Open and Shut?: Alexander Grossmann on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

Use the link to access the interview.  An excerpt of the introduction reads as follows: " ... And it is clearly his openness to new ideas and trends, combined with frustration at the way legacy publishers are responding to OA, which has persuaded Grossmann to combine his new academic post with a different kind of publishing role, as President of a privately owned OA venture called ScienceOpen. Co-founded with Tibor Tscheke, the new venture, says Grossmann, will feed into and help his future research. ScienceOpen is a 'research and publishing network' designed to allow researchers to share scientific information, both formally by publishing articles, and informally by reviewing their colleagues’ work, providing endorsements and comments, and updating their own papers. Essentially, it will offer a publishing service that will also enable post-publication peer review, and which will be embedded in a social networking environment. A beta site will go live next month, and submissions will start to be accepted in November. Once the service is properly up and running researchers will be charged around $800 to publish a full article (Although there will be no publication fees this year). Imprisoned Having had experience of both the research environment and of academic publishing, Grossmann has an interesting perspective on OA. Above all, he understands all too well the fear that OA has engendered in publishing houses. And now that he has left traditional publishing behind he is able to view the challenges that scholarly publishers face more objectively than his former colleagues still working in the industry. Readers must reach their own conclusions, but what struck me in what Grossmann has to say in the Q&A that follows is that, whatever their wishes and intentions, legacy publishers seem to be prisoners of their past — imprisoned by the business model of academic publishing they have inherited, imprisoned by their shareholders (where they work in a public company), but above all imprisoned by their need to maintain the high profit levels to which scholarly publishers have become accustomed. It is the latter that publishers believe OA now threatens and which they so fear. By Grossmann’s account, while appearing to respond positively to OA, publishers are in reality like rabbits caught in the head beams of an approaching automobile. They are more inclined to freeze into inaction than leap into an uncertain future. Certainly they seem unable to confront the huge changes that the new networked environment is demanding of them. As Grossmann puts it, 'I have the impression that there is no publishing house which is either able or willing to consider the rigorous change in their business models which would be required to actively pursue an open access publishing concept … The yearly drop in subscription numbers has everyone on edge and the occasional experiments in Open Access are not designed to save the bottom line.' Grossmann also paints a picture of a research community struggling to move forward. With their library budgets eaten up by 'big deal' subscription contracts, research institutions simply do not have the wherewithal to pay for Gold OA, other than on a small scale. 'As long as libraries are caught in the big deals and traditional subscription models, we all have less chance to move forward with OA,' says Grossmann. Whatever the accuracy of Grossmann’s analysis, we cannot but note that it is a less upbeat picture of the current state of Open Access than OA advocates are inclined to paint — e.g. by SPARC’s Heather Joseph in an earlier Q&A in this series ... So what could break this seeming impasse? Green OA advocates argue that the answer is self-evident: Researchers should continue to publish in subscription journals and then self-archive their papers — thereby forcing publishers to downsize their operations and embrace OA wholesale, rather than tinkering with it in a piecemeal fashion as they are currently doing. Grossmann, however, is not convinced. Green OA, he suggests, should be viewed as having been no more than 'the first response of the publishing industry to the new legal requirements or regulations introduced by funding agencies'. What is required today, he says, is for 'one or a few key scholarly institutions to make a significant change in how their libraries acquire and fund their research content.' In other words, to move forward Grossmann believes it is essential to free up money by cancelling big deals. For this reason, he says, the main focus of the OA movement today should be on encouraging and supporting libraries to 'reallocate a part of the present budget which is spent on big deals for subscription journals towards OA in order to meet the costs of Gold OA publications.' Something further is needed too, he adds. New ways of publishing and distributing research need to be introduced — novel new services like PeerJ and F1000, for instance. '[I]t is not sufficient to continue to launch single new OA journals in individual scientific disciplines,' he says. 'Rather, both the vis