Harvard's Stuart Shieber on Open Access at CalTech and Berkeley
Stuart Shieber, the tireless architect of the historic Harvard
self-archiving mandate that may at last have tipped the scale for
global Open Access, has been traveling to spread the message,
to Caltech on March 26th and to Berkeley on March 30th.
Click here to see the video of his CalTech talk. It was very clear
and articulate (and often funny, too!).
I would add one strategic suggestion on how to make the message and
priorities crystal clear to the 10,000 minus 76 institutions and
funders worldwide that have not yet mandated OA:
Mandate Green OA Self-Archiving First
as Harvard FAS and 75 other universities/departments and
funders have done
(and only then consider funding gold OA publishing,
if you wish).
More than half of the CalTech talk (and just about all of the
subsequent discussion session) was focused on journal costs, OA
journal business models, and Harvard's "Compact" to subsidize
"reasonable" OA publishing fees for Harvard authors that need it.
There was next to no mention of mandates in the discussion session,
although I'm certain that Stuart hoped, as I do, that CalTech too
would consider adopting a self-archiving mandate like Harvard's.
The talk was of course addressed to a librarian audience rather than
a researcher audience, and libraries are most interested in serials
budget and pricing problems. But I think it is still a strategic
mistake to focus on journal economics, and on new "compacts" for
university funding of OA journal publication fees, instead of
stressing the all-important priority:
To date, there exist 76 OA self-archiving mandates (40 of
them adopted before the Harvard Mandate, 35 since), out
of at least 10,000 universities and research funders
worldwide. For the universal OA that is now within reach,
mandate adoption has to be significantly accelerated
globallysimply takes and keeps everyone's eyes off the
ball.
If one can just manage to get mandates to propagate
across universities worldwide, all the rest will take
care of itself, quite naturally, of its own accord.
The Harvard mandate (now that it has been upgraded to
include an immediate-deposit requirement even if the
author opts-out of rights-retention, hence OA) is just
wonderful: Thus revised, Harvard's is now
the optimal mandate model for global adoption.
My suggestion to Stuart and to all others who are
promoting OA is hence to promote the mandate very
directly and exclusively, presenting the evidence of all
of its advantages for research access and impact, and to
talk about journal business models only if and when the
(inevitable) question gets raised, rather than letting
the urgent and immediate and solvable
research accessibility problem get subsumed, yet again,
by the journal affordability problem.
Once mandates become universal, even if the journal
affordability problem is left entirely unaltered, that
problem immediately becomes far less urgent, since all of
its urgency derives from the accessibility problem, which
universal mandates will have solved, completely! (Once
everyone has online access to everything, it matters
incomparably less how much journal subscriptions cost,
and how many of them a university can afford to subscribe
to.)
Apart from this basic strategic suggestion about
priorities and focus, I have just two small comments, one
on "branding" and one on what "reasonable" OA publishing
charges would/will be:
(1) Branding: What authors really care about in choosing
a journal -- and what it is that they really mean by
"imprimatur" or "brand" -- is the journal's known
track-record for article and author quality. It is not a
mysterious property of the "brand-name" but an empirical
running average that the journal must earn, and sustain.
It basically refers to the journal's ongoing quality
standards for peer review (what portion and proportion of
the overall quality distribution curve they accept for
publication).
I think Stuart knows all this. It was latent in the very
interesting data he presented in the video by way of
reply to the familiar "vanity-press/plummeting-standards"
argument -- though, again, the talk put the accent on
pricing issues, whereas the real point is that authors
try to publish in the journals that have the track-record
for the highest quality-standards, and quality standards
mean selectivity, based on quality alone: any lowering of
peer-review standards so as to accept more articles will
simply lower the journal's quality, and hence its
attractiveness to authors seeking the highest-quality
journals. As Stuart notes in the video, there are both
subscription and OA journals at all quality levels (and,
one might add, there are articles and authors at all
quality levels).
