Open access issues

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Open access issues

Open access involves any number of issues, and the dividing lines between issues, Open access myths and Open access controversies aren't clear. This article includes a few of the issues that aren't obviously myths and don't seem quite contentious enough to rise to the level of controversy.

Contents

Open research questions

Selected items from a much longer and more elaborate list of Research questions in the Open Access Directory. A few more of these questions appear in Open access controversies.
  • Publishers often assert that all or most of those who need access to peer-reviewed journal literature already have access. Who doesn't have access? What kinds of people don't have access and how well can we measure their numbers?
  • What is the current rate of self-archiving in different fields and countries? Can we graph the change in these rates over time? Can we disentangle spontaneous self-archiving from self-archiving encouraged or required by funders and universities? Can we calculate both the percentage of self-archiving authors and the percentage of self-archived papers?
  • What percentage of published articles from a given year or a given journal have OA copies somewhere online? Can we break this down by permitted copies and unpermitted ones? Can we break it down by OA preprints and OA postprints? Can we break it down by field? Can we collect these numbers easily enough to recompute them annually and chart future progress?
  • How much economic value is produced by OA to research literature and data? That is, if the basic peer-reviewed literature and all associated data were OA, then what kinds of economic activity would that trigger and what is its total net value?
  • We know roughly what percentage of peer-reviewed journals are OA: ((number listed in the DOAJ / 25,000) * 100). But what percentage of newly launched peer-reviewed journals are OA? Have we reached the cross-over point when the majority of new launches are OA?
  • What percentage of peer-reviewed, free online journals go beyond removing price barriers to the removal of at least some permission barriers? Of those removing permission barriers, how many use a CC-BY license (or equivalent), a CC-BY-NC license (or equivalent), and so on?
  • Only a minority of OA journals charge author-side publication fees. What are the other OA journal business models? This may require a lot of emails and phone calls, since many journals don't give business details on their web sites. The first phase of this research is simply to document the range of models actually in use. The second phase is to study which models work best, and worst, in which niches.
  • What percentage of journals pay editors or referees?
  • What kinds of subsidies do TA journals get from public funds? Can we quantify these subsidies? How many countries pay these subsidies? How many publishers and journals benefit from them?
  • For a dual edition book (with OA and non-OA editions), how can we measure the sales the non-OA would have had in the absence of the OA edition? If we think the OA edition increased (or decreased) net sales, how can we measure that increase (or decrease)?
  • How will improvements in ebook readers affect the economics of dual-edition books? If OA editions currently increase the sales of print editions, how much of that effect is due to the fact that few people want to read a whole book on a screen?
  • Are researchers responding to funder and university OA policies by changing the patterns of where they submit their work for publication?
  • How many more researchers would routinely self-archive if they knew that it was lawful? If they knew that it took an average of 6-10 minutes/paper? If they knew that self-archiving increased citations 40-250% (on average, in different fields)?
  • Do junior faculty deposit their work in archives, or submit it to OA journals, more often than senior faculty, perhaps because they grew up with the internet and more readily see the benefits of OA? Or do senior faculty do so more often than junior faculty, perhaps because they already have tenure and can afford to disregard the criteria of conservative promotion and tenure committees?
  • When researchers learn about a TA article of interest to them, how often do they look online for an OA copy? When they do so, where do they look?
  • When faculty have a choice between equally prestigious and equally suitable OA and TA journals, will they submit their work to the OA journal? When the answer is no, what other variables come into play?
  • How much time does it take for a university to create and maintain an OAI-compliant OA repository? How much does it cost the university, in hardware, software, and human resources? If it depends on how much the university wants to do with the repository, and how much to educate users, then can we break down the costs for each layer of use and service?

Assuring long-term access in a post-print arena

Most gold OA journals are electronic-only--and journals converting to OA may very well abandon their print versions in the process. So, for that matter, might subscription journals attempting to minimize costs to stay in business or to stay competitive.

