
can and does co-exist peacefully with journals while greatly enhancing
both
author/article and journal impact, to the benefit of both. Journal
publishers
should not be trying to delay and block self-archiving policy; they
should be
collaborating with the research community on ways to share its vast
benefits.
This
is a reply to the public letter by Sally Morris, Executive Director of ALPSP
(Association of
Learned and Professional Society Publishers) to Professor Ian Diamond,
Chair,
RCUK (Research Councils UK), concerning the RCUK proposal to
mandate
the web self-archiving
of
authors' final drafts of all journal articles resulting from
RCUK-funded
research, making them freely accessible to all researchers worldwide
who cannot
afford access to the official journal version, in order to maximise the
usage
and impact of the RCUK-funded research findings.
It is
extremely important that the arguments and objective evidence for or
against
the optimality of research self-archiving policy be aired
and discussed openly, as they have been for several years now, all
over the
world, so that policy decisions are not influenced by one-sided
arguments from
special interests that can readily be shown to be invalid. Every single
one of
the points made by the ALPSP below is incorrect -- incorrect both from
the
standpoint of both objective evidence and careful logical
analysis. We accordingly provide a point
by point rebuttal here, along with a plea for an end to publishers'
efforts to
block or delay self-archiving policy -- a policy that is undeniably
beneficial
to research and researchers, as well as to their institutions and the
public
that funds them. Publishers should collaborate with the research
community to
share the benefits of maximising research access and impact.
(Please
note that this is not the first
time the ALPSP's points have been made, and rebutted; but whereas the rebuttals
take very careful, detailed account of the points made by ALPSP, the
ALPSP
unfortunately just keeps repeating its points without taking any
account of the
detailed replies. By way of illustration, the prior
ALPSP critique of the RCUK proposal (April 19) was followed on July
1 by a point-by-point
rebuttal. The reader who compares the two cannot fail to notice
certain
recurrent themes that ALPSP keeps
ignoring in their present critique. In particular,
3 of the 5 examples that ALPSP cites below as evidence of
the negative effects of self-archiving on journals turn out to have
nothing at
all to do with self-archiving, exactly as pointed out in the earlier
rebuttal.
The other 2 examples turn out to be positive evidence for the potential
of
sharing the benefits through cooperation and collaboration between the
research
and publishing community, rather than grounds for denying research and
researchers those benefits through
opposition.)
Professor Ian Diamond
Chair, RCUK Executive Group
Research Councils UK Secretariat
Polaris House
North Star Ave Swindon SN2 1ET
5th August, 2005
Copies 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)
ALPSP response
to RCUK's proposed position
statement on access to research
outputs
ALPSP:
This
usage and application is called research impact. Research impact
is a measure of
research progress and productivity: the influence that the findings
have had on
the further course of research and its applications; the difference it
has made
that a given piece of research has been conducted at all, rather than
being
left unfunded and undone. Research impact is the reason the public
funds the
research and the reason researchers conduct the research and report the
results. Research that makes no impact may as well not have been
conducted at
all. One of the primary indicators -- but by no means the only one --
of research
impact is the number of resulting pieces of research by others that make use of
a finding,
by citing
it. Citation counts are accordingly quantitative measures of research
impact.
(The reader is reminded, at this early point in our critique, that it
is
impossible for a piece of research to be read, used, applied and cited
by any
researcher who cannot access it. Research access is a necessary
(though not
a sufficient) condition
for research impact.)
Owing
to this central importance of impact in the research growth and
progress cycle,
the authors of research are rewarded not by income from the sales of
their
texts, like normal authors, but by 'impact
income'
based on how much their research findings are used, applied, cited
and built upon. Impact is what helps pay the author's salary, what
brings
further RCUK grant income, and what brings RAE (Research
Assessment
Exercise) income to the author's institution. And the reason the public
pays
taxes for the RCUK and RAE to use to fund research in the first place
is so
that that research can benefit the public -- not so that it can
generate sales
income for publishers. There is nothing wrong with research also
generating
sales income for publishers. But there is definitely something wrong if
publishers try to prevent researchers from maximising the impact of
their
research, by maximising access to it. For whatever limits research
access
limits research progress; to repeat: access is a necessary
condition for
impact.
