On "Open Access" Publishers Who Oppose
Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates
Stevan Harnad
American
Scientist Open Access Forum
SUMMARY: The online age has
made powerful new benefits for research possible, but these benefits
entail a profound conflict of interest between (1) what is best for the
research journal publishing industry and (2) what is best for research,
researchers, universities, research institutions, research funders, the
vast research and development (R&D) industry, and the tax-paying
public that funds the research.
What is at stake is (1) a hypothetical
risk of potential future losses in subscription revenue for publishers
versus (2) actual, ongoing losses in current research impact
for researchers. How this conflict of interest will have to be resolved
is already clear: Research publishing is a service industry; it will
have to adapt to what is best for research, and not vice versa. And
what is best for research is Open Access (OA), provided through
research funders and universities mandating the OA
self-archiving of all their researchers' peer-reviewed research output.
The conventional (non-OA) publishing industry's
first commitment is of course to what is best for its own business
interests, rather than to what is best for research and researchers;
hence it is lobbying
vigorously
against the many OA self-archiving mandates that are currently being adopted, recommended
and petitioned for by the
research community worldwide.
But what is
especially disappointing, if not deplorable, is when "OA"
publishers take the very same stance against OA itself (by opposing
OA self-archiving mandates) that non-OA publishers do. Conventional
publisher opposition to OA will be viewed, historically, as having
been a regrettable, counterproductive (and eventually countermanded)
but comprehensible strategy, from a purely business standpoint. OA
publisher opposition to OA, however, will be seen as having been
self-deluded if not hypocritical.
I close with a reply to Jan Velterop, of
Springer's "Open
Choice": Jan opposes Green OA self-archiving mandates, because they
would provide OA without paying the publisher extra for it. But all
publishing costs are currently being paid for already: via
subscriptions. So opposition to Green OA self-archiving mandates by a
hybrid Gold "Open Choice" Publisher sounds very much like wanting to
have their cake and eat it too (even though that is precisely what they
like to describe Green OA advocates as trying to do!).
The online age has given birth to a very profound conflict of interest
between what is best for (1) the research journal publishing industry,
on the one hand, and, on the other hand, what is best for (2) research,
researchers, universities, research institutions, research funders, the
vast research and development (R&D) industry, and the tax-paying
public that funds the research.
It is no one's fault that this conflict of interest has emerged. It was
a consequence of the revolutionary new power and potential for research
that was opened up by the Web era. What
is at stake can also be put in very concrete terms:
(1) hypothetical risk of future losses in
publisher revenue
versus
(2) actual daily losses in research usage and impact
The way in which this conflict of interest will need to be resolved is
also quite evident: The research publishing industry is a service
industry. It will have to adapt to what is best for research, and not
vice versa. And what is best for research, researchers, universities,
research institutions, research funders, the R&D industry and the
tax-paying public in the online age is: Open Access (free online
access). That is what maximizes
research usage and impact, productivity and progress.
The research publishing industry lobby of course does not quite see it
this way. It is understandable that their first commitment is to their
own business interests, hence to what is best for their bottom lines,
rather than to something else, such as Open Access, and what is best
for research and researchers.
But what is especially disappointing, if not deplorable, is when
so-called "Open
Access" publishers take exactly the same stance against Open Access
(OA) itself (sic) that conventional publishers do. Conventional
publisher opposition to OA will be viewed, historically, as having
been a regrettable, counterproductive (and eventually countermanded)
but comprehensible strategy, from a purely business standpoint. OA
publisher opposition to OA, however, will be seen as having been
self-deluded if not hypocritical.
Let me be very specific: There are two ways to provide OA: Either
individual authors make their own (conventionally) published journal
article's final draft ("postprint")
freely accessible on the Web, or their journals make their published
drafts freely accessible on the Web. The first is called "Green OA"
(OA self-archiving) and the second is called "Gold OA"
(OA publishing).
