What's the difference between an issue and a controversy? The issues raised in chapter 3 are situations that deserve attention and study. Topics in this chapter are more controversial, or appear to be more controversial.
That's an important distinction. This chapter concerns two very different categories:
For much more detail and quite a few more examples, read Peter Suber's “A field guide to misunderstandings about open access,” a 10,000-word essay in the April 2009 SOAN Newsletter, and “(Mis)Leading open access myths,” a 5,000-word statement from BioMed Central.1
These are some of the more interesting controversial questions for open access.
Peer review, editing and copyediting, markup, distribution, promotion: We know about those functions—and we know some of them are already either free (most peer review, most editorial supervision) or can be extremely inexpensive (electronic distribution, flow control for peer review, electronic promotion).
What else do publishers bring to the table? The simplest answer is “It depends”—different publishers in different fields add different amounts and kinds of value.
T. Scott Plutchak's “The invisible parts of publishing”2 (T. Scott, June 12, 2008) believes publishers add more value than some of us think:
We often have a tendency to glibly think (in the world of scholarly publishing, at least) that nothing of significance happens between the completion of peer review and the appearance of the published version (whether that be in print or digital form) …
At the New England Journal of Medicine (along with most other publishers), there is an army of copy-editors and illustrators and fact-checkers who come into play after the article has been accepted, all of whose skills are needed to put that article into final form and make sure that the authors' intent is conveyed in the very best way possible. You can't do that kind of work with volunteers.
And then there's the matter of getting somebody's attention. Take any article from the latest issue of NEJM, Nature, or JAMA. Do you really think that if you posted it on a website and invited comments (even in some mediated way so that it approximated serious peer review), and used those comments to modify and further develop the piece, it would get anywhere near the attention that it would get from having been published in one of the high-profile journals? We have a tendency to ignore the critical importance of brand in helping people make their way through the morass of content that is available.
Does Plutchak overstate the case? PLoS One proposes that “what's worth reading” should not be a decision made by journal editors. Critically valuable can be a loaded term, one that tends to flavor conservatism in research. And there's a bit of a straw man in these quotations: very few OA supporters propose that all journals in all fields can or should operate without any funding or rely entirely on volunteer labor. Copyediting, markup, and promotion all require skilled effort and can be expensive. The controversy is not whether publishers add value—it boils down to how much value, whether today's brands are the only or most appropriate ones, and how best to pay for that value.
This is not the same question as “Is there enough money to make OA journals work?” Some OA advocates have suggested that all the money currently spent on subscriptions (directly and through aggregated full-text databases) should be applied to author-side fees. That would certainly be “enough money,” but it would also leave libraries no better off than they are now.
It seems likely that most estimates of costs by commercial subscription-journal publishers and estimates of author-side fees that would be required have been calculated by the simple expedient of dividing current revenues by the number of articles, including all current profit and overhead in the calculations along with (in some cases) the costs of print versions.
What are the real costs?
That last bullet (and some provision for hosting and redundant archiving) might justify a per-article budget in the low hundreds of dollars—less in some fields, more in a few. Are there realistic justifications for author-side fees as high as $5,000? That's a tough question, one that OA advocates are generally reluctant to raise. An answer needs to show real explanations for legitimate costs that go beyond “here's our revenue for last year and how many articles we published.”
Currently, Hindawi (a publisher of many gold OA journals) charges author-side fees in the low hundreds of dollars; PLoS charges range from $1,350 to $2,900; BioMed Central charges range from $740 to $2,380—and that $5,000 figure is Nature Publishing Group's charge for the a new “hybrid” Nature Communications. At the other extreme, one article on the true costs of e-publishing asserts a range of $64 to $76 per article, with some controversial assumptions.3
Can we arrive at realistic estimates for legitimate costs, possibly based on the kind of journal? Can those estimates be stated in ways most stakeholders would accept? Now, there's a controversy.
I'm not sure this belongs in the legitimate controversy category. It's possible to create scenarios in which full gold OA would cost more for libraries and universities than the current subscription-journal system, but it requires extreme assumptions—such as assuming that per-article charges in the $3,000 to $5,000 range are universally legitimate, that all OA journals will have such ambitious charges, and that the only source of author-side fees will be universities and libraries.
None of those assumptions bears up to even slight scrutiny. In fields where grant funding pays for most research, the cost of dissemination (that is, author-side fees) can and should be included in grant totals—and some granting agencies are already doing that. In most other fields, author-side fees are likely to be smaller or nonexistent. (Remember, most existing gold OA journals don't charge author-side fees.) Attempts to model the full scholarly communications system seem to show that full OA should yield at least a 30% savings over the current environment while yielding far better results, since all articles would be available to everybody with internet connections.