Hence,
for researchers and their institutions, the need to 'maximise access to
research information' is not just a pious promotional slogan: Whatever
denies
access to their research output is denying the public the research
impact and progress
it paid for and denying researchers and their institutions the impact
income
they worked for. Journals provide access to all individuals and
institutions
that can afford to subscribe to them, and that is fine. But what about
all the
other would-be users -- those researchers world-wide whose institutions
happen
to be unable to afford to
subscribe to the journal in which a research finding happens to be
published?
There are 24,000
research
journals and most institutions can afford access only to a small fraction of them.
Across all
fields
tested so far (including physics,
mathematics, biology, economics, business/management, sociology,
education,
psychology, and philosophy), articles that have been self-archived freely on the web, thereby maximising
access, have been shown to have 50%-250+% greater
citation impact
than articles that have not been self-archived. Is it reasonable to
expect
researchers and their institutions and funders to continue to renounce
that
vast impact potential in an online age that has made this impact-loss
no longer
necessary? Can asking researchers to keep on losing that impact be
seriously
described as 'maximising access to
research information'? Now let us see on what grounds researchers are
being
asked to renounce this impact:
If it
were indeed true that the RCUK's policy will inevitably lead to the
destruction
of journals, then this contingency would definitely be worthy of
further time
and thought.
But
there is in fact no objective evidence whatseover in support of this
dire
prophecy. All evidence1
from 15 years of self-archiving
(in some fields having reached 100% self-archiving
long ago) is exactly the opposite: that
self-archiving and journal
publication can and do continue to co-exist peacefully, with
institutions continuing to subscribe to the journals
they can afford, and researchers at the institutions that can afford
them
continuing to use them; the only change is that the author's own
self-archived
final drafts (as well as earlier pre-refereeing preprints)
are now accessible to all those researchers whose
institutions could not
afford the official journal version (as well as to any who may wish to
consult
the pre-refereeing preprints). In
other words, the self-archived author's drafts, pre- and
post-refereeing, are supplements to the official journal
version, not substitutes
for it.
In
the absence of any objective evidence at all to the effect that
self-archiving
reduces subscriptions, let alone destroys journals, and in the face of
15
years' worth of evidence to the contrary, ALPSP simply amplifies the
rhetoric,
elevating pure speculation to a putative basis for continuing to delay
and
oppose a policy that is already long overdue and a practice that has
already
been amply demonstrated to deliver something of immense benefit to
research,
researchers, their institutions and funders: dramatically enhanced
impact. All
this, ALPSP recommends, is to be put on hold because some publishers
have the 'conviction' that self-archiving will destroy journals.
ALPSP:
The objective evidence from 15
years of continuous
self-archiving by physicists
(even longer by computer
scientists) has in fact tested his grim hypothesis; and this
evidence
affords not the slightest hint of any move to a 'disastrous scenario.'
Throughout the past decade and a half, final drafts of hundreds
of
thousands of articles have been made freely accessible and readily
retrievable by their authors (in some fields approaching 100% of the
research
published). And these have indeed been extensively accessed
and
retrieved and used and applied and cited by
researchers
in those disciplines, exactly as their authors intended (and
far more extensively than articles for which the authors' drafts had
not been
made freely accessible). 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 could identify no loss of subscriptions to
their journals as a result
of this critical mass of self-archived and readily retrievable physics
articles1.
The
ALPSP's
doomsday conviction does not gain in plausibility by merely being
repeated,
ever louder.
Google Scholar and OAI-PMH do indeed make the
self-archived supplements more accessible to their would-be users, but that
is the point:
The purpose of self-archiving is to maximise access to research
information. Some publishers may still be
in the habit of reckoning that research is well-served by
access-denial, but
the providers of that research -- the researchers themselves, and their
funders -- can be forgiven for reckoning ,
and acting, otherwise.
ALPSP:
First, please note the
implicit premise here: Where
research institutions 'lack the funds to purchase all the content their
researchers want,' the users (researchers) should do without that
content,
not give it to one another, as the RCUK proposes. And why?
Because researchers giving their own research to one another will make
journals
die.