In other words, one of the forms of OA (OA publishing, Gold OA) is a
new form of publishing, whereas the other (OA author self-archiving,
Green OA) is not: Green OA is just conventional subscription-based
publishing plus author self-help; the author supplements the usual
access to the publisher's subscription-based version for those users
who can afford it with a free onine version for those who cannot. Both
forms of OA are equivalent; both maximize
research usage and impact. But Green OA depends on the author whereas
Gold OA depends on the publisher.
Now both forms of OA do represent some possible risk to publishers'
current revenue streams:
With Green OA, there is the risk that the authors'
free online versions will make subscription revenue decline, possibly
unsustainably.
With Gold OA, there is the risk that either subscription revenue will
decline unsustainably or author/institution publication charges will
not generate enough revenue to cover expenses (or make a profit).
So let us not deny the possibility that OA in either form may represent
some risk to publishers' revenues and hence to their current way of
doing business. The real question is whether or not that risk, and the
possibility of having to adapt to it by changing the way publishers do
business, outweighs the vast and certain benefits of OA to research,
researchers, universities, research institutions, research funders, the
R&D industry and the tax-paying public.
This question has been addressed by the various interested parties for
several years now. But lately -- after much (too much) delay and debate
with publishers -- research funders as well as research institutions
have begun to take OA matters into their own hands by mandating Green OA.
Funder Mandates: As a condition for receiving
research grants, fundees must self-archive in their Institutional OA Repositories (or
Central OA Repositories) the final drafts of any resulting articles
that are accepted for publication: The European
Research Council (ERC), 5 of 8 (and soon 6 out of 7) UK Research Councils,
the Australian
Research Council (ARC) and the Wellcome Trust
have already mandated Green OA self-archiving. In the US both the Federal
Public Research Access Act (FRPAA) and a mandated upgrade
of the NIH Public Access Policy are likewise proposing a
self-archiving mandate. Similar
proposals are under consideration in Canada, individual European
countries, and Asia.
University Mandates: In parallel, Green OA mandates have
also been adopted locally by a growing number of universities and
research institutions worldwide, each requiring all of its own
institutional research output to be self-archived in its own Institutional OA Repository.
These Green OA mandates by research funders and institutions have been
vigorously opposed by some (not all) portions of the publishing
industry: the opposing lobby has already succeeded in delaying the
adoption of Green
OA mandates on a number of
occasions.
Nevertheless, the benefits of OA to research are so great that such
attempts to delay or derail the Green OA mandates are proving
unsuccessful.
The specific issue I wish to address here, however, is the stance of
(some) Gold OA publishers on the Green OA mandates: Most Gold OA
publishers support Green OA mandates. After all, a Gold OA journal is
also, a fortiori, a Green journal (as are about 65% of conventional
journals), in that it explicitly endorses OA self-archiving by its
authors.
But endorsing individual author self-archiving is not the same as
endorsing self-archiving mandates by funders and universities. So it is
not surprising that although most conventional journal
publishers endorse individual author self-archiving, many of them
oppose self-archiving mandates.
So what about those Gold OA journal publishers that oppose Green OA
mandates? This is an extremely telling question, as it goes straight to
the heart of OA, and the rationale and justification for insisting on
OA.
Gold OA journals rightly represent themselves as differing from
conventional journals in that they provide OA. To put it crudely, what
they propose to authors is: "Publish in my journal instead of a
conventional journal if you want your article to be Openly Accessible
to all users." (And, for those Gold OA journals that charge publication
fees: "Publish in my journal instead of a conventional journal and pay
my publication fee if you want your article to be Openly Accessible to
all users.")
Apart from that, there is the usual competition among journals: OA
journals compete with non-OA journals, and journals of all kinds within
the same field compete among themselves. For conventional journals and
for OA Gold journals supported by subscriptions, there is competition
for subscription fees. For all journals there is competition for
authors. And for Gold OA journals that charge publication fees, the
competition for authors is compounded by the competition for
publication fees.
What about OA itself? In order to be successful over its competition, a
product-provider or service-provider has to provide and promote the
advantages of his product/service over the competition. In the
competition between OA and non-OA journals, the cardinal advantage of
the OA journal is OA itself: OA journals provide OA, maximizing
research usage and impact; conventional journals do not. For
subscription-based Gold OA journals, OA is a drawing point. For
publication-fee-based Gold OA journals, OA is a selling point.
