Gold OA is 'not fair and not sustainable' - Research Information

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-10-26

Summary:

"I sometimes read feature pieces in the newpapers headlined things like ’Why I’m sick of the Royal Baby’ or ‘Why the fuel for my car should cost £5 a litre’ and think – ooh, you had better put your hard hat on because you are going to get a world of stuff poured on your head. So – at the risk of the same…. I don’t like pay-to-publish gold open access. At all. It is not economically sustainable. It is philosophically shaky. It carries a danger of cultural imperialism. And it’s likely to lead to a range of unintended (and unfavourable) consequences. I remember early-days discussion about unsustainable research journal pricing, particularly in scientific and medical research. Normally market capitalism would easily handle this problem with the launch of alternative journals, but in the weird world of scholarly journal publishing, where prestige publication for the authors is pretty well all, the ‘invisible hand’ of market adjustments was bound tight. But let’s remember that the roots were about ‘unfair pricing’ of ‘must-have’ peer-reviewed scientific journals and an attempt to bring more equity and responsibility into this dysfunctional market. We have moved on a way from that point, and the main driver has been the move to online publishing – a democratisation of information which is writing new rules as quickly as I am writing this paragraph. It’s both a scary and an exciting time to be a publisher. But, as sometimes happens, we have institutional intervention in a field where models are blooming, unregulated and unfettered. So we have the institutional-political bright idea of gold open access (OA). There is a strong and valid argument which says: ‘but publically-funded research should be available to the public’. Before the mid-90s, that was a real challenge because the medium for distribution was paper, and printing and mailing (or otherwise disseminating) carries a substantial direct cost. Since then, and certainly today, technology has given us a very adequate solution. You write something and you want to make it available for people to see? Put it on your website. Email it to your friends and colleagues. It doesn’t cost anything (or at least it doesn’t cost much). You work for an institution? Ask your institution to post it on their website. In fact, if you work for an institution which has a lot of people publishing a lot of things, they may well have a kind of proxy publishing arm, an institutional repository. So put it in there. An institutional repository can normally take care of some of the complicated issues of soliciting, capturing, reviewing, editing, administering, curating, archiving and disseminating material. But, the thing is, someone needs to pick up these costs. In most walks of life, the customer pays. Sometimes (like a free newspaper or the Spotify music distributor), advertisers pay. Sometimes the government pays, out of the public purse. Sometimes (like the Medicis in Renaissance Florence, or the Soros Foundation) a plutocrat will pay out of a sense of philanthropy, or for whatever reason.  Here’s why I think gold OA is unsustainable, philosophically dodgy, and is likely to deliver unintended consequences.  Author-pays will concentrate the creation of knowledge in the hands of the wealthy. That is inevitable. Right now, an author can submit a paper or a book manuscript to us at Greenleaf Publishing, whatever their personal or institutional means. They and we may earn something, or we may not. The market will decide. But an APC of a couple of thousand pounds, which seems trivial in the light of a research grant of hundreds of thousands, is not trivial to a person or institution of limited means.  Creating a system that pretty much excludes poorer people from contributing to knowledge, or that assumes that researchers in developed-world top-level institutions are the only people with anything useful to say, is the worst kind of cultural imperialism. We didn’t do so well with global financial systems!  The creation of carved-out budgets in institutions and research funds does not serve to create a utopian knowledge-for-all. Rather (I don’t find this surprising but maybe the policy-makers do) it creates a swathe of opportunistic start-ups saying ‘we can publish your research free, send us a cheque’; and a rash of ‘double-dipping’ behaviour from the commercial publishing establishment who see the opportunity to get APCs as well as subscriptions in a ‘hybrid’ model.  It has also muddied the water on ‘green’ OA where publishers allow researchers to publish a PDF of their paper on their own or their institution’s site after some/no embargo. The Research Council UK guideline that a 24-month embargo was OK simply led to many publishers extending a previous six or 12 month embargo limit to 24 months ..."

Link:

http://www.researchinformation.info/news/news_story.php?news_id=1404

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.negative oa.green oa.prestige oa.hybrid oa.fees oa.repositories oa.journals oa.objections oa.debates oa.sustainability oa.economics_of oa.double_dipping

Date tagged:

10/26/2013, 20:51

Date published:

10/26/2013, 16:51