Open Access publishing: A Personal View

Use the link to access the full text article.  “This is a guest post written by Sara Delamont and Paul Atkinson, Editors of the journal Qualitative Research that sets out their response to the recent Finch Report and its implications. We welcome further blog posts from socialsciencespace members and the wider social science community on responses to this important issue... ‘... We are also far from convinced by the general rationale for open-access publishing, especially the ‘gold’ option...  We are also aware that SAGE in common with other major publishers has been contributing to the relevant discussions. We are personally sceptical about many of the major premises of Open Access Publishing, and we are certain that many of the potential implications have not been thought through. The Finch Report pays remarkably little heed to the detailed arrangements that may need to be put in place, or many of the potential consequences for individual scholars, research groups and academic departments.  The imperatives for Open Access publishing are poorly articulated, and lack logic.  It is asserted that the results of publicly-funded research should be more widely accessible. In point of fact the ‘findings’ of research are almost always freely available, as investigators are required by funders and others to disseminate their results widely (public-engagement events, web-pages, press-releases, media exposure etc.) In fact, Research Councils and major charities, such as Wellcome, could overnight make the results of their funded research publicly available by publishing final reports of all funded research projects on their websites, after the external evaluation process is completed. This, of course, would not satisfy the less overtly articulated agenda of trying to clip the wings of commercial publishers. There seems to be a political campaign based on a desire to stop public money, in the form of university library subscriptions, going to commercial academic publishers ... In the current political climate, however, it seems odd. Vast amounts of ‘public’ money are in fact channelled into the ‘private’ sector. Through procurement and out-sourcing  large swathes of public services are in private, for-profit hands – from prison services to defence procurement, to pharmaceuticals and  healthcare provision. There seems no special reason to disrupt the long-standing ecology of publishers and academics. Open Access publication will only guarantee universal access to research, of course, if all the papers that are submitted are actually accepted for publication. The only alternative will be to expand open-access journals until they accept 100% of all papers submitted to them, which would of course destroy their credibility. (But the financial temptation is clearly there if every paper comes with a £1,000 to £2,000 price-tag,)... Much of the research in social and cultural disciplines is not based on large-scale, externally-funded research grants that can (with some problems) fund author-pays publishing. Much research and scholarship is done on an individual basis, with little or no direct funding. (Of course, it is nominally paid for from the 40% or so notionally available to a tenured academic on a teaching-and-research contract in an HEI unit of assessment that receives QR funding).  Who pays for its publication? Clearly it has to be the employing institution – from departmental allocations. But who decides how many papers each scholar is entitled to publish on this basis? Again, is this an open-ended commitment? Clearly not, when budgets are finite. We know that some of the authors we publish do so in an environment that is hostile to qualitative research – especially in the United States, where tenure committees, deans and chairs of department can take a strong line. At the moment there is no bar to anyone submitting and publishing work on any topic, in any intellectual style, from any methodological or conceptual standpoint. We do not envisage that lasting. The consequence may not even be completely unintended...”