So what about Green OA mandates? For the 35% of conventional
journals that have not endorsed OA self-archiving by their authors,
their opposition to Green OA mandates is just an extension of their
opposition to OA: We know where they stand. "What matters is what is
best for our bottom line, not what is best for research."
For the 65% of
conventional journals that are "Green" in that they have endorsed OA
self-archiving by their authors, those of them (their percentage is not
yet clear) that oppose Green OA mandates are in a sense in conflict
with themselves: "It's ok if individual authors self-archive to enjoy
the advantages of OA, but it's not ok if their institutions or funders
mandate that they do so." (This is an awkward stance, rather hard to
justify, and will probably succumb to the underlying premise that OA is
indeed an undeniable benefit to research.)
But then what about opposition
to Green OA mandates from Gold (or hybrid-Gold) OA publishers --
publishers that are presumably 100% committed to the benefits of OA for
research? This is the stance that is the hardest of all to justify. For
the fact is that Green OA is in a sense a "competitor" to Gold OA: It
offers OA without constraints on the author's choice of journal, and
without having to pay publication fees.
The only resolution open to a Gold OA publisher who wishes to justify
opposing Green OA mandates is to adopt precisely the same argument
as the one being used by the non-OA publishers that oppose Green OA
mandates: that mandated OA self-archiving poses a potential risk to
their subscription revenues -- in other words, again putting what is
best for publishers' bottom lines above what is best for research,
researchers, universities, research institutions, research funders, the
R&D industry and the tax-paying public.
Perhaps this was bound to come to pass in any joint venture between a
producer who is not seeking any revenue for his product (i.e., the
researcher-authors, their institutions and their funders) and a vendor
who is seeking revenue for the value he adds to the (joint) product.
I happen to think that this conflict-of-interest will only sort itself out if and
when what used to be a product -- a peer-reviewed, published journal
article, online or on paper -- ceases to be a product at all (or at
least a publisher's product), sold to the user-institution, and becomes
instead a service (the 3rd-party management of peer review, and the
certification of its outcome), provided by the publisher to the
author's institution and funder.
I also happen to think that only Green OA mandates can drive this transition
from the current subscription-based cost-recovery model to the
publication service-fee-based model, with the distributed network of
institutional OA repositories making it possible for journals to
offload all their current access-provision and archiving burden and its
costs onto the repositories, distributed worldwide, thereby allowing
journals to cut publication costs and downsize to become providers of
the peer-review service alone, with its reduced cost recovered via
institutional publication fees paid out of the institutional
subscription-cancellation savings.
Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and
Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal
publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and
Fruitful Collaboration.
But this is all hypothetical: We are not there now. Right now, the cost
of publication is being amply paid by subscriptions. Publishers are
hypothesizing that OA self-archiving mandates will make that revenue
source unsustainable -- but no actual evidence at all is being provided
to show either that that hypothesis is correct, or when and how quickly
subscriptions will become unsustainable, if the hypothesis is indeed
correct. Most important, publishers are giving no indications
whatsoever as to why the peaceful
transition scenario described above will not be the (equally
hypothetical, but quite natural) sequel to unsustainable subscriptions.
Instead, the only thing publishers are offering is hypothetical
doomsday scenarios: the destruction of peer review, of journals,
and of a viable industry. Then, on the pretext of the need to protect
their current revenue streams and their current ways of doing business
from this hypothetical doomsday scenario, publishers try to block OA
self-archiving mandates, despite OA's substantial demonstrated
benefits to all the other parties involved, viz, researchers,
research institutions and funders, R&D industries, and the
tax-paying public that funds the research.
This is indeed a conflict of interest, although the future revenue
losses to the publishing industry are completely hypothetical, whereas
the current ongoing access/impact losses to research are very real, and
already demonstrated (to the satisfaction of all the players except the
publishing industry).