Many subscription journals make a few teaser articles available for free immediately and open all peer-reviewed articles for all readers after an embargo period. Some OA advocates regard these journals as legitimate OA journals, if not optimal. Others don't accept that they should be called open access at all. That's one controversy (I come down on the “delayed access is not OA” side). Another is whether delayed OA is a transitional tactic or whether it makes sense for the long run. Will (and should) libraries keep paying subscription or full-text licensing fees for journals when the articles will become available at no cost in three months, six months, a year?
Stevan Harnad, an important founding voice for OA, gives lip service to the desirability of both green OA and gold OA but consistently argues against expenditures of time or money on gold OA, saying 100% green OA, which he has called “optimal and inevitable,” must and should come first. Some others argue that only gold OA does any real good—although rarely in so many words. Jan Velterop seems to make this case in most of his writing about open access. Joe Dunckley argues “Green is no goal” in a June 9, 2010, post at Journalology (http://journalology.blogspot.com/):
To achieve a sufficiently large but distant win, it is worth sacrificing a much smaller but nearer win if it stands in the way or distracts and delays the larger achievement. To achieve a small but near win, it is not worth sacrificing a much larger but more distant win. But the difference in magnitude must be sufficiently large, and the difference in distance sufficiently small, to make delaying the gratification really pay off.
Dunckley isn't interested in access as a goal: “Access is not an interesting problem.” He's much more interested in how “parasitic subscription access publishers” are “slowly killing” university libraries and the “real revolution” of open data. An extreme view? Possibly—but is it more extreme than arguing that all energy should go toward green OA?
Only gold OA assures that readers won't be guided to fee-based copies of articles rather than free copies. Only gold OA definitely saves money for libraries as compared to subscription access to the same or equivalent journals. And, of course, with more than 5,000 gold OA journals already publishing, “green only” isn't going to happen.
On the other hand, a rapid transition to 100% gold OA, or even majority status for gold OA, isn't going to happen soon. It's too disruptive to commercial and society publishers, so that substantial sums will be spent to retain the subscription model for as long as possible. As long as journal brand names count, those brand names will (in some cases) come at a price. Realistically, we need both roads for OA to make real progress.
Most gold OA journals do not charge author-side fees. Is that a reasonable way to build the future?
Here's part of what Peter Suber has to say about business models for non-fee OA journals:4
Some no-fee OA journals have direct or indirect subsidies from institutions like universities, laboratories, research centers, libraries, hospitals, museums, learned societies, foundations, or government agencies. Some have revenue from a separate line of non-OA publications. Some have revenue from advertising, auxiliary services, membership dues, endowments, reprints, or a print or premium edition. Some rely, more than other journals, on volunteerism …
We have a lot to learn from the no-fee journals. Whatever their business models, and whatever their adequacy, they have found ways to generate revenue or subsidies that other journals (both OA and non-OA) could use or try. Exposing their models to scholarly attention and community-wide discussion might even uncover ways to refine and enhance them …
Suber considers where no-fee and author-side fee models might work best. For example, in fields such as medicine where most articles come from grant-funded research, author-side fees represent such a tiny portion of grant funding that they may be the reasonable way to proceed.
Consider gold OA journals in the field of library and information science, a case where very few subscription charges are outrageous. As of August 9, 2010, DOAJ's author list (which includes hybrid journals) includes 111 journals. Only 14 of the 111 (13%) charge author-side fees. Of 41 journals (including hybrid journals) related to organic chemistry, however, 36 (88%) charge author-side fees. The differences? That requires investigation.
Tom Wilson has published and edited Information Research for many years and regards gold OA journals with author-side charges as partial open access. He's now using the term platinum OA for what he regards as the only true open access: journals with neither subscription costs nor author charges. “Open access—again,” posted June 21, 2010, at Information Research—ideas and debate (http://info-research.blogspot.com/), discusses the economics of journal publishing and argues that volunteer effort can reasonably eliminate essentially all costs, as it does for Information Research. Does the platinum model work in all fields? Perhaps not, and it would be useful to know why and where that's so.
There are strong OA journals and weak subscription journals. There are strong subscription journals and weak OA journals. Anyone with an ax to grind can assemble comparative lists that will hone that blade as required.
It seems to be well established that there's no clear correlation between price and quality. One might expect that, in the long run, authors would recognize that gold OA opens their readership to the world, which might make authors more careful—but how could you produce evidence of this or its inverse?