But the urgent issue now is access -- and especially
access to the higher quality journals. (There are are
about 4000 OA journals, out of perhaps 25,000 refereed
journals in all, and there are OA journals among the top
journals too. However, it is also a fact that
the proportion of OA journals among the top journals is
far lower today than their proportion among journals as a
whole. This simply re-emphasizes that what is urgent
today is to make all articles in all journals openly
accessible -- by mandating self-archiving -- rather than
to find ways of paying for publication in OA journals.)
(2) "Reasonable" OA publishing charges: Stuart also
speaks in the video about what would be "reasonable"
charges for publishing in OA journals. But surely this
depends on what the true costs will turn out to be:
Today, subscription journals publish both online and
print editions and (as Stuart notes) they charge whatever
they can get. But now let us focus just on what universal
self-archiving mandates will bring, entirely independent
of journal price:
With OA self-archiving mandated universally, all articles
will be accessible to all users online for free. This, in
and of itself, solves the research access/impact problem,
completely, and with certainty. Its other side-effects
are only a matter for speculation, but here are the
possibilities:
(2a) Nothing else changes: Universities
continue to subscribe to the print and/or
online edition of whatever journals they can
afford, and journal costs (and prices, and
price increases) continue as before,
unchanged.
So what? The access problem is completely solved.
Everyone has online access to everything they need. So
university subscriptions are now decided on the basis of
other considerations (demand for the print edition,
demand for the luxury PDF edition, preservation,
prestige, habit, charity, superstition). These are all
worthy supply/demand issues, but there would certainly be
nothing left that could be described with the urgency of
the "serials crisis," because that crisis derived all of
its urgency from the need to provide access, and the
universal OA mandates will already have taken care of
that need, completely.
(2b) More likely, the availability of the
authors' OA versions will eventually reduce
the demand for the publisher's print and
online versions, and subscription
cancellations will grow. The publishers'
first response will probably be to try to
raise prices, but if that just further
increases cancellations, supply/demand
implies that they will instead have to try to
cut costs by doing away with inessential
products and services. The ways are many.
Cancel the online edition: If print
subscriptions still cover costs sustainably,
fine, it stops there. If cancellations
continue to grow, then journals will have to
cancel the print edition too. But then there
is nothing left to sell via subscription. So
they must then convert to OA publishing,
which means charging for their only remaining
service: managing peer review.
It is that price -- the price for managing peer review
alone -- that is really at issue here. That is the
"reasonable" (indeed essential) cost of peer-reviewed
journal publishing, once all access-provision and
archiving has been offloaded onto the distributed network
of (mandated) institutional repositories.
Not a single OA publisher today is operating on -- or
even knows -- this irreducible, essential cost, because
none of them have downsized yet to doing peer-review
alone (because they have not yet had to do so, out of
necessity, because universal Green OA is not yet there,
exerting the pressure to do so). For this reason, it does
not make sense to speak of (let alone subsidize) this
"reasonable" price today, when the necessary precondition
for converging on it (namely, universal OA mandates) has
not yet been provided: In other words, today's
asking-prices are necessarily inflated, and will remain
so, until universal OA itself forces the requisite
downsizing.
So this, it seems to me, is yet another reason for not
putting the accent on a pre-emptive "compact" to cover
"reasonable" OA publication fees today, in the absence of
universal OA mandates.
I hasten to add that Harvard, having already mandated OA,
is of course entitled and welcome to do whatever it likes
with its spare cash! But this should be separated
completely from the really urgent message, which still
needs to be communicated to the remaining 10,000
not-yet-mandating universities of the world, which
is first to mandate OA, as Harvard did, before making
plans on how to spend their spare cash. Otherwise they
are just subsidizing an arbitrary OA publishing fee, for
a minority of the journals (and an even smaller minority
of the top journals) without first doing their essential
part toward solving the research access problem.
(Lest it is not self-evident, however, all this carping
and unsolicited advice on my part in no way diminishes my
great admiration and appreciation for the enormous
contribution Stuart Shieber has made, and continues to
make, in having gotten a mandate adopted at Harvard, and
now promoting mandate adoption globally!)
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Received on Sat Apr 18 2009 - 00:37:42 BST
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0
: Fri Dec 10 2010 - 19:49:45 GMT