Making Open Access and the UK’s scholarly society work | Impact of Social Sciences

"Recently, at a one-day colloquium on Open Access I learned why academic publishing is so expensive, and I was disappointed to discover that resistance to open access from scholarly societies is not linked to the costs of publishing, but to the cost of non-publishing activities. The UK is in the midst of a heated debate about Open Access, following the Finch Report and an incoming policy that will require all research funded by the taxpayer to be published open access ... Nearly everyone agrees open access is a good thing, but how to pay for it is a matter of contention. The government’s policy works much better in the sciences where large research budgets are common and a few thousand quid for publication costs is a drop in the bucket. The Wellcome Trust’s representative Simon Chaplin argued at the colloquium that they’ve been funding this practice for years and thought it was a great use of money.  I don’t disagree with Chaplin, but few historians will ever see a grant the size of a typical Wellcome Trust award that can run hundreds of thousands or millions of pounds. Many historians operate entirely without funding, but those working in academic departments will have to find the money to publish in an open access format, else their work will not 'count' towards the 2020 REF ... The government’s proposal is also potentially disastrous for early career researchers who will find it difficult to secure funding to publish and who may have to choose between paying for food and 'investing' in their career by paying for publications. Why would a department give a temporary employee (eg, Post Docs) access to funding for publishing that could go to permanent staff, when there’s a good chance that employee will be contributing to another university’s research outputs by the time the tallies are next taken?  While I did symapthize with many of the positions speakers took at the colloquium, it was the position of the scholarly societies in particular that I found most frustrating ... What I do not like is how many scholarly societies get their money, which became clear to me this past Friday. Jane Humphries, President of the Economic History Society, spoke on the business model of her society. According to Humphries, 1/3 of their income comes directly from the subscriptions raised by the society’s journal. These subscriptions are then used to fund the activities of the society rather than to pay the costs of publication alone. Humphries argues that without these subscriptions the society could not continue to function, which is a major push behind resistance to open access because most societies and publishers assume they will be forced to take what amounts to a paycut under the proposed models.  One of the activities of the Economic History Society is to fund 5 postdoctoral fellowships at a cost of £70,000. This fellowship scheme is a wonderful one and it’s something I’d be very sad to see discontinued. However, it is NOT a publishing cost. Instead, the subscriptions are increased well above the cost of publication in order to participate in non-publishing activities. That means libraries are being charged a surplus. And libraries get much of their money from the pockets of students paying tuition who are indirectly funding these postdoctoral fellowships without a say in the matter. While the scheme is entirely and undoubtedly good intentioned, the society is not working as hard as it could to reduce the costs of publishing because it has a vested interest to constantly increasing its income and expanding its activities. They are effectively robbing Peter to pay Paul. And I’m Peter ..."