How do libraries and society as a whole assure long-term access to digital-only articles? Whose job is it to assure such preservation?

There are at least three aspects to this issue:

  1. Perpetual rights to licensed digital resources.
  2. Access to paid resources whose publishers have ceased to exist.
  3. Access to unpaid resources where the originator no longer exists.

LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) and CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) are significant international efforts to deal with the first and second aspect (and to a lesser extent the third). The third aspect has not been terribly well addressed in general.

Should your library be an OA publisher?

One way to support non-fee open access journals is through direct institutional subsidy in the form of absorbed costs.

Should your library--particularly if you're in an academic library--provide publishing support for new OA journals?

This note is currently a stub, waiting for discussion and examples of libraries in the OA publishing business.

Balancing author and publisher rights

Brief excerpts from Peter Suber's essay by this name in SPARC Open Access Newsletter 110, June 2, 2007.

In order for authors to provide OA to their own work, they don't need to retain full copyright, and in order for publishers to publish, they don't need to acquire full copyright. This raises the hope that we might find a balance giving each side all it needs. But even with good will on both sides, this win-win compromise may be out of reach; each side might give and receive significant concessions and still not have all it needs.

There were two developments in May [2007] that could affect the balance between author and publisher rights. First, a group of universities adopted an "author addendum" to modify standard publisher copyright contracts and a pair of non-profits enhanced their own author addenda. Second, a group of publishers adopted a position statement on where the balance lies. Not surprisingly, the two groups strike the balance in different places...

Author addenda

An "author addendum" is a lawyer-written document that authors sign and staple to a publisher's standard copyright transfer agreement. It modifies the publisher's contract to allow authors to retain some rights that the default contract would have given to the publisher. Because it's a proposed contract modification, the publisher may accept or reject it...

One problem that author addenda won't solve is author fear that merely asking for different contract terms will cause publishers to reject an already-accepted paper. But I haven't heard of a single case in which this has happened. The fear is groundless; there's no harm in asking...

The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) is a OA-friendly consortium of 12 research universities: Chicago, Illinois at Chicago, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Pennsylvania State, and Purdue... Early in 2007 the CIC provosts wrote a statement in support of OA and a draft author addendum, and began circulating them to member institutions. It released the final version on May 17, 2007.

The CIC author addendum retains three rights for authors: (1) a non-exclusive right to make and use derivative works, even for future publication, (2) a non-exclusive right to self-archive the published version six months after publication, in any repository, and (3) a non-exclusive right for the author's institution to use and copy the work for any activity at the institution.

In my view, the only significant omission is a non-exclusive right to provide *immediate* OA to the final version of the author's peer-reviewed manuscript (not the published edition)...

Publishers describe how they'd balance author/publisher rights

Meantime on May 9, three publisher associations released a position paper titled, "Author and Publisher Rights For Academic Use: An Appropriate Balance." The three groups were the ALPSP (Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers), AAP/PSP (Association of American Publishers / Professional/Scholarly Publishing), and STM (International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers).

For convenience I'll call the authors of this document "the publishers." But everyone should understand that not all publishers share the views set forth in this document, perhaps not even all publishers who belong to the ALPSP, AAP/PSP, or STM.

The heart of the document lies in two assertions, one on author rights and one on publisher rights:

  1. Academic research authors and their institutions should be able to use and post the content that such authors and institutions themselves provide...for internal institutional[,] noncommercial research and education purposes; and
  2. Publishers should be able to determine when and how the official publication record occurs, and to derive the revenue benefit from the publication and open posting of the official record (the final published article), and its further distribution and access in recognition of the value of the services they provide.
  • The first statement, on author rights, seems to say that free online access should be limited to the author's own institution. [A discussion of the ambiguity in this statement follows.]
  • For the rest of the reason why the publisher position is unbalanced we have to look at the next statement, on publisher rights. Unfortunately it's even more difficult to parse.
"Publishers should be able to determine when and how the official publication record occurs...." If the occurrence of a record is the publication of an article, then determining "how" it occurs is the whole question. Giving this entirely to publishers is to give up the quest for balance.
"Publishers should be able to...derive the revenue benefit from the publication...." Is the "revenue benefit" more than just "the revenue"? Publishers do have the right to sell their publications, of course. That's non-controversial. But are publishers also claiming the right to all the revenue that anyone can make from it? What if I'm offered an honorarium to speak at a conference on the strength of my publication? What if Google indexes the repository copy and puts ads on the page of search returns? What if I link to a copy, even the publisher's copy, from a page hosting ads? What if a team of industrial scientists pays for access but uses the resulting knowledge to make a product which their company sells for a profit? I'm not saying that the publishers are claiming all this revenue, merely that the statement needs clarification...
More importantly, are the publishers saying they deserve the revenue because of the value of the services they provide? It seems so. But there are three problems here. First, authors, referees, and funders provider valuable services that enhance the same final product, competing with the publishers' claim to exclusive rights... Second, a significant fraction of publisher revenue doesn't come from the value they add but from price increases made possible by monopoly power and market dysfunction... [T]hird, in order to keep the revenue stream flowing, publishers take many steps that actually subtract value from the final product, such as password protection, packaging in locked PDFs, cutting good articles solely for length, turning processable data into unprocessable images, and turning gifts into commodities which may not be further shared...
There is, as usual, a lot more in the original essay.

Would blog-type journals improve matters or make them worse?

Marcus Banks has proposed that journals in at least one field (librarianship) should "evolve into blogs." Excerpts from the proposal, which came to him as he was helping move a journal from one OA platform to a cheaper OA platform:

I became firmly convinced that the traditional journal model is antiquated for sharing research and knowledge among librarians. A better course is to develop and nurture excellent blogs, with multimedia capabilities and guaranteed preservation of the postings. This could be an entirely new blog that starts from scratch, or an established journal that evolves into a blog...
My arguments:
  1. As respected library commentator Walt Crawford notes, blogs are among the most vibrant library literature today. I agree with Crawford, and believe there is no reason why all of the rigor traditionally associated with journals could not be maintained on a blog contributed to by multiple authors.
  2. Peer review should be a post-publication process, rather than a pre-publication process that sometimes drags out for many months. If physicists can post pre-prints that get discussions flowing quickly, why can't librarians?
The argument for pre-publication peer review is that it filters out poor research. This is a legitimate concern when the research in question is about a new and potentially deadly medical intervention. Library research is not like this; peer review can occur via community conversation.
Counter-arguments:
  1. Most people will prefer to publish in established journals rather than an unestablished blog... Of course this is true, which is why the evolution to a blog paradigm would take a long time.
  2. All of the supporting structures--from PubMed citations to tenure requirements--favor the traditional journal... Rebuttal: This is certainly true now, but--ultimately--what is a scholarly journal but a means of communication among people of similar interests and backgrounds?..
  3. Blogs are ephemeral; they come and go at the speed of light. In some cases, good journals have existed for hundreds of years... Response: The proof of the viability of a scholarly blog will be in how long it lasts. But even if the blog failed, that would be a function of a lack of commitment among the people involved. There is no intrinsic reason why all of the functions served by a quality journal cannot be served just as well by a carefully designed and managed blog.

A comment from James Jacobs notes that a blog/journal could use peer review--and offers some other advantages:

  • blogs cut down the costs of publication/distribution (and can, if one chooses, be a revenue stream with google ads, sections for highlighted vendors etc.)
  • blogs are more easily found and searchable in popular search engines
  • blogs speed up community input, which makes articles all the more interesting, lively, and contextual.
  • blogs are closer to the ideal of "scholarly communication" than paper journals with necessarily long publication cycles.
  • a blog could be used in addition to a traditional journal (paper or digital) to highlight TOCs and important articles, add content to articles that couldn't be published in paper, post responses to articles and timely items of interest to the community.
  • LC allows for ISSN's for blogs.