I close with a reply to Jan
Velterop, of Springer's "Open
Choice": Springer is a subscription-based, hybrid Green/Gold
publisher: Springer sells journals by subscription; Springer is fully Green,
endorsing author self-archiving; Springer offers authors fee-based Gold
OA as an option; and Jan opposes Green OA mandates.
The following exchange begins with an attempt to justify (some)
publishers' insistence on the transfer of exclusive rights
(rather than just publishing rights) to the publisher; Jan suggests
that transferring exclusive rights is a form of "payment" by the author
to the publisher, but he never explains why the rights need to be
exclusive. Then Jan goes on to oppose Green OA self-archiving mandates,
because they would provide OA without paying for it. (No mention is
made of the fact that all publishing costs are currently being paid for
already -- via subscriptions...)
On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Jan
Velterop, Springer UK wrote:
JV: "transfer of exclusive rights to a
publisher is a form of 'payment'. Payment for the services of a
publisher."
Is it? And then what are subscription revenues? A fringe benefit?
(I would have thought that assigning a publisher the right to publish
and the exclusive right to collect revenues for selling an author's
work, without even paying any royalties to the author, was "payment"
enough for the value added by the publisher...)
JV: "The publisher subsequently uses
these exclusive rights to sell subscriptions and licences in order to
recoup his costs"
Why exclusive rights?
JV: "The advantage is seemingly for the
author, who (mistakenly) has the feeling that he doesn't have to pay
for the services of formal publication of his article, but who seldom
realizes why he is asked to transfer exclusive rights."
Authors are naive, but not quite as foolish as that. They know the
publisher needs to sell subscriptions to make ends meet. But what you
haven't explained is why the publisher needs exclusive rights
in order to do that.
JV: "The disadvantage is that payment in
the form of exclusive rights limits access, because it needs a
subscription/licence model to convert this form of 'payment' into
money."
Disadvantage or no disadvantage, subscriptions are currently making
ends meet quite successfully.
And you still haven't explained why the rights transferred need to be
exclusive.
JV: "And subscriptions/licences are by
definition restrictive in terms of dissemination."
No problem, once the author supplements the access provided by
subscriptions with free online access to his own self-archived draft
(Green OA), providing eprints
to would-be users who cannot afford the published version, exactly as
authors had provided reprints in paper days.
JV: "Article-fee supported open access
publishing, where the transfer of exclusive rights is replaced by the
transfer of money, consequently doesn't have the need for subscriptions
and can therefore abolish all restrictions on dissemination.
Yes. But where is the need for "article-fee supported open access
publishing" (Gold OA) at a time when (a) most journals are still
subscription-based, (b) subscriptions are still paying the costs of
publishing, and (c) the only thing the author needs to do to provide
(Green) OA is to self-archive (and the only thing the author's funder
or institution need do is mandate it)?
JV: "Stevan Harnad c.s. will argue that
none of this matters, because there is 'green', meaning that whatever
'exclusive' rights have been transferred, authors can still disseminate
their articles via self-archiving in open repositories. In that model,
having transferred 'exclusive' rights is meaningless, and that implies
that the 'payment' that exclusive rights transfer actually is, has
become worthless."
(1) You have not yet replied about why the transferred rights need to
be exclusive.
(2) Nor about what the problem is, as long as subscriptions are paying
for publication costs, as they are.
(3) If you choose to invoke the hypothetical "doomsday"
scenario -- that mandated self-archiving will cause cancellations and
drive subscriptions down to unsustainable levels -- by way of response,
kindly first cite (3a) the evidence that self-archiving causes
subscription cancellations and (3b) the arguments and evidence as to
why publishing will not quite naturally make the adaptive transition to
the Gold OA cost-recovery model that you favor, if and when
self-archiving mandates ever do cause subscriptions to become
unsustainable.
JV: "In mandates with embargos, the
'payment' may not be completely worthless (depending on the length of
the embargo) but is at least severely devalued."
You seem to be singularly fixated (for an OA advocate) on payment
rather than access (at a time when all payments are being made, but
much access and impact is being lost).
You also seem to be more concerned about payments than access delays,
and you seem to be expressing some sympathy for embargoed access over
Open Access in your (unsupported) defense of exclusive rights as a form
of "payment."
