Open access myths

From PLN

Jump to: navigation, search

Open access myths

There are real issues and controversies related to open access--but there are also myths, arguments that have been refuted but that keep showing up time and time again.

Here are a few related sets of myths or near-myths from different sources.

There's also a common misunderstanding--namely, that open access is entirely about open access publishing. It isn't. As discussed in Open access basics and Open access overview, that's "gold OA." "Green OA"--depositing article preprints in OAI-compliant repositories--is an equally valid form of open access. Most of the myths discussed here relate primarily to gold OA.

Contents

Standard arguments against open access

by Walt Crawford. The introduction and first seven items originally appeared in different form as part of the "Library Access to Scholarship" essay in Cites & Insights 4:13, November 2004. The responses and items 8 and 9 are new to this article.

I’m going to do something I should have done back in June [2004]: Provide a numbered key to the standard arguments against OA publishing (as opposed to unique arguments such as “it distracts attention and money from OAI archiving”), so I can simply list the numbers used in specific pieces.

1. STM (science, technology and medicine) publishing has developed over centuries and works just great as it is

Even the wealthiest university libraries can no longer pay the subscription costs for all the journals they might want--and most people don't have access to the wealthiest university libraries. The system is, by most accounts, broken.

2. $1,500 (or $500 or $525) can’t possibly pay the real costs per article; OA isn’t sustainable without charging ($3,000, $4,500, whatever)

Most OA journals manage without charging any author-side (article) fees. While it's still not clear what the actual article-related costs of scholarly publishing in electronic form are (setting aside publisher profit, advertising, corporate overhead, etc.), it's increasingly clear that some OA publishers can get by with reasonably modest fees (or none at all).

There are also a growing number of journal business models to provide revenue sources other than author-side fees.

3. OA publishing weakens or undermines peer review

Simply not true. Journals aren't listed in DOAJ unless they have peer review or editorial quality control. There is no basis whatsoever for this particular myth--which may be why it's one of the most commonly repeated. [Note: Some sampling suggests that the vast majority of journals in DOAJ use peer review for scholarly articles, although there may be a few exceptions.]

For an extremely detailed discussion of this issue (and the related idea that self-archiving could somehow undermine peer review), see Peter Suber's "Will open access undermine peer review"? in SPARC Open Access Newsletter 113 (September 2, 2007). Do note that it's 15 print pages--and maybe needs to be that long. Based on that and other background, I regard this as a myth, not a controversy.

4. Research grants don’t include publication funding

Some do, more could--and in any case, at least for STM, the highest author-side fees represent a tiny percentage of the research costs for an article.

5. OA/article-fee publishing gives well-funded scientists advantages over others

Of the minority of gold OA journals that charge author-side fees, most (if not all) provide fee waivers for scientists unable to pay.

6. OA/article-fee publishing will prevent scientists in developing nations from publishing

Of the minority of gold OA journals that charge author-side fees, most provide broad waivers for developing nations.

7. OA publishing undermines professional societies that subsidize their activities through journal profits

This one isn't a myth as such--but it's a traditional cross-subsidy for some professional societies that can't be justified on any logical basis. If universities are expected to subsidize professional societies (beyond membership dues), they should do so directly--not through the library budgets supporting overpriced journals. (See later in this article: There's good reason to believe that high-quality, appropriately-priced society-published journals would survive just fine in an OA world.)

8. Open access advocates claim that online publishing doesn't cost any money

No serious open access advocate has ever said that online publishing, whether open access or not, was without costs.

As Peter Suber said when responding to this claim being promulgated by a professional society publisher in 2005 (in an op-ed saying "One of the myths promulgated by Public Access advocates is that online publishing does not cost any money"): "To say so at this late date, after this old misinformation has repeatedly been corrected, is to show that one is not paying attention." Or, less charitably, that repeating lies can make them seem like facts.

