A Not-For-Profit Publisher’s Perspective on Open Access
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Martin Frank, Margaret Reich and Alice Ra’anan, A Not-For-Profit Publisher’s Perspective on Open Access(pdf), a preprint forthcoming in Serials Review, 30, 4 (2004). A critique of OA arguing that OA journals cost more than their proponents admit, that OA archiving will harm journals, that the NIH OA plan will harm journals, and that OA to medical research will not help patients. Abstract: “Recent legislative activity in the US House of Representatives and the UK House of Commons has added fuel to a debate over electronic access to the Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) literature that was initiated in 1999 with the introduction of E-Biomed. On-going efforts to change the landscape of STM publishing involve moving it away from a subscription basis to an author pays model. This article chronicles the swift evolution of electronic access to the scientific literature and asks whether the scholarly community will really be better off with government-mandated open access (OA) publishing.”
The authors of this article seem to feel that not-for-profit publishers are being tarred with the same brush and subsequently penalized alongside the profit-driven businesses. They refer to their habit of making articles older than a set limit freely available and brush aside the fact that these limits change from journal to journal. The problem is that if the librarians don’t know that the articles are free, they might as well not be.
They also mention that the pricing for publishing an article is often higher than the author fees being charged by the OA publishers and discuss the institutional subscriptions which are being used to offset costs. … the membership fee is to be recalculated annually based on the number of authors from that institution published during the previous year. Since libraries have been paying the membership fees, this means that librarians will now face the challenge of budgeting for a variable expense that could increase.
I am strongly reminded of a librarian I talked to recently who was lamenting that a certain journal had increased it’s price significantly more than her representative had told her it would just a couple of months ago. She has been left scrambling to find the fee somewhere in her already approved budget. This will not be a new challenge.
They do make some good points on possible cost problems. Open Access is definately not a panacea and will certainly need alterations as it progresses to work. However, the authors seem to be blind to how bad the problem has gotten. The open-access movement is the library equivalent to the French Revolution. The current model they consider a “successful evolution” is actually an unsustainable house of cards.
The authors are unhappy about the recent rulings in the US and the UK to require that government-funded research be made available by open-access. They are concerned about the effect it will have on the current publishing model. They do overlook the fact that the ruling only applies to government-funded research. Information created with public money should be publicly available.
The problem with most of the article is that the authors do not distinguish between the not-for-profit publishers, who according to this article have been reasonable in price increases, and the for-profit set who seem to being trying to drive libraries bankrupt. It’s possible that a seperate set of rules need to be made for not-for-profits but the authors offer no solutions other than living with the problem and hoping it will sort itself out.
Open Access — laura