PLoS One has been derided for its “anything goes” approach, where articles are reviewed only for scientific legitimacy, not for impact—resulting in a 70% acceptance rate. The journal is now old enough to receive an impact factor—and it's a respectable number, high enough to assert quality if the impact factor means anything useful (which it may not).
Will an institutional mandate, even one adopted by a faculty senate rather than administrative fat, result in an institution's faculty and scholars depositing 100% of their published articles in the institution's repository in a timely and responsible manner?
We don't know yet—such mandates haven't been around long enough. The evidence from one early mandate is positive, with one analysis claiming nearly 100% success for new articles. But there won't be strong evidence until several large institutions study deposits and publications over several years.
There's a related question: will all scholarly institutions adopt institutional OA mandates—and should they? So far, the adoption rate is slow. Mandate is a term many faculty loathe, and administrative mandates seem likely to engender resistance—but a growing number of mandates come from faculty senates, offering a better chance of willing compliance.
Not that universal institutional mandates (which I regard as highly unlikely) would yield 100% green OA. There are researchers outside of academia and, indeed, researchers and scholars not affiliated with any institution. Until or unless every subject has an OAI subject repository and every institution has a robust institutional repository, some articles won't be available.
This may not be a controversy so much as a serious issue, one far beyond the scope of this book and my knowledge. It depends on your success criteria, for starters. As a good starting point, read Dorothea Salo's landmark article “Innkeeper at the roach motel” in Library Trends 57:2 (Fall 2008), available as a green OA postprint at http://minds.wisconsin.edu/bitstream/handle/1793/22088/Salo_Final.pdf?sequence=6, particularly the section “What must happen.”
A narrower form of that question: would 100% green OA result in serials cancellations, and to what extent? The overall questions are hugely controversial.
At one extreme, it seems unlikely that Science or Nature would lose all their subscriptions if all peer-reviewed articles were known to be available from repositories. These journals have too many noninstitutional subscribers and offer too much added value to disappear overnight.
At the other extreme, I would be astonished to see any library retain a subscription to LIS journals costing $2,000 to $10,000 and up if the articles were known to be available through green OA, if those subscriptions aren't hidden within bundles sold at heavy discounts from fantasy list prices.
There is no question that some journals can retain reasonably priced subscriptions while going to gold OA, either for added value or for print copies. If gold OA journals can do so, it seems likely that journals made partially redundant through green OA could also do so—but not at the high prices currently being charged in some cases.
Finally, here's one that's a real controversy not directly related to any specific aspect of open access:
T. Scott Plutchak thinks they do—to the extent that he's said he's disgusted with the open access movement. I think repeated, strident calls to focus all attention on one aspect of OA and personal attacks on those who feel differently have the net result of alienating people who would otherwise support forward movement. Similarly, assertions that OA repositories are essentially free make life difficult for people trying to develop and run effective institutional repositories that cost real money.
It cuts both ways, to be sure. Some of those who oppose OA—especially those who implicitly oppose it or work to undermine it—use fallacies, personal attacks, and misleading assumptions to slow the progress of OA. Some who appear to support gold OA do so in a manner that works to undermine all OA, by supporting only forms of OA that would keep publishers and their profits whole. Misleading tone and content are always with us.
Any number of publishers, including commercial publishers and society publishers earning surpluses from journal subscriptions, has offered these myths as reasons to oppose open access. Two organizations (or, in one case, pseudo-organization) seem to exist largely to maintain these pseudo-controversies. Most notoriously, PRISM, the so-called Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine, was created by the Professional & Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers to fight against “government mandates”—the NIH mandate and proposed acts to improve public access to publicly funded research such as FRPAA, the Federal Research Public Access Act. The website is still there with no updates since 2007. The other, the DC Principles Coalition, claims to support “broad access to the scientific and medical literature”—but in a manner that's very different from open access and works to undermine open access. The group has consistently worked to reverse the NIH mandate and expansion of public access to publicly funded research, propounding the myth that open access undermines copyright. The coordinator of the DC Principles Coalition, Martin Frank of the American Physiological Society, is one of the most active proponents of anti-OA myths.
Subheadings here are statements rather than questions. In every case, the statement is either false or exaggerated, or applies at least as much to subscription journals as it does to OA journals. For those statements related to green OA, the statements are either false or exaggerated. Some of these are misunderstandings rather than deliberate myths—not so much attempts to undermine open access as simple failures to understand it fully. This is, to be sure, an incomplete list.
Simply not true. Both gold OA and green OA presume proper peer review, using exactly the same methodology as in peer-reviewed subscription journals.
There are people who feel that traditional peer review no longer works—but such feelings are not part of any OA movement.