JV: "I am a great fan of open access, but not
a great fan of 'green'."
Translation: I am a great fan of OA as long as it is paid Gold OA. (The
accent seems to be on the "paid" rather than on the "OA".)
But what is missing today is not publisher payment, but OA...
JV: "'Green' is a kind of appeasement by
publishers (some of who, it must be said, themselves didn't [and
sometimes still don't] realise the 'payment' nature of exclusive rights
transfer)."
Perhaps my interpretation is more charitable: 92% of journals did not
endorse Green OA (65% for immediate postprint OA) merely to "appease"
or "placate," but because they recognized that OA is indeed a great
benefit to research and researchers, and that trying to oppose OA would
be neither creditable nor successful.
Jan seems to prefer the less charitable idea that endorsing Green
self-archiving was merely a cynical sop, granted on the assumption that
it would not be used, and perhaps even to be taken back, "Indian-Giver"
Style, if too many researchers actually went ahead and self-archived.
JV: "Appeasement is often regretted with
hindsight. Instead of allowing the nature of exclusive rights transfer
to be compromised, publishers should much earlier have offered authors
the choice of payment either transfer of exclusive rights, or cash. The
appeasement, the 'green', now acts as a hurdle to structural open
access, perhaps even an impediment."
In other words, publishers should have refused to endorse Green OA
self-archiving unless they were paid extra for it. Never mind that all
publication costs were and still are being fully paid via
subscriptions. No OA without extra pay (Gold).
Because of this impetuous Green appeasement, Springer (a Green
publisher) is now stuck with only being able to ask payment for Gold,
not for Green too...
JV: "Harnadian orthodoxy will dismiss
this. It holds that subscription journals will survive, that they will
be paid for by librarians even if the content is freely disseminated in
parallel via open repositories, and that it doesn't matter anyway"
Shorn of the above rhetoric, my position is much simpler:
Mandate self-archiving now, for immediate Green OA.
If and when 100% Green OA ever does cause universal subscription
cancellation, then use the self-same windfall subscription savings to
pay for Gold OA.
But not now, when there is next to no OA and no Green-induced
subscription cancellations.
JV: "(the guru is tentatively beginning to admit
that large scale uptake of self-archiving, for instance as the result
of mandates, may indeed destroy journals)"
Nothing of the sort. There is no guru, but all I say is what I have
been saying
all along: if and when OA self-archiving makes subscriptions
unsustainable, journals can and will adapt by converting to Gold OA,
and institutions will pay the Gold OA fees out of (a portion of) their
windfall subscription cancellation savings. (Only a part, because
journals will have down-sized to peer-review service-provision alone.)
JV: "because a new order will only come
about after the complete destruction of the old order."
No destruction: merely a natural adaptation to the optimal and
inevitable outcome for research, made possible by the online medium.
JV: "After all, morphing the old order
into the new, without complete destruction, entails a cost in terms of
money, which "isn't there", and anyway, the cost that comes with
complete destruction of the old order is preferred to spending money on
any transition, in that school of thought."
Translation, shorn of Jan's rhetoric:
'Harnad (and many others) are objecting to
needlessly (and wastefully) redirecting scarce research funds toward
paying for Gold OA now, when (1) 100% Green OA is reachable
without it, when (2) subscriptions are still covering publishing costs,
and when (3) it is still a speculative matter whether and when Green OA
will ever cause subscriptions to become unsustainable. The time to
redirect funds toward paying for Gold OA is when the hypothesized
subscription cancellations have actually materialized, so the new
savings can be redirected to pay for the new Gold OA publishing costs.'
And the objection isn't primarily to the redirection of scarce research
funds to pay for needless Gold OA costs. If the research community is foolish
enough to want to do that, it is welcome to do so. The objection is to
any further delay in mandating Green OA, wasting still more time
instead on continued bickering about paying pre-emptive Gold publishing
fees. Let research funders and institutions mandate OA Green
self-archiving, now, thereby guaranteeing 100% OA, now, and then
let them spend their spare time and money in any way they see fit.