Second, RCUK-funded
researchers publish in thousands
of journals all over
the world -- the UK, Europe and North America. Their publications,
though
important, represent the output of only a small
fraction
of the world's research population. Neither research topics nor
research
journals have national boundaries. Hence it is unlikely that a
'significant
proportion' of the articles in any particular journal will become
freely
available purely as a consequence of the RCUK policy.
Third, journals die and are
born every year, since the
advent of journals. Their birth may be because of a new niche, and
their demise
might be because of the loss or saturation of an old niche, or because
the new
niche was an illusion. Scholarly fashions, emphases and growth regions
also
change. This is ordinary intellectual evolution plus market economics.
Fourth (and most important),
as we have already noted,
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
subscriptions1 despite a decade and a half's opportunity
to do
so, and the journals continue to survive and thrive. So whereas ALPSP
may find
it subjectively 'inconceivable,' the objective fact is that
self-carving is not
generating cancellations, even where it is most advanced and has been
going on
the longest.
Research
libraries -- none of which can afford to subscribe to all journals,
because they
have only finite journals budgets -- have always tried to maximise
their
purchasing power, cancelling
journals they think their users need less, and subscribing to
journals
they think their users need more. As objective indicators, some may use
(1)
usage statistics (paper and online) and (2) citation impact factors,
but the
final decision is almost always made on the basis of (3) surveys of
their own
users' recommendations2. Self-archiving
does not change this one bit, because self-archiving is not
done on a per-journal basis but on a per-article basis. And it is done anarchically,
distributed across authors, institutions and disciplines. An RCUK
mandate for
all RCUK-funded researchers to self-archive all their articles will
have no net
differential effect on any particular journal one way or the other. Nor
will
RCUK-mandated self-archiving exhaust the contents of any particular
journal. So
librarians' money-saving and budget-balancing subscription/cancellation
efforts may proceed apace.
Journals will continue to be born and to die, as they always did, but
with no
differential influence from self-archiving.
But
let us fast-forward this: The RCUK self-archiving mandate itself is
unlikely to
result in any individual journal's author-archived supplements rising
to
anywhere near 100%, but if the RCUK model is followed (as is quite
likely) by
other nations around the world, we may indeed eventually reach 100%
self-archiving
for all articles in all journals. That would certainly be optimal for
research,
researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the tax-paying
public that
funds the funders. Would it be disastrous for journals? A certain
amount of
pressure would certainly be taken off librarians' endless
struggle to balance their
finite journal budgets:
The
yearly journal selection process would no longer be a struggle for
basic
survival (as all researchers would have online access to at least the
author-self-archived supplements), but market competition would
continue among
publisher-added-values, which include (1) the paper edition and (2) the
official, value-added, online edition (functionally enriched with XML
mark-up,
citation links, publisher's PDF, etc.). The market for those added
values would
continue to determine what was subscribed to and what was cancelled,
pretty
much as it does now, but in a calmer way, without the mounting panic
and
desperation that struggling with balancing researchers' basic inelastic
survival needs has been carrying with it for years now (the 'serials
crisis').
If,
on the other hand, the day were ever to come when there was no longer a
market
for the paper edition, and no longer a market for some of the online
added-values, then surely the market can be trusted to readjust to that
new
supply/demand optimum, with publishers continuing to sell whatever
added values
there is still a demand for. One sure added-value, for example, is peer
review.
Although journals don't actually perform the peer review (researchers
do it for
them, for free), they do administer it, with qualified expert editors
selecting
the referees, adjudicating the referee reports, and ensuring that
authors
revise as required. It is conceivable that one day that peer review
service
will be sold as a separate
service to authors and their insitutions, with the journal-name
just a tag
that certifies the outcome, instead of being bundled into a product
that is
sold to users and their institutions. But that is just a matter of
speculation
right now, when there is still a healthy demand for both the paper and
online
editions. Publishing will co-evolve naturally with the evolution of the
online
medium itself. But what cannot be allowed to happen now is for
researchers'
impact (and the public's investment and stake in it) to be held hostage
to the
status quo, under the pretext of forestalling a doomsday scenario that
has no
evidence to support it and all evidence to date contradicting it.
