Journal Publishing and Author
Self-Archiving:
Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration
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)
Andrew Odlyzko (US, University of Minnesota)
Arthur Sale (Australia, University of Tasmania)
Peter Suber (US, Earlham)
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 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, auguring 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 public reply, co-signed by the above, to the August 5, 2005,
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 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.)
All quotes are from ALPSP
response to RCUK's proposed position statement on access to research
outputs
which was addressed to: Professor Ian Diamond, Research Councils UK
Secretariat on 5th August, 2005:
ALPSP: "Although the mission of our publisher
members is to disseminate and maximise access to research information"
The principle of maximising access to research information is
indeed the very essence of the issue at hand. The reader of the
following statements and counter-statements should accordingly bear
this principle in mind while weighing them: Unlike the authors of books
or of magazine and newspaper articles, the authors of research journal
articles are not writing in order to sell their words, but in order to
share their findings, so other researchers can use and build upon them,
in order to advance research progress, to the benefit of the public
that funded the research. 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:
ALPSP: "we find ourselves unable to support RCUK's
proposed position paper on the means of achieving this. We continue to
stress all the points we made in our previous response, dated 19 April,
and are insufficiently reassured by RCUK's reply. We are convinced that
RCUK's proposed policy will inevitably lead to the destruction of
journals."
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 evidence (footnote
1) 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
justification 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: "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 objective evidence from 15 years of continuous self-archiving by physicists (even
longer by computer
scientists) has in fact tested this grim hypothesis; and this
cumulative 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 articles (footnote 1). 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 perhaps be forgiven for reckoning, and acting,
otherwise.)
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 [emphasis added] 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, 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, and the providers (researchers) should do without the usage
and impact, rather than just giving it to one another, as the RCUK
proposes. And why? Because researchers giving their own research to
researchers who cannot afford the journal version will make the
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 subscriptions (footnote
1) 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-archiving
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' recommendations (footnote 2). 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 speculation: 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 stabler 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: "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"
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,
peer review and the certification of its outcome 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: "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 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: "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."
(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 -- if an either/or choice point were ever
actually reached, and the trade-off and costs/benefits were made
completely explicit and transparent -- that researchers would knowingly
and willingly 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,
hence there is no either/or choice that needs to be made. All
indications to date are that learned societies will continue to publish
journals -- adding value and successfully selling that 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 affirm that this is their mission; yet by their restrictive
publishing practices they actively contradict it, while defending the
resulting inescapable contradiction by pleading a disaster scenario
(very like the one ALPSP repeatedly invokes) 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." (Footnote
3)
This perfectly encapsulates why we should not be too credulous about
the dire warnings emanating from learned societies to the effect that
self-archiving will damage research and its dissemination. The
dissemination of research findings should, as avowed, be a
high-priority service for societies -- a direct end in itself, not just
a trade activity to generate profit so as to subsidise other
activities, at the expense of research itself.
ALPSP: "The damaging effects will not be limited to
UK-published journals and UK societies; UK research authors publish
their work in the most appropriate journals, irrespective of the
journals' country of origin."
The thrust of the above statement is rather unclear: The RCUK-mandated
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 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 [emphasis added],
even at this early stage"
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: "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."
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
Society (US) have both stated publicly that they 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 -- something that
is already 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; the sooner they drop their filibustering and turn to
constructive cooperation and collaboration, the better for all parties
concerned.)
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 about which journals to renew or cancel take into
account a variety of comparative measures, citation statistics being
one of them (footnote 2). 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 and reference statistics -- all credited to the official
published version. So that is no principled obstacle either. This is
all just a matter of adapting scholarly practices naturally to the new
medium (and is likewise 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: "[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. The journal became fully Open Access
this year, but offered a substantial reduction in the publication
charge to those whose libraries maintained a print subscription;
however, the drop in subscriptions has been far more marked than was
anticipated."
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: "[4] The BMJ Publishing Group has noted a
similar effect; the journals that have been made freely available
online on publication have suffered greatly increased subscription
attrition, and access controls have had to be imposed to ensure the
survival of these titles."
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: "[5] In the USA, the Institute for Operations
Research and the Management Sciences found that two of its journals
had, without its knowledge, been made freely available on the Web. For
one of these, an established journal, they noted a subscriptions
decline which was more than twice as steep as the average for their
other established journals; for the other, a new journal where
subscriptions would normally have been growing, they declined
significantly. While the unauthorised free versions have now been
removed, it is too early to tell whether the damage is permanent."
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 Biology (footnote
3). 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
societies (footnote
4).]
ALPSP: "In addition, it is increasingly clear that
this is exactly how researchers are already using search engines such
as Scirus and Google Scholar: Greg R. Notess, Reference Librarian,
Montana State University, in a recent article in Information Today (Vol
29, No 4) writes 'At this point, my main use of both [Scirus and Google
Scholar] is for finding free Web versions of otherwise inaccessible
published articles.'"
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 drafts of articles they could not otherwise use
because they are accessible only by subscription. ISI's Web of Knowledge and Elsevier's Scopus, both paid
services, find 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; Elsevier's 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: "'I found a number of full-text articles via
Google Scholar that are PDFs downloaded from a publisher site and then
posted on another site, free to all.'"
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: "'Both Scirus and Scholar were also useful for
finding author-hosted article copies, preprints, e-prints, and other
permutations of the same article.'"
Exactly as one would hope they would be, if one hopes to 'maximise
access to research'.
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 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: "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 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 or allow 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) each article's metadata (author name,
date, article title, journal name, etc.).
plus
(2) each 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 and 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 have their access set to OA immediately. For the
remaining 10%, the author can set access to IA initially, but of course
each article's 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 update their policy or the author tires of
doing all those needless keystrokes and sets articleaccess 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 or 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 sent as hard copy to the recipients of the ALPSP
statement.)
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.