JV: "I doubt that a complete wipe-out
will come. But there are quite a large number of vulnerable journals
and a partial wipe-out as a result of mandated self-archiving is
entirely plausible."
If what Jan is saying here is that journals will continue to be born
and die, as they do now, I agree. Green self-archiving mandates don't
affect journals individually, they affect them all, jointly, and the
effects are gradual. No one funder or institution generates the
contents of an individual journal. So as the percentage of
self-archiving rises, there will be a (possibly long) uncertain period
when it is unclear how much of the contents of any given journal are
accessible online for free.
If and when a point is reached where journal subscriptions do become
unsustainable, there will be a natural mass transition to Gold OA.
Before that time, it is a matter of the sheerest of sheer speculation
whether Green OA will or will not alter either the rate or the
direction of spontaneous journal births and deaths.
JV: "Although there seems to be a myth
that journals are very, even extremely, profitable, the fact is that a
great many journals are not profitable or 'surplus-able' (in
not-for-profit parlance). In my estimate it is the majority. Within the
portfolio of larger publishers these journals are often absorbed and
cross-subsidised by the journals that are profitable. Smaller (e.g.
society-) publishers cannot do that. Marginal journals do not have to
suffer a lot of subscription loss before they go under. Some of these,
especially society ones, will be 'salvaged' by being given the
opportunity to shelter under the umbrella of the portfolio of one of
the larger independent publishers. Others will just perish if they lose
subscriptions. They could of course convert to open access journals
with article processing fees, but setting those up is no sinecure, and
requires a substantial financial commitment, as the experience of PLoS
and BMC has shown. Journals that are run for the love of it, by the
commendable voluntary efforts of academics, are mostly very small, and
are the first to be affected, unless, of course, they do not need any
income because they are crypto-subsidised by the institutions with
which their editors are affiliated. Such journals have always been
there and there are probably more now than ever (and some are very good
indeed, or so I'm told), but to imagine scaling them up to deal with
the million plus articles per year published as a result of global
research efforts seems far-fetched, indeed."
Part of this speculative account had some plausibility: Yes, journals
are born and die. Yes some struggle to make ends meet (irrespective of
OA). Yes some are subsidised. None of this has anything at all to do
with OA.
The causal influence of OA on this already ongoing birth/death/survival
process, however, is pure speculation: Some titles will die; some will
migrate (possibly to OA Gold publishers like Jan's former employer, BioMed Central -- which, I
note in passing, has signed the EC
petition in support of the EC OA Self-Archiving Mandate, whereas
Jan's current employer, Springer, did not); some will survive, with or
without subsidy, just as before. Nothing to do with Green OA, either in
terms of rate or direction.
But where on earth did Jan get to the non-sequitur of "scaling... up
the [border-line and subsidised journals] to deal with the million plus
articles per year"?
Journals will continue to make ends meet as they did before, on
subscriptions or subsidies; some will die, as they always did; others
will migrate. Then, if and when subscriptions become unsustainable,
there will be a transition (and downsizing) to OA Gold, paid for out of
(a portion of) the very same subscription cancellation savings that
drove the transition, redirected toward paying for Gold OA fees.
Jan's own speculation only sounds like an Escher impossible-figure
because he chooses to paint it that way. Without the imposition of that
arbitrary distortion, the transitional landscape looks perfectly
natural.
JV: "Open access is the inevitable
future, and it is worth working on a truly robust and sustainable way
to achieve it."
OA means free online access, and that is indeed worth reaching for
right now, via Green OA self-archiving mandates, which are reachable
right now. Jan instead recommends continuing to sit and wait for a
hypothetical outcome, while meanwhile refraining from reaching for a
sure outcome: 100% OA via Green mandates. Jan urges the research
community instead to "work on" finding a way to pay pre-emptively for
Gold OA now, when Gold OA is neither needed, nor are the funds
available for paying for it (without poaching them from research)
because the funds to pay for publishing are still paying for
subscriptions.
Caveat pre-emptor.
Stevan Harnad
American
Scientist Open Access Forum