Publishers repeat this myth despite a complete lack of evidence. When FRPAA (which would mandate open access to government-funded research) was first proposed, the AAP claimed that it “could well have the unintended consequence of compromising or destroying the independent system of peer review that ensures the integrity of the very research the U.S. Government is trying to support and disseminate.” The DC Principles Coalition claimed that FRPAA would result in a rapid decline in journals that consist largely of federally funded research and that “subscription revenues support the quality control system known as peer review.” Similarly, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) and International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (IASTM), opposing a proposed open access mandate for the European Union, asserted, “Open deposit of accepted manuscripts risks destabilising subscription revenues and undermining peer review.” PRISM went further, claiming that OA policies would “jeopardize the financial viability of the journals that conduct peer review, placing the entire scholarly communication process
at risk.”5
Saying a thing three times does not make it true, despite Lewis Carroll's poetry— and saying a thing hundreds of times, or specifically linking subscription revenues to peer review, does not make this nonsense believable. Not that this deters opponents of OA: an April 29, 2010, letter from some members of AAP's Professional and Scholarly Publishing Committee to Congress, opposing FRPAA (still on the legislative agenda), claims once again that it “would undermine copyright and adversely impact the existing peer review system.”
There are OA journals that use editorial quality control rather than full peer review, just as there are subscription journals that do exactly the same thing. Most OA journals use traditional peer review and, as with subscription journals, nearly all peer review is done for free by other researchers and scholars, not paid out of subscription revenues.
There's a related myth, and this one's a little more complicated:
The claim is that, since author-side fees are almost universally charged only for accepted articles, OA publishers will be tempted to accept marginal papers in order to increase revenues.
This myth has been stated in a different manner: open access threatens scientific integrity due to a conflict of interest resulting from charging authors. Here's a terse response to this myth from “(Mis)Leading open access myths”6
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 … If a journal had a reputation for publishing poor science, it would not receive submissions …
Consider these facts:
Green OA frequently means depositing versions of papers that have not yet been peer-reviewed—but they should be marked as such, and authors (and repository managers) have strong incentives to be sure that papers are identified as peer reviewed and published once that's the case.
That's not impossible but it's unlikely in most cases—which is why I use author-side rather than author and why processing fees may be better than author-side fees. There's a related misunderstanding, namely that author-side fees mean well-funded researchers have more access to publication outlets than poorly funded ones do.
OA, whether gold or green, improves the ability of researches in developing nations because it assures that they can read existing papers. In practice, most gold OA journals with author-side fees provide broad waivers for developing nations, so this isn't an issue in any case. Developing nations are also founding their own journals, mostly online and OA, a heartening development for scholarship and global diversity.
No serious open access advocate has ever said that online publishing, whether open access or not, was without cost—although some have said (correctly) that for some smaller journals the costs are so low that they can be covered by trivial departmental subsidies. It seems likely that online publishing costs can be dramatically lower than existing publishing systems, but there are always costs.
As Peter Suber said when responding to this claim being promulgated by a professional society publisher in 2005: “To say so at this late date, after this old misinformation has repeatedly been corrected, is to show that one is not paying attention.”
By now, you know the answer to this: green OA, depositing peer-reviewed papers in subject or institutional repositories, is an equally valid form of open access. Of course, there's also the opposite assertion, which is more of a controversy than a misunderstanding:
One analysis of biomedical research (one of the most expensive research areas) suggests that the total amount of money that goes to support traditional publishing, including very high profit margins for the largest commercial publishers and the added costs of print distribution and inefficient production systems, amounts to no more than 1% to 2% of the funds devoted to biomedical research. That's a worst-case scenario. In most fields, open access costs should amount to little more than a rounding error in research funding.
Arguments against the NIH mandate to deposit articles resulting from NIH-funded research into PubMed Central have included claims that maintaining an enlarged PubMed Central would significantly shrink funds available for research support. NIH has said that full compliance with the mandate could result in an annual cost of $15 million to operate PubMed Central. That may seem like a lot, but that's out of a $28 billion NIH research budget. In other words, the cost of green OA for these articles comes out to just over one-twentieth of 1% of the research funding or $1 out of every $2,000.
A narrower version of this argument is a claim that researchers at institutions of higher education in the United Kingdom have access to 97% of journals in ScienceDirect. Similarly, it's assumed that most researchers in the U.S. are at very large universities that have Big Deals providing access to nearly all scientific journals. For example, in a 2010 hearing on FRPAA, Alan Adler claimed that “there is no crisis in the world of scholarly publishing, or in the dissemination of scientific materials.”