9. Open access publishing is unsustainable

Quoting Peter Suber in the December 2007 SPARC Open Access Newsletter regarding two substantial OA publishers:

Because both Hindawi and Medknow have both been profitable for more than year, you'd think that the fact of their success would start to sink in, with corresponding effects on attitudes toward the sustainability of OA journals and interest in their business models.

(Mis)Leading open access myths

Excerpted from Open Access now, published from July 2003 through December 2004 by BioMed Central, a major open-access publisher. The full document includes a direct quotation stating each myth followed by a response. This shorter version excludes the quotations and includes portions of the responses.

1. The cost of providing Open Access will reduce the availability of funding for research

It is clear that at an overall macro-economic level, a switch to Open Access publishing would not negatively impact research funding. The cost of the present system of biomedical research publishing, with all its inefficiencies and overly generous profit margins, still only amounts to about 1-2% of the overall funding for biomedical research...

There is no reason why the cost of Open Access publishing should exceed the cost of the current system, since the fundamental process is the same. In fact, Open Access publishers are leading the way in using web technology to reduce costs further, so the cost of Open Access publishing to the scientific community will be significantly less than the cost of the system that it replaces...

At the micro-economic level, there will certainly be transitions that need to be carefully managed as the Open Access publishing model grows in economic significance. e.g. since the total cost of publishing scientific articles is roughly proportional to the amount of research to be published, it may well make sense for the costs of publishing to be incorporated into research funding grants, rather than being covered by library budgets...

2. Access is not a problem - virtually all UK researchers have the access they need

[A claim of 97% access to ScienceDirect journals] refers to researchers at UK Higher Education institutions only, many of which have indeed taken out ScienceDirect subscriptions as a part of JISC's "big deal" agreement. However, these researchers do not have access to all ScienceDirect content by any means--the subset of journals that is accessible varies widely from institution to institution, meaning that access barriers are frequently a problem, even for researchers.

More fundamentally, the Higher Education sector is only one of several sectors carrying out biomedical research...

Editor's note: The situation is similar in the US, except that there is no nationwide Big Deal for higher education as a whole.

3. The public can get any article they want from the public library via interlibrary loan

To say that being able to go to the library and request an interlibrary loan is a substitute for having Open Access to research articles online is rather like saying that carrier pigeon is a substitute for the Internet.

Yes - both can convey information, but attempting to watch a live video stream with data delivered by carrier pigeon would be a frustrating business. Practically, the obstacles to obtaining an article via the interlibrary loan route are so huge that all but the most determined members of the public are put off...

4. Patients would be confused if they were to have free access to the peer-reviewed medical literature on the web

This position is extremely elitist. It also defies logic. There is already a vast amount of material on medical topics available on the Internet, much of which is junk. Can it really be beneficial for society as a whole that patients should have access to all the dubious medical information on the web, but should be denied access to the scientifically sound, peer-reviewed research articles?...

5. It is not fair that industry will benefit from Open Access

The chemical, biotech and pharmaceutical industries play a major role in the UK economy, and so this argues strongly for Open Access. To say that they do not contribute significantly in terms of publishing research is inaccurate. Industry publishes a significant amount of research itself, and also funds much research within the academic community that then goes on to be published...

6. Open Access threatens scientific integrity due to a conflict of interest resulting from charging authors

The assertion being made is, essentially, that Open Access publishers have an incentive to publish dubious material, in order to increase their revenue from Article Processing Charges. This is a very peculiar accusation for [traditional publishers] to make given that [their subscription price increases are primarily justified on the basis that they are publishing more articles.] In which case, if their own argument is to be believed, they face the exactly the same conflict of interest as Open Access publishers.

Fortunately, however, no such conflict of interest exists, for either Open Access or traditional publishers. Any scientific journal's success depends on authors choosing to submit their research to it for publication. Authors publish research in order for the value of their findings to be recognized. The kudos granted by a solid publication record is crucial for scientific career progression. Authors submit their research to journals with a reputation for publishing good science. If a journal had a reputation for publishing poor science, it would not receive submissions. Thus the system is inherently self-correcting...