ALPSP:
Notice
that the doomsday scenario has simply been taken for granted here,
despite the
absence of any actual evidence for it, and despite all the existing
evidence to
the contrary. Because it is being intoned so shrilly and with such
'conviction', it is to be taken at face value, and we are simply to
begin our
reckoning with accepting it as an unchallenged premise:
but that premise is without any objective foundation
whatsoever.
As
ALPSP mentions peer review, however, is this not the point to remind
ourselves
that among the many (unquestionable) values that the publisher does
add,
peer-review is a rather anomalous one, being an unpaid service that
researchers
themselves are rendering to the publisher gratis (just as they give
their
articles gratis, without seeking any payment)?
As
noted above,
the implementation of peer review could in principle be sold as a
separate service to the author-institution,
instead of being bundled with a product to the
subscriber-institution; hence it
is not true that it would be 'impossible to support' peer review even
if
journals' subscription base were to collapse entirely. But as there is
no evidence
of any tendency toward a collapse of the subscription base, this is all
just
hypothetical speculation at this point.
ALPSP:
Wherever authors and readers
value either the paper
edition or the rich online functionality -- both provided only by the
publisher
-- they will continue to subscribe to the journal as long as they can
afford
it, either personally or through their institutional library. As noted above, this clearly
continues
to be the case for the physics journals that are the most advanced in
testing
the waters of self-archiving. Publishers who add sufficient value
create a
product that the market will pay for (by the definition of supply,
demand and
sufficient-value). However, surely the interests of research and the
public
that funds it are not best-served if those researchers
(potential users) who happen to be
unable to afford the particular journal in which the functionally
enriched,
value-added version is published are denied access to the basic
research finding
itself. Even more important and pertinent to the RCUK proposal: The
fundee's
and funder's research should not be denied the impact potential from
all those researchers who cannot afford access.
Researchers have always given
away all their findings (to
their publishers as well as to all requesters of reprints) so that
other
researchers could further advance the research by using, applying and
building
upon their findings. Access-denial has always limited the progress,
productivity and impact of science and scholarship. Now the online age
has at
last made it possible to put an end to this needless access-denial and
resultant impact-loss; the RCUK is simply the first to propose
systematically
applying the natural, optimal, and inevitable remedy to all research
output.
Whatever
publisher-added value is truly value continues to be of value when it
co-exists
with author self-archiving. Articles continue to appear in journals,
and the
enriched functionality of the official value-added online edition (as
well as
the paper edition) are still there to be purchased. It is just that
those who
could not afford them previously will no longer be deprived of access
to the
research findings themselves
ALPSP:
(Notice,
first, that this is all still predicated on the truth of the doomsday
conviction -- 'that self-archiving
will inevitably destroy journals' -- which is contradicted by all
existing
evidence.)
But
insofar as learned-societies 'other activieties' are concerned, there
is a very
simple, straight-forward way to put the proposition at issue :
Does anyone
imagine that researchers would knowingly choose to continue
subsidising
learned societies'
admirable good works -- meetings, bursaries, research funding, public
education
and patient information -- at the cost
of their own lost research impact?
The
ALPSP doomsday 'conviction', however, has no basis in evidence. All
indications
to date are that learned societies will continue to publish journals --
adding
value and successfully selling the added-value -- in peaceful
co-existence with
RCUK-mandated self-archiving. But
entirely apart from that, ALPSP certainly has no grounds for asking
researchers
to renounce maximising their own
research impact for the sake of financing learned societies' good works
(like
meetings, bursaries and public education) -- good works that could
finance
themselves in alternative ways that were not parasitic on research
progress, if
circumstances were ever to demand it
The ALPSP letter began by
stating that the mission of
ALPSP publisher members is to 'disseminate and maximise access to
research
information'. Some of the journal-publishing learned societies do
indeed
proclaim this to be their mission; yet by their restrictive publishing
practices they actively contradict it, and defend the undeniable
contradiction
by invoking a disaster scenario (very like the one ALPSP repeatedly
cites) in
the name of protecting the publishing profits that support all of the
society's
other activities. Yet this is not the attitude of forward-thinking,
member-oriented societies that understand properly what researchers in
their
fields need and know how to deliver it. Here is a 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 members):
"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 too
credulous about the dire warnings from learned societies that
self-archiving
will damage research and its dissemination. The dissemination of
research
findings should be a high-priority service for societies -- a direct
end in
itself, not a financial activity to generate profit to subsidise other
activities, at the expense of research itself.