This argument fails the sniff test. Even researchers at the largest universities don't have access to all the journals they could use, particularly as growing costs require cancellations. This says nothing about researchers at smaller institutions and outside academia, and the hapless situation of independent scholars, practitioners, and lay readers.
The situation is far worse in most countries. There are programs by which some journals are available for free in some developing nations—but, for example, the HINARI and AGORA initiatives provide about 2,000 journals for free only to the poorest countries and with very limited access in those countries. Countries such as India, Pakistan, and Indonesia are not part of the deals; neither are Brazil and China. Researchers in these nations, and researchers at all but the wealthiest institutions in first-world nations, do not have ready access to all the research in their field.
Realistically, and even assuming everyone has access to public libraries (not true in the U.S., much less most less-developed nations), this only works via interlibrary loan, since few public libraries can afford (or would spend their funds on) Big Deals.
“(Mis)Leading open access myths” puts it this way:
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 …
This also assumes that online or print journal subscriptions allow for unlimited provision of ILL copies of articles, decidedly not the case. This assertion might better be stated: “Determined members of the public who have access to the wealthiest public libraries may be able to obtain articles in some cases if they're patient enough.”
This one's been stated differently for medical research: patients would be confused by access to peer-reviewed medical literature, and doctors don't want their patients to be confused.
There are doubtless some doctors who would just as soon that their patients not be more up-to-date on a particular medical situation than the doctors are. More enlightened doctors are only too happy to have patients directly involved in awareness and care, and many laypeople are quite capable of understanding scholarly research. This is a particularly obnoxious elitist argument.
Here's an odd one: claims by publishers that copyright transfer, which can get in the way of green OA, is needed so they can protect authors from plagiarism or outright thief. That's nonsense; there are few if any cases where copyright law has been used to defiend the integrity of a scientific paper. BioMed Central has said it “knows of no situation where this has happened.” In practice, effective OA discourages plagiarism and thief by making it easier to identify the original of a paper.
Quite the opposite, from an author's perspective. Gold OA journals typically leave copyright in the name of the authors—and if not, such journals would retain copyright.
Providing free access is not the same as abandoning copyright. The most straightforward way for OA journals to handle this is to adopt a Creative Commons license (ideally attribution or BY, alternatively attribution-noncommercial or BY-NC), which explicitly grants needed rights while retaining copyright.
Green open access at the preprint stage does not violate copyright: at that point, the author holds copyright. You hold copyright in your work as soon as it's created— effectively, as soon as you save it to disk or other stable memory. The only way you can give up copyright is through a formal assignment, and submitting a manuscript does not constitute such an assignment. Neither does its acceptance: only a separate signed agreement can turn over copyright.
Does OA weaken copyright? Not if you believe in the constitutional basis of copyright, “to promote the progress of science and useful arts.” OA strengthens that aspect of copyright, as it makes work more readily available to those who could take progress further. If you believe that copyright's purpose is to yield the maximum possible revenue for the copyright holder, then you could make this claim—but scholarly articles typically return zero revenue to authors, so it's a meaningless claim.
There are two versions of this one: open access deprives authors of royalties, or open access destroys the incentive to create good work.
The first one is a myth for the obvious reason that contemporary open access is about work that does not generate royalties for authors. Few advocates of open access argue that people should make their books available for free; there are arguments for such experiments, but they're not part of the open access movement as such.
The second gets it exactly wrong. One incentive to write good scholarly articles should be to have people read them and make effective use of your research. By making it possible for everybody to read your articles, you enhance that incentive.
The first part of this assertion is true. At best, self-archiving seems to cover 15% to 20% of new research articles. It's not possible to disprove the second part of this assertion in general—but it is noteworthy that, for the past two or three years, most new OA mandates have been adopted by faculty vote rather than administrative fat. When asked (with enough information), most faculty members are willing to comply with mandates—and when faculty senates unanimously adopt mandates, it's fair to assume they're not opposed to their effects.
There are two obvious reasons for low rates of self-archiving:
Ignorance: Most faculty members and other researchers are too busy with teaching and research to spend much time learning about open access.
Inertia: Until faculty members and other scholars understand the direct and indirect benefits of OA, it's easiest to keep on doing what they've been doing.
This isn't a myth and not a complete misunderstanding. It is, instead, a limiting simplification—it equates gratis OA with all OA.
Removing price barriers is great, but removing permission barriers can lead to important new scholarship. Libre open access (discussed in chapter 2) has clear advantages over gratis OA. Unfortunately, a fair number of OA journals don't get this— too many of them don't have clear licenses permitting more than just reading.
I'm not discussing other myths and misunderstandings. You'll find some of them in the sources listed in the endnotes.