7. Poor countries already have free access to the biomedical literature

HINARI, and its sister initiative, AGORA [two initiatives to provide STM literature to some poorer nations], are commendable initiatives and are undoubtedly warmly welcomed by researchers working in the eligible countries. Via these schemes, publishers give some of the poorest countries free access to some of their journals. In HINARI, twenty-eight publishers participate, making a total of more than 2000 journals available for free to some of the poorest countries (defined as having a per capita annual income of less than $1000); and at a deep discount for some slightly less disadvantaged countries (per capita annual income between $1000 and $3000).

Unfortunately these schemes offer only a partial solution to the access problems of the developing world. The list of eligible countries has many notable omissions. It excludes large low-income countries such as India, Pakistan and Indonesia, even though these countries have per capita annual incomes of $735 or less, and are therefore "low-income" countries according to World Bank criteria. Countries such as Brazil and China (which are "lower-middle income" according to the World Bank) are also excluded from the eligibility list, even for discounts.

It is therefore clear that researchers in developing countries have a huge amount to gain from greatly expanded access to the global scientific literature that Open Access publishing will offer.

8. Traditionally published content is more accessible than Open Access content as it is available in printed form

This claim should perhaps win a prize for audacity. To be clear: it is not just slightly wrong; it is preposterously wrong.

Firstly, sending out printed copies of journals to subscribers who pay for them is in no way in conflict with the goals of Open Access. Many Open Access journals...have print editions. Wherever there is a demand for print (from libraries or from individuals) then print editions are available to those who wish to pay to receive them, just as with a traditional journal.

But, far more importantly...more than half a billion people worldwide use the Internet. The wonderful thing about Open Access is that any one of those hundreds of millions of people can print out copies of any Open Access article, and distribute them to whomever they want...

In contrast, many traditional journals are received in print by only a few hundred libraries worldwide. Not only that, the libraries that hold these print copies are bound by strict rules governing what is and is not permissible in terms of copying and redistribution. To argue that these few hundred printed copies provide greater access to research than making articles openly accessible online is, frankly, ludicrous.

9. A high quality journal such as Nature would need to charge authors £10,000-£30,000 in order to move to an Open Access model

...This figure is only claimed to apply to Nature--an extremely special case among the tens of thousands of life science journals. Elsevier's evidence confirmed that, even with the inefficiencies of publishers' current systems, the cost per article for a typical journal is far lower...

But even for Nature, the figure of £10,000-£30,000 is wildly off the mark. The calculation used by Macmillan was as follows: "Very crudely, £30 million of sales: we get income of £30 million and we publish 1,000 papers a year. That is your [£30,000]."

There are several major problems with the calculation that was used:

  1. A significant fraction of Nature's £30m revenue is spent to commission and produce the non-research-article content of the journal (e.g. News & Views articles, book reviews, commentaries, editorials etc.).This non-research content would continue to drive healthy print and online subscription revenue, even if the research articles were made freely accessible online. Since the non-research content (the front-matter) is far more widely read than the research articles themselves, it is far from clear whether making the research articles Open Access would have any negative impact on subscription revenue. In fact, the opposite can be argued.
  2. For the same reason, there is no reason to believe that Nature's impressive advertising revenue would suffer dramatically as a result of Open Access, yet they are assumed to fall to zero in Nature's calculation.
  3. Part of the argument used to justify the high cost per published article is that Nature rejects more than 90% of papers submitted, and so has to review more than 10 papers for every one it publishes, and has to bear the entire cost of this.... [In fact, however, if a paper is scientifically sound, but is not exceptional or fashionable enough to appear in Nature, it may well be submitted and accepted into one of the next tier of journals in the Nature stable... without requiring significant additional editorial work or costs.]

