The Embargoes Don't Work: The British Academy provides the best evidence yet | PLOS OpensPLOS Opens

"The debates today on implementing Open Access pivot around two key points. The first is the perceived cost of a transition to a fully funded Open Access publishing environment. The second is the question of delaying access to copies of research outputs made available through repositories – how long should embargoes be? In both cases the question of what data and evidence is reliable has been contentious but information is accumulating. Given the obsession with embargoes from everyone interested in Open Access it would be easy to think that they logically sit at the core of the debate. Traditional publishers and their lobbyists spend a lot of time and money lobbying for policy statements and legislation that include longer embargoes. And in the interest of full disclosure PLOS and others spend quite a bit of time (although not so much money) advocating for shorter, preferably zero, embargoes. They must surely be important! But in actual fact they are the residue of a messy compromise. The assumption that lies at the heart of the embargo argument was that if some version of a peer reviewed article is made available through a repository then a subscription publisher needs some period of exclusivity to recover their costs. The evidence that this is the best way to protect publishers while widening access is thin to say the least. The basic assumption is that having an author manuscript freely available online poses a risk to the subscription business of the publisher. This is a matter of  controversy and I am on the record (and oral comments) as saying that I see substantial evidence that no damage is done and no credible evidence of any damage – a conclusion endorsed by a UK Parliamentary report. But it is the flip side of the argument that is perhaps more important. That is the idea that embargoes help traditional publishers maintain their business while sustainably allowing wider access through repositories ... The latest salvo in this debate comes from a report commissioned by the UK’sHEFCE from the British Academy, the UK’s National Academy body for the Humanities and Social Sciences scholars. The first thing to say is that the report brings a valuable set of information on the landscape of scholarly publishing in H&SS to the table – in particular the data reported in Chapters 2 and 3 are going to be very helpful. In this post I want to focus on the conclusions the report comes to on embargoes and the work reported in Chapters 4 and 5 ... The conclusion I draw from these two sets of data is that there is no value in longer embargoes for H&SS – indeed that there is no need for embargoes at all. H&SS cluster with physics and maths, disciplines where substantial, and importantly concentrated, portions of the literature have been available prior to publication for over 20 years and where there is no evidence of a systemic failure in the running of sustainable publishing businesses. A recent report from the London Mathematical Society (LMS) stated that they saw no risk to their business from the availability of author manuscripts online and that online availability of author manuscripts had no significant effect on traffic to their journal sites (they note that the situation might be different if the version of record is online but no public access policy requires this) ..."