Open and Shut?: Scholarly Publishing: Where is Plan B?

“To the intense joy of Open Access (OA) advocates, Elsevier announced Monday that it has withdrawn its support for the controversial US Research Works Act (RWA). Shortly afterwards, it was reported that the two sponsors of the bill — Representatives Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) — would not be ‘taking legislative action’ on the RWA. One person who took particular note of the news was Claudio Aspesi, a senior research analyst at the sell-side research firm Sanford Bernstein. Aspesi tracks Elsevier for investors, so on Tuesday he published a new report on the company... So when I received a copy of the report I took it as a sign that it was time to re-interview Aspesi. The interview follows my own thoughts on the current situation below... Sadly for Elsevier, however, its flirtation with the RWA appears to have wreaked havoc on its relationship with the research community... It is important to note, however, that this anger was not just over Elsevier’s support for the RWA... researchers have a number of historic grievances against the company... the boycott site (Cost of Knowledge) lists a number of these grievances... As such, the danger is that having opened Pandora’s Box, Elsevier may not be able to close it again... At the time of writing, the number who had pledged to shun the publisher had grown to 7,690, and continues to grow by the hour... Elsevier... will tell you that self-archiving mandates like the NIH policy represent an unfair threat to its business — by depriving it of vital subscription revenue it needs to fund the publishing of research papers... But is it true that self-archiving mandates inevitably cause libraries to cancel subscriptions, as Elsevier claims? This is far from self-evident. What we do know is that a 2006 study by the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC) — of which Elsevier is a senior member — reported that 44% of librarians indicated they would cancel journal subscriptions if more than 40% of the content became freely available within 12 months of publication. We also know that in its submission to the consultation on public access organised by the US Office of Science & Technology (OSTP), Elsevier claimed that the NIH policy is already having a negative impact on publishers’ revenues. However, no figures have yet been produced to demonstrate as much. When I asked Elsevier’s director of universal access Alicia Wise recently for evidence, she replied, ‘[W]e are currently evaluating the best way to disseminate these results.’ We further know that a recent report published by the Committee for Economic Development concluded that there is no compelling evidence that public access mandates impact on subscriptions... for as the RWA sinks beneath the waves a new bill called the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) has set sail on the legislative waters. As it happens, observers do not expect the FRPAA to be any more successful than the RWA, certainly in the short term. Nevertheless, argue OA advocates, open access to publicly funded research is inevitable, and last year’s America COMPETES Reauthorization Act will likely make this happen sooner rather than later.  Section 103 of the Act, reports Heather Joseph, executive director of OA advocacy group SPARC, directed the OSTP to convene an Interagency Working Group to develop recommendations on science agency public access policies for both data and articles. ‘The provision required the Working Group to submit these recommendations to Congress in the form of reports,’ says Joseph. We cannot yet know the outcome of this, but OA advocates express quiet confidence... What is the underlying problem? Simply that the research community can no longer afford to pay the costs of publishing its research in the traditional manner. While OA may change the way in which research papers are distributed (whether by means of publishing in a subscription journal and then self-archiving a copy on the Web, or by paying to publish in an OA journal), it does not change the fundamental publishing model, including the utilisation of the costly process of pre-publication peer review... cancellations seem inevitable in the long term if nothing changes. However, these cancellations would likely not be a consequence of self-archiving, but of the mismatch between falling university budgets and the rising number of papers researchers want to publish. The latter figure is growing at around 6% to 7% per annum, and shows no signs of falling off. Claudio Aspesi has been drawing attention to this underlying problem for a number of years... If Aspesi is correct, then even if the cyclical funding crisis were to go away tomorrow, and librarians became pussycats overnight, the long-term unsustainable trend would continue to pose a significant threat to Elsevier, as it would to all scholarly journal publishers, and indeed to the research community itself. The problem is the research community appears not to be focused on this deeper problem. Two years ago Aspesi told me to me that Elsevier appears to be ‘in denial on the magnitude of the issue potentially affectin