Lawrence Lessig, in Wired magazine, has written a brilliant allegory
on how a powerful status quo with profitable inefficiency can and will
lobby to try to block anything that favours a competing efficiency.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.05/posts.html?pg=7 --
Larry's example is California's withdrawal of a cheap, efficient
tax-filing system -- "ReadyReturn" -- much praised by tax-payers,
under pressure from lobbying on behalf of the tax-filing service
industry. Larry's point is that there is not an inefficiency under
the sun that cannot be defended, nor a potential benefit that cannot
be blocked, if the government hews to this sort of pressure from the
business status quo, protecting its current revenue streams at all costs
-- to the consumer, to society, or to the planet itself. Larry casts
this as government's being pro-business status-quo-preserving interests
instead of pro-competition, change and efficiency.
This may all sound familiar to the Open Access community from the
rocky fate of the RCUK self-archiving proposal, the still-birth of
the NIH "public access" policy, and even the inbuilt birth-defects of
the Wellcome Trust self-archiving policy (with its counterproductive
6-month embargo at science's all-important early-growth tip) --
although the Wellcome Trust, being a private charity rather than
a government agency, has had a freer hand, and the result has been
welcome and evident (and lately rightly rewarded with the SPARC Europe
Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications --
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/2973.html ).
All the more reason that the distributed network of universities and
research institutions should stop waiting for their cue from the
government or a big research funder in order to mandate what is as
surely in the best interests of research, researchers, and their
institutions as the (defeated) California tax ReadyReturn is in the
interests of the tax-payer. Indeed the tax-payer, being the
research-funder, is the beneficiary here too, if self-archiving is
mandated -- and the loser as long as it is not.
Distributed institutions have the advantage of not being fixed lobbying
targets, the way governments are. Indeed, the only conceivable basis for
hesitation by universities is fear of copyright infringement: This fear
is groundless, but mandating immediate deposit of the full-text without
mandating the setting of access privileges immediately to "Open Access"
--
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html --
effectively moots the copyright issue completely, deflecting any embargo
pressure from the deposit to the access-setting, and, most important of
all, allowing semi-automated eprint-emailing -- directly by individual
authors to individual eprint-requesters who discover the Closed Access
full-text from its Open Access bibliographic metadata (author, title,
journal, date, etc.) -- to tide over any delay period in setting full-text
access to Open Access.
So, unlike governments, the world-wide network of universities and
research institutions need not heed the lobby from interests vested in
preserving the restricted-access status quo at the cost of needless
research access-denial and impact-loss to research, researchers,
their institutions, and the public that funds them. They can mandate
immediate self-archiving immediately.
Stevan Harnad
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Excerpted from Peter Suber's Open Access News
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_04_23_fosblogarchive.html#114632562201207036
Why government-provided OA isn't unfair competition for publishers
Peter Suber: What's wrong with publishers lobbying Congress to
stop the federal government from providing OA to publicly-funded
research? What's wrong with AccuWeather lobbying Congress to stop the
government from providing OA to publicly-funded weather data? Lawrence
Lessig hits the nail on the head in his May column for Wired.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.05/posts.html?pg=7 --
Excerpt (from Lawrence Lessig in Wired):
"Imagine if tire manufacturers lobbied against filling potholes so
they could sell more tires. Or if private emergency services got
local agencies to cut funding for fire departments so people would
end up calling private services first. And what if private schools
pushed to reduce public school money so more families would flee
the public system? Or what if taxicab companies managed to get a
rail line placed just far enough from an airport to make public
transportation prohibitively inconvenient?...
"[T]his one, unfortunately, is true. In 2005, the state of California
conducted an experiment. Hoping to make paying taxes easier, it
launched a pilot program [called ReadyReturn] for people who were
likely to file "simple returns."...Praise for the program [from
taxpayers who used it] was generally over-the-top....Soon after
ReadyReturn was launched, lobbyists from the tax-preparation industry
began to pressure California lawmakers to abandon the innovation.
Their opposition was not surprising: If figuring out your taxes were
easy, why would anyone bother to hire H&R Block? If the government
sends you a completed form, why buy TurboTax? But what is surprising
is that their "arguments" are having an effect. In February, the
California Republican caucus released a report highlighting its
"concerns" about the program - for example, that an effort to make
taxes more efficient "violates the proper role of government." Soon
thereafter, a Republican state senator introduced a bill to stop
the ReadyReturn program.
"Inefficiency has become