The Illicit Love Affair between Open Access and Traditional Publishing | The Scholarly Kitchen

"Aside from the curry at Nora’s, the highlight of this year’s PSP conference for me was the panel put together by the Kitchen’s very own David Crotty. From the program notes: 'This session will focus on the large number of requirements and policies being placed on researchers and their articles across the spectrum of scholarly publishing and how they are starting to impact publishers.' Kitchen readers may not be aware that when he is not cracking the whip over the wretched Kitchen contributors, David has a day job at Oxford University Press, where a growing portion of his time goes into managing compliance with various open access (OA) mandates. This was to be expected, of course: the price of a free lunch is astronomical. But as long as the people who demand a free lunch aren’t the ones who have to serve it up, free lunches will reign and costs will rise. This is the promise of OA: higher costs, more industry consolidation, and, among the advocates, an alarming growth of self-regard. Consolidation is the inevitable outcome because organizations seek scale to keep administrative costs down. OA is a marvelous feast, but don’t stick me with the check. The panel had representatives from government (the NSF’s Amy Friedlander), the library world (Judith Russell, the Dean of the University of Florida’s library system), and publishing (Elsevier’s Alicia Wise). Until I attended this panel, I had not realized the extent to which libraries, too, incur administrative costs for OA compliance. My heart went out to Friedlander, who had the unenviable task of telling a room full of publishers that increasing their administrative costs is in the public interest ... What becomes clear as you peruse Wise’s materials is that the matter of compliance is not a single thing but a complicated collection of multiple mandates and rules. Let’s imagine, for example, a paper by three authors, who reside at three different institutions, located in three different countries, and whose research was partly funded by three different entities. The institutions may have different mandates, the funders may have different mandates, there may be local regulatory requirements, and even the individual authors may have the audacity to have some ideas as to how their work should be made public, typically expressed in a preference for one Creative Commons license over another (Solution: Don’t use CC licenses at all). The regulatory matters are completely out of sync with the global and collaborative nature of research publication today. Someone has to clean up this mess, and naturally that task falls to the publishers. And they will do a good job at it, though at considerable expense, as developing and implementing industrial systems is much of what publishers do ..."