Guest Post: Open Access to Science for Everyone

“Before the internet, there were non-trivial costs associated with disseminating paper-based research publications – each and every page of every article of every journal cost the publisher money to produce... But now the internet allows unlimited copies of research publications to be created for zero cost and these can be advertised and disseminated at relatively insignificant costs – just the cost of bandwidth, keeping servers up and running, maintaining a user-friendly website that search engines can crawl, and providing an RSS feed to notify interested parties of new journal articles... Note that for the sake of clarity we’ll ignore the role of manuscript-submission, organising peer-review, and the peer review process itself here – I contend these are only of minor administrative cost... Furthermore these processes need not necessarily be performed by the same organisation that acts to distribute the publications (decoupled scholarly publication), a nice idea as popularised by Jason Priem... Yet, the models of payment for publication of, and distribution of research works are still largely centred on paying-for-access, rather than paying-to-publish. In the digital age this is inefficient and illogical... I contend that the reader-pays model is currently dominant, especially with commercial for-profit publishers because it can generate excessive profits through its opaqueness and inefficiency (relative to the ultimate goal of providing free, Open Access to scientific knowledge for everyone)... The interests of shareholders, and board members of for-profit publishing companies are now hugely conflicting with that of research funders, institutions and academics. By definition, the primary goal of a for-profit publishing company is profit... Whereas the goal of STM researchers & funders is surely for knowledge to be created and shared with the world. To myself and thousands of other academics it is clear without further explanation that these two goals cannot be simultaneously maximised... the majority of scientific research is publicly-funded and thus there is a clear moral duty to share results with everyone e.g. taxpayers. To paraphrase James Harvey: ‘if you want to keep your research private, fund it yourself. That’s the privilege of private funding...’ The tension between librarians (who have to negotiate to buy subscription-access to journals) and academics united on one side, and for-profit publishing companies on the other is particularly noticeable at the moment, hence The Economist’s labelling of this as a potential Academic Spring ... Note that a cartoon representation of this debate can be seen on YouTube and is embedded below... Indeed it is not just academics who benefit from access to scientific literature – as is being documented by a new initiative called Who Needs Access? There are a huge number and variety of people that would benefit from legally unrestricted, free, Open Access to scientific publications e.g. patients, translators, artists, journalists, teachers and retired academics... So where would all these publications go, if not on servers owned and controlled by for-profit publishers? The ideal, natural home as Björn Brembs argues are libraries and university presses as institutional repositories for research publications, code and data. Currently IRs are used as Green OAarchives which achieve only limited success in providing free full-text access. But as Networked Repositories for Digital Open Access Publications perhaps they might enable Open Access for all, as well as reducing the overall cost of publishing research. In areas of science that have already shifted to this model e.g. some of Physics and related subjects with ArXiv (which is arguably analogous to a subject-specific Cornell University IR); Science is distributed pre-review with remarkable ease and cost effectiveness at