If you can’t beat ‘em go around ‘em

“Shaming journal publishers into change will not work... GOOD for ABC Radio National’s Antony Funnell in presenting a documentary on the open access movement. You can listen to it on RN on Sunday (June 10) or here. There is nothing in the program anybody interested in the argument hasn’t heard before but with the RN audience now informed another 11 people are across the debate. It strikes the Common Room that Funnell reprised a debate already over in the academy. The basis for the existing model is almost universally publicly funded researchers and peer reviewers working for free, with the publishers packaging copy and maintaining databases. It is a case of socialised expenditure and privatised profits. Some optimists argue the publishers will inevitably buckle over complaints about what they charge for not much and accept the demands of medical research funders in the US, UK and Australia that research they pay must be publicly available at no charge after a six/12 months or so. But the journal publishers are not going to give up a bloody big earner without a fight – which is yet to begin. At best, they might fine-tune their pricing some time in the future but they will not muck around with their model. They certainly aren’t taking open access seriously yet. Some publishers say they produce journals everybody can read free, but they require authors and or their funders to pay for space. Talk about more hide than Jessie/more front than Myers (insert alternative expression of choice signalling shock at their gall here). If this is a concession gawd help research if the for-profit publishers ever get greedy. Under this model publishers not only get to publish peer-reviewed research for free – they actually charge authors and reviewers. They get away with it because they have enormous infrastructure and reputational advantages. The thousands of journals they publish and the search engines that service them give publishers a lock on a swag of human knowledge which scholars cannot afford to ignore. And academics not only want to publish in the most prestigious journals, their careers’ require it. Academic editors can resign, researchers refuse to submit their work and libraries cut subscriptions to marginal journals but these actions alone are not going to carry the keep of castle publishing. They get away with it because they have enormous infrastructure and reputational advantages. The thousands of journals they publish and the search engines that service them give publishers a lock on a swag of human knowledge which scholars cannot afford to ignore. And academics not only want to publish in the most prestigious journals, their careers’ require it. Academic editors can resign, researchers refuse to submit their work and libraries cut subscriptions to marginal journals but these actions alone are not going to carry the keep of castle publishing. So what’s to do? Use Basil Liddell-Hart’s indirect approach strategy. (There is a new essay on it here , but guess what - because it comes from a journal publisher, it will cost you $35 to read).  At best, battering away at the publishers’ pricing policies will lead them to make minor concessions that they probably have already built in to their business models. However establishing alternative open access publications ensures they do not choose the battleground. In straightforward publishing terms creating new journals is easily accomplished by anybody who knows how to blog and uses Acrobat... creating new journals that ambitious young scholars and established names want to publish in is a major marketing challenge. If establishing alternative journals is left to individual academics or disgruntled departments, it will never occur in sufficient numbers to bother the publishers. But it is possible if a template is created, or better still, experts are available to establish new journals and help get them up and running for a couple of years... Open-access publishing systems already exist but working out how to extend and improve them is a suitable subject for research funding. Running journals is something funding agencies or scholarly associations could do. And an independent organisation with some arms-length funding from an intellectually reputable international agency (which rules out the UN, but not the World Bank or IMF) could proselytise for open access journals. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia (now retained by the British Government to work on increasing the availability of research) is one person who could do it. The optimum outcome is for the editorial boards of highly regarded journals to defect en masse and set up new publications. Is it possible? For sure but will it happen? It can, if enough academics accept protests are all very well but the way to open access to research is to create alternatives to the existing publisher model. Or as Liddell Hart (sort of) put it, if you can’t beat ‘em, go around them.”