JISCMail - JISC-REPOSITORIES Archives-- Comments about Peter Wiley’s talk at ANU on 6 Sept

“Yesterday (6 Sept 2012) I attended a talk held at the Australian National University entitled “Open Access & Scholarly Publishing in 21st Century”, given by Peter Booth Wiley, Chairman of the Board of Wiley & Sons.  I have added my complete notes from the event below, but in summary Peter had some interesting things to say about the changing nature of scholarly communication declaring the pdf ‘dead’ as we move from a static to an interactive publishing experience...  Peter invoked many of the usual myths that we would expect from a publisher in this context, not least that publishers maintain the quality of the scholarly communication process by running peer review  [MYTH no 1: publishers take responsibility for the ‘integrity’ of the scientific endeavour]  When the discussion moved to open access he stated that open access publishing is growing rapidly, but there is a problem with pushing for open access in a less than thoughtful way.  For those who were aware of the discussion about open access here in Australia in the last days of the previous CEO of the Australian Research Council, these words eerily echo Margaret Sheil’s comments about the ‘supporters of open access being naive’ ... Some of the big issues in the open access debate he gave were – people assume people want their research to be free – but this is not always the case. Sometimes they want to commercialise it first  [MYTH no 2: Open access threatens commercialisation. This is spurious... ] Another issues is different countries can develop in different ways. Some countries may not be as open as others, and might believe in controlling information. So those in the open access world are funding research for the closed world. Peter actually mentioned China here, an interesting invocation of the Yellow Peril given we were in the College of Asia Pacific.  [MYTH no 3: open access means communists will steal all our research. Not even worth validating this racist point of view with a rebuttal]  Then there is the question of who pays. He said there is one UK institution costed out to open access (through article processing fees) and they discovered it would cost more than closed access, and this could impact research.  [MYTH no 4: Open access costs more. This is silly for several reasons. For a start, the argument assumes total move to gold open access, which is unlikely in even the medium term.  Given, there would be a small handful of institutions for whom this is the case.  But overall it would be cheaper for everyone. And given the UK is saying we need to invest  BP38 million each year to oA gold publishing, perhaps that could be directed towards the few institutions who are producing large amounts of research output.]  The last myth was invoked in answer to my question about why if they believe (as he stated) their mission is to provide information to people regardless of where they are, they are a ‘no to green’ publisher. He said ‘if we were to make everything available immediately open access you would be asking us to commit suicide’.  [MYTH no 5: the publishing industry will collapse. For a start it has been happening in the physics community for 21 years and that is still going. But actually we are not asking for all journal published versions to be OA , we are asking for permission to make the accepted version available in a  repository ... ]  The reason for the event was to celebrate a new society where AusAID has provided financial assistance for both the journal & society. The journal is published by Wiley as an online, unrestricted open access journal.  At the talk there was no mention of the cost, but for those who are interested, article processing fees in Wiley’s OnlineOpen program are US$3,000 per paper...  The only bright spot in the talk was I am now in contact with Mark Robertson who is the Australian Wiley representative, so I can talk to him about a few of our issues here in Australia.”