ALPSP:
The thrust
of the above statement is rather unclear: The self-archiving itself
will indeed
be distributed across all journals, worldwide. Hence, if it had indeed
been 'damaging', that damage would
likewise be distributed (and diluted) across all journals, not
concentrated on
any particular journal. So what is the point being made here?
But
in fact there is no evidence at all that self-archiving is damaging to
journals, rather than co-existing peacefully with them; and a great
deal of
evidence that it is extremely beneficial to research, researchers,
their
institutions and their funders.
ALPSP:
We shall now examine whose
assertions need to be
absolutely rejected as unsupported, and whether there is indeed 'a growing body of evidence that the
opposite is the case'.
What
follows is the ALPSP's 5 pieces of putative evidence
in support of their expressed 'conviction' that
self-archiving will damage journals. Please follow carefully, as the
first two
pieces of evidence [1]-[2] --
concerning usage and citation statistics -- will turn out to be
positive
evidence rather than negative evidence, and the last three pieces of
evidence
[3]-[5] -- concerning journals that
make all of their own articles free online -- turn out to have nothing
whatsoever to do with author self-archiving:
ALPSP:
How does example
[1] show that 'the opposite is the case'? As has already been
reported above,
the Institute of Physics Publishing (UK) and the American
Physical Scoiety have both stated publicly
that it can identify no
loss of subscriptions as a result of nearly 15 years of self-archiving
by
physicists! (Moreover, publishers and institutional repositories can
and will
easily work out a collaborative system of pooled usage statistics, all
credited to the publisher's official version; so that is no principled
obstacle
either.)
The
easiest thing in the world for Institutional Repositories (IRs) to
provide to
publishers (along with the link from the self-archived supplement in
the IR to
the official journal version on the publisher's website that is
dictated by
good scholarly practice) is the IR download
statistics
for the self-archived version of each article. These can be pooled with
the
download statistics for the official journal version and all of it (rightly) credited to the article
itself. Another bonus that the self-archived supplements already
provide is enhanced
citation impact -- of which it is not only the article, the author,
the institution and the
funder who are the co-beneficiaries, but also the journal and the
publisher, in
the form of an enhanced
journal impact factor (average citation count). It has also been
demonstrated recently that download impact and citation impact are correlated, downloads
in the
first six months after publication being predictive of citations after
2 years.
All
these statistics and benefits are there to be shared between
publishers,
librarians and research institutions in a cooperative, collaborative
atmosphere
that welcomes the benefits of self-archiving to research and that works
to
establish a system that shares them among the interested parties. Collaboration
on the sharing of
the benefits of self-archiving is what learned societies
should be setting up meetings to do -- rather than just trying to delay
and
oppose what is so obviously a substantial and certain benefit to
research,
researchers, their institutions and funders, as well as a considerable
potential benefit to journals, publishers and libraries. If publishers
take an
adversarial stance on self-archiving, all they do is deny themselves of
its
potential benefits (out of the groundless but self-sustaining
'conviction' that
self-archiving can inevitably bring them only disaster). Its benefits
to
research are demonstrated and incontestable, hence will incontestably
prevail.
(ALPSP's efforts to delay the optimal and inevitable will not redound
to
learned societies' historic credit, and the sooner they drop their
filibustering and turn to constructive cooperation and collaboration,
the
better for all parties concerned.)
ALPSP:
Librarians' decisions about
which journals to renew or
cancel take into account a variety of comparative measures, citation
statistics
being one of them2. Self-archiving has
now been analysed extensively and shown to increase
journal article citations substantially in field after
field;
so journals carrying self-archived articles will have higher impact
factors,
and will hence perform better under this measure in
competing for
their share of libraries' serials budgets. This refutes example [2].