10. Publishers need to make huge profits in order to fund innovation

Huge investment by a large corporation is not the best driver of innovation, especially in the modern connected world. The explosion of the Internet has shown that open platforms are the real spur for innovation. The open standards of the Internet mean that anyone can create a website and offer any imaginable online service, and it will be instantly accessible by all Internet users world-wide. The result has been an unparalleled wealth of innovation, which goes far beyond what proprietary online services had previously achieved.

Open Access to the scientific literature holds the promise of the same benefits for science. Once the majority of the scientific literature is Open Access, in the full sense of being openly re-distributable and re-usable, the entire scientific community will be free to develop and improve techniques to mine and explore that literature. They will not be constrained by any one corporate budget or policy, nor by the barriers inherent in the current fragmentation of the literature. At this point in time we can only imagine what is possible, but it is certain that it will dwarf what any one company might achieve.

11. Publishers need to take copyright to protect the integrity of scientific articles

Scientific integrity is protected not by copyright law, but by the norms, standards and processes of the scientific community. An article is only "stolen" from an author if it is mis-attributed. This is fraud, and laws other than copyright deal with fraud.

It is exceptionally rare for a scientific publisher to use copyright law to defend the integrity of a scientific paper on behalf of an author. In fact BioMed Central knows of no situation where this has happened.

Dispelling myths about open access

Excerpted and modified from this article prepared by MIT Libraries.

Is it true that Open Access means an article is not copyrighted?

No. Choosing to publish through an open access channel does not mean the article is not copyrighted. The same options exist when publishing through an open access channel as when an article is published through a controlled-access (or traditional subscription) model: the author may in some cases be able to retain copyright, or may be required to grant the journal publisher copyright. But in either case, the article is still copyrighted, either by you or the publisher...

Is it true that Open Access articles and journals are not peer-reviewed?

No. A journal's economic or access policy does not determine its peer review policy. Most scholarly journals, whether open access or controlled-access journals, are peer-reviewed. There are both open and controlled journals that are not peer-reviewed.

Is it true that Open Access journals are built on a premise that they are “free”?

No.... Supporters of Open Access do not assume that documenting and providing access to research can be carried out without cost, but they do assume that research should be accessible to readers without barriers. So the costs involved in editing, refereeing, producing, and distributing a journal are expected to be managed through a business model other than payment for access to the content.

Is it true that research is already openly available enough?

No. It’s true that preprints and postprints are made widely available on the internet, with or without the consent of the publisher of the final article. However, many authors are constrained by publisher policies from making all their research available, and disciplines vary in their support for making pre- or post- prints available. One 2006 paper co-authored by a leader in the OA movement, Stevan Harnad, estimates that only 15% overall of articles are being made available “through spontaneous self-archiving” into institutional repositories by their authors.

A recent study (pdf) by Ted Bergstrom, an economics professor at UC Santa Barbara, showed that of very recent economics articles published in 25 journals, 73% were available in a free version through a Google search. This is a significant percentage, but it still indicates that more than one-quarter of the articles were excluded from access. Bergstrom concludes that the self-archived, freely accessible copies are very important since “many readers have no access to publisher-posted copies,” including “small universities, private sector, and third world countries.”...

Is it true that Open Access will inevitably harm scholarly societies?

No. It is inevitable that all publishers will need to adjust existing economic models to meet the realities of, and fully realize the capabilities of, internet access... The best new models are likely to require significant change from all the players; the existing controlled-access journal subscription model, particularly in cases where the journals are high-priced, may not serve the community as well as it has in the past. New economic models need to be developed and tested, a process that is already underway.

None of this means that scholarly societies, many of which depend on revenue from their publication programs, will necessarily be jeopardized by transitioning to these new economic models. As Clifford Lynch, the Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information, has recently said about journals published by scholarly societies: “their journals typically are viewed as offering high quality at reasonable cost, and there”s no reason that they shouldn’t continue to be highly competitive if one moves away from a reader-pays model.”

Related articles

Your turn: Talk about it

Retrieved from "http://pln.palinet.org/wiki/index.php/Open_access_myths"
Personal tools
Home