T. Scott Plutchak's post "Editing and peer review" (February 12, 2008), writing as a long-time library journal editor, finds the idea appealing but perhaps not persuasive. He notes just how much editing and rewriting actually took place for many articles and goes on (excerpts):

I'm not at all sure that it would be a service to the library community if all of those articles that I read through in their first iterations had simply been posted to a blog and opened up for comment. The few experiments that have been done in the last couple of years with post-publication review have not been overwhelmingly successful, the ArXiv experience notwithstanding...
I'm not one who is terribly impressed by the "wisdom of crowds"... I've rarely seen anything approaching substantive discussion and analysis take place in a comment thread, and the longer the thread, the more worthless it typically is. Rather than providing vibrant post-publication review, I'm afraid that posting unedited articles for comment would result in much good work being buried and ignored.
But the terrain continues to evolve rapidly, and the opposition of blogs to traditional journals is probably a false distinction. The traditional journal is rapidly morphing into something else, while adopting features that we associate with blogs (the ability to provide rapid responses being the most obvious)...

Six things that researchers need to know about open access

Excerpted from Peter Suber's essay of the same name in SPARC Open Access Newsletter 94, February 2, 2006. As annotated in the original essay, it's a good guide to inform new scholars--something librarians should consider doing.
  1. What OA journals exist in your field?
    • When "presented with a list of reasons why they have not chosen to publish in an OA journal and asked to say which were important...[t]he reason that scored highest (70%) was that authors were not familiar enough with OA journals in their field." ...There's no excuse not to know the OA journals in your field. Go to the DOAJ and browse by discipline... If you learn what OA journals exist in your field and decide against each of them, all right. At least you made an informed decision. But check the DOAJ again when you've written your next paper. Things are changing fast... If you don't publish in an OA journal, you can publish in a non-OA journal and self-archive the peer-reviewed version of your manuscript in an OA repository. About 70% of existing non-OA journals already permit this. More in #4 below.
  2. OA journals are not the whole story of OA. There are also OA archives or repositories.
  3. OA archiving only takes a few minutes.
    • Les Carr and Stevan Harnad studied two months of log activity at a much-used repository and found that the time required for deposit averaged 10 minutes per paper. Taking into account the rate at which authors had their work archived for them by others (co-authors, librarians, students, or assistants), authors who published one paper per month would spend less than 40 minutes per year on their deposits.
  4. Most non-OA journals allow authors to deposit their postprints in an OA repository.
    • The best current estimate is that 70% of non-OA journals consent in advance to postprint archiving... If we count the journals that consent to preprint or postprint archiving (or both), the figure rises to 93%.
  5. Journals using the Ingelfinger Rule are a shrinking minority.
    • Some authors are afraid that depositing a preprint in an OA repository will disqualify it for subsequent publication. It's true that some journals refuse to publish papers that have previously circulated as preprints or whose results have been publicized. This is called the Ingelfinger Rule, named after a former editor at the New England Journal of Medicine. The rule is rare outside the field of medicine and in decline...
  6. OA enlarges your audience and citation impact.
    • This is the chief reason for authors to provide OA to their own work. OA increases the audience for a work far beyond the audience of any priced journal, even the most prestigious or popular journal. Studies in many fields show a correlation between OA and citation-count increases from 50% to 250%.

Providing OA to your own work is not an act of charity that only benefits others, or a sacrifice justified only by the greater good. It's not a sacrifice at all. It increases your visibility, retrievability, audience, usage, and citations. It's about career-building. For publishing scholars, it would be a bargain even if it were costly, difficult, and time-consuming.

Related articles

Your turn: Talk about it

As always, you're welcome to add material directly here or on the talk page (subject to editing), or to email it--noting which PLN article you think it should go in--to me (waltcrawford@gmail.com or crawford@palinet.org), if you'd rather not do the wiki markup and you'd like an early editing pass.

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