As to the proper citation of
the official journal
version: This is merely a question of proper scholarly practice, which
is
evolving and will of course adapt naturally to the new medium; a
momentary lag
in scholarly rigour is certainly no argument against the practice of
self-archiving or its benefits to research and researchers. (Moreover,
publishers and institutional repositories can and will easily work out
a
collaborative system of pooled citation
statistics -- all credited to the official published version.
So that is
no principled obstacle either.)
Again,
this can and will be quite easily and naturally remedied,
collaboratively,
through a system of pooled citation and reference statistics -- all
credited to
the official published version. This is just a matter of adapting
scholarly
practices naturally to the new medium (and that too is inevitable). It
borders
on the absurd to cite something whose solution is so simple and obvious
as
serious grounds for preventing research impact from being maximised by universal self-archiving!
ALPSP:
This
is a non-sequitur, having nothing to do with self-archiving, one way or
the
other (as was already pointed out in the prior
rebuttal of APLSP's April
critique of the RCUK proposal): This example refers to an
entire
journal's contents
-- the official value-added versions, all being made freely accessible, all at once, by the
publisher --
not to the anarchic, article-by-article self-archiving of the author's
final
draft by the author, which is what the RCUK is mandating. This example
in fact
reinforces what was noted earlier: that RCUK-mandated self-archiving
does not
single out any individual journal (as OU Press did above with one of
its own)
and drive its self-archived content to 100%. Self-archiving is
distributed
randomly across all journals. Since journals compete (somewhat) with
one
another for their share of each institution's finite journal
acquisitions
budget, it is conceivable that if one journal gives away 100% of its
official,
value-added contents online and the others don't, that journal might be
making
itself more vulnerable to differential cancellation (though not
necessarily:
there are reported
examples of the exact opposite effect too, with the free online
version
increasing not only visibility, usage and citations, but thereby also
increasing subscriptions, serving as an advertisement for the journal).
But
this is in any case no evidence for cancellation-inducing
effects of self-archiving, which
involves only the author's final drafts and is not focussed on any one
journal
but randomly distributed across all journals, leaving them to continue
to
compete for subscriptions amongst themselves, on the basis of their
relative
merits, exactly as they did before.
ALPSP:
Exactly
the same reply as above: The risks of making 100% of one journal's
official,
value-added contents free online while all other journals are not doing likewise
has nothing
whatosever to do with anarchic self-archiving, by authors, of the final
drafts
of their own articles, distributed randomly across journals.
ALPSP:
Exactly
the same artifact as in the prior two cases. (The trouble with
self-generated
Doomsday Scenarios is that they tend to assume such a grip on the
imagination
that their propounders cannot distinguish objective evidence from the 'corroboration' that comes from
merely begging the question or changing the subject!)
In all three examples, whole
journals were
made freely available, all at once, in their entirety, along with all
the added
value and rich online functionality that a journal provides. This is
not at all
the same as authors self-archiving only their own final drafts (which
are
simply their basic research reports), and doing so on a single-article (rather than a whole-journal) basis.
Yet the latter is all that the RCUK proposes to mandate. Hence examples
[3]-[5]
are really a misleading conflation of two altogether different matters
creating
the illusion of support for what is in fact an untenable conclusion on
which
they actually have no bearing one way or the other.
[Moreover -- even though it
has nothing at all to do
with what the RCUK is mandating --if one does elect to look at evidence
from
whole-journal open access then there are many more examples of journals
that
have benefited from being made freely available: Molecular Biology
of the
Cell's subscriptions, for example,
have grown steadily
after free access was provided by its publisher, The
American Society for Cell Biology3. That journal 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:
This
is merely a repetition of ALPSP's earlier point about OAI and Google Scholar. Reply: Yes,
these
wonderful new resources do increase access to the self-archived
supplements:
but that's the point! To maximise research access, usage and impact.
Other search engines that
retrieve free access
articles (such as citebase,
citeseer and OAIster) likewise
serve the
research community by enabling any
unsubscribed researchers to find and access to drafts of articles they
could
not otherwise use because they are accessible only by subscription.
ISI's Web of Knowledge, a paid
service, finds the
authors' free versions as well as the journals' subscription-only
versions,
which researchers can then use whenever they or their institutions can
afford
subscription, license, or pay-per-view access; Scirus, a free service,
likewise
retrieves both, as does Google
itself (if
at least the reference metadata are made web-accessible). All these
services do
indeed help to maximise access, usage and impact, all to the benefit of
the
impact of that small proportion of current research that happens to be
spontaneously self-archived already (15%). The RCUK mandate will
increase this
benefit systematically to that remaining 85% of UK research output that
is
still only accessible today to those who can afford the official
journal
version.
ALPSP:
This
point, on the other hand, is not about author self-archiving, but about
pirating and bootleg of the publisher's official version. RCUK is not
mandating
or condoning anything like that: The policy pertains only to authors'
own final
drafts, self-archived by them -- not to the published version poached
by 3rd
party consumers, which is called theft.
(Hence this
point is irrelevant.)
ALPSP:
Exactly
as one would hope they would be, if one hopes to 'maximise access to
research'.
ALPSP:
So far no evidence whatsoever
of 'serious and
irreversible damage' (or indeed of any damage) caused by author
self-archiving
has been presented by ALPSP. (This is unsurprising, because in reality
no such
evidence exists, and all existing evidence is to the contrary.)
Of
course publishers can and should do whatever they wish in order to
expand
access to their journal content and remain viable. But they certainly
have no
right to prevent researchers, their institutions and their funders from
likewise doing whatever they can and wish in order to expand the access
to, and
the impact of, their own research findings -- nor
to expect them to agree to keep waiting passively to see
whether their publishers will one day maximise their access and impact
for
them.
100%
self-archiving is already known to be both doable and to enhance
research
impact substantially; self-archiving has also been co-existing
peacefully with
journals for over a decade and a half (including in those fields where
100%
self-archiving has already been reached) ; 100% self-archiving overall
is
already well overdue, and years' worth of research impact have already
been needlessly
lost waiting for it. ALPSP has given no grounds whatsoever for
continuing
this delay for one moment longer. It has merely aired a doomsday
scenario of
its own imagination and then adduced 'evidence'
in its support that is obviously irrelevant and
defeasible.What is certain is that research impact cannot be held
hostage to
publishers' anxieties, simply on the grounds of their subjective
intensity.
ALPSP:
Self-archiving
in October 2005 is not 'the earliest possible self-archiving'.
It is
self-archiving that is already at least a decade overdue.
And it
has nothing to do with untried and uncosted publishing practices: Self-archiving is
not a publishing practice at all; it is a researcher
practice. And it has been tried and
tested -- with great success
and great benefits for research progress -- for over 15 years now.
What is
needed today is more self-archiving
-- 100% -- not more delay.
Or does the
'earliest
possible' here refer not to when the RCUK self-archiving mandate is at
last
implemented, but how early the published article should be
self-archived? If so, the answer from the
point of
view of research impact and progress is unambiguous: The final
draft should
be self-archived and made
accessible to all potential users immediately upon acceptance for
publication
(prefinal preprint drafts even earlier,
if the author wishes). No research
usage or progress should be held back arbitrarily for 3, 6, 12 or more
months,
for any reason whatsoever.
It
cannot be stressed enough just how crucial it is for RCUK to resist any
pressure to impose any sort of access-denial period, of any length,
during which unpaid access to research findings would be embargoed -- findings that the RCUK has paid for,
with public money, so that they can be immediately reported, used,
applied and
built upon, for the benefit of the public that paid for it, not so that
they
can be embargoed, for the benefit of assuaging publishers' subjective
fears
about 'disaster scenarios' for which there does not exist a shred of
objective evidence. Any delay that is
allowed amounts to an
embargo on research productivity and progress, at the expense of the
interests
of the tax-paying public. That is exactly what happened recently to the
US
National
Institutes of Health's public access policy, setting US research
access and
impact back several years.
Fortunately,
there is a simple compromise that will completely immunise the RCUK
mandate
from any possibility of being rendered ineffectual in this way:
What
all
RCUK-funded
researchers should be required to self-archive in their own
Institutional
Repositories (IRs) immediately upon acceptance for publication are:
(1) the
article's metadata
(author
name, date, article title, journal name, etc.).
plus
(2)
The article's
final draft
(full-text)
That
fulfills
the RCUK requirement. The
access-setting, however, can then be given two options:
(OA)
Open
Access
(both the metadata and the full-text
are made freely accessible to everyone webwide)
or
(IA)
Institutional
Access
(the metadata are freely accessible webwide but the full-text is made
accessible only to the fundee's institution, its employees, and its
funders,
such as the RCUK or RAE, for record-keeping, grant-fulfillment and
performance-assessment purposes).
The
RCUK
fundee is strongly
encouraged
(but not required) to set access to OA
immediately.
As 90% of journals have
already
given article self-archiving their official green light, 90% of
articles can be
set to OA immediately. For the remaining 10%, the author can set the
article at
IA initially, but of course its metadata (author, title, journal, etc.)
will
immediately be openly accessible webwide to all would-be users, just as
the
metadata of the OA 90% are. That's enough data so that would-be users
can
immediately email the author for an 'eprint' (the author's final draft)
if they
cannot afford to access the journal version. The author can keep
emailing
eprints to each would-be user until either the remaining 10% of
journals
updates their policy or the author tires of doing all those needless
keystrokes
and sets the article to OA. In the meanwhile, however, 100% of
RCUK-funded
research will be immediately accessible webwide, 90% of it directly,
and 10% of
it with author mediation, maximising its access and impact. Nature can
take
care of the rest at its leisure.
ALPSP: It is clearly unrealistic to consult
adequately with all those likely to be affected over the summer holiday
period,
and we therefore urge you to extend the consultation period and to
defer, for
at least 12 months, the introduction of any mandate for authors to
self-archive. In the meantime, we would like to take up RCUK's
expressed
willingness to engage with both publishers and learned societies,
beginning
with a meeting in early September with representatives of ALPSP; we
propose one
of the following dates :
5th September,
6th September, 7th
September, 8th September
We look forward to a reply at your
earliest
convenience.
Yours sincerely
Sally Morris, Chief Executive
The
consultation has been going on since long
before 'the summer holiday period' and there has already been far
more
delay and far more research impact needlessly lost than anyone can
possibly
justify. Some members of the publishing community are quite leisurely
about
continuing to prolong this needless loss of research impact and
progress in
order to continue debating, but the research community itself is not
(as
indicated, for example, by the
ill-fated demand for open access -- by a deadline of September 1, 2001
-- on the
part of the 34,000 researchers
who signed
the PloS petition).
RCUK
should go ahead and implement its immediate-self-archiving
mandate, with no further delay
deferral, 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. Any further pertinent matters and developments can
be
discussed as well -- but not at the cost of further delaying what is
indisputably the optimal and inevitable (and long overdue) outcome for
research, researchers, their institutions, and their funders -- and for
the
public, which funds the research on the understanding that its use and
applications are meant to be maximised
to benefit the public's interests, not minimised
to protect other parties' from imaginary
threats to their interests.
(A
shorter UK version of this critique -- http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/18-guid.html
--
has been co-signed
by the
following UK senior researchers [in boldface] and mailed as hard
copy to the
recipients of the ALPSP statement. The preseny longer analysis is also
co-signed by some
prominent
international supporters of the RCUK initiative.)
Tim
Berners-Lee (UK, Southampton & US, MIT)
Dave
De Roure (UK, Southampton)
Stevan
Harnad (UK, Southampton &
Canada, UQaM)
Derek
Law (UK, Strathclyde)
Peter
Murray-Rust (UK, Cambridge)
Charles
Oppenheim (UK, Loughborough)
Nigel
Shadbolt (UK, Southampton)
Yorick
Wilks (UK, Sheffield)
Subbiah
Arunachalam (India, MSRF)
Helene
Bosc (France, INRA, ret.)
Fred
Friend (UK, University College, London)
Peter
Suber (US, Earlham)
References
1. Swan, A (2004). Re:
Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding.
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.
Open Access Now: 6 October 2003
4. Walker, T (2002) Two
societies show how to profit by providing free access. Learned
Publishing 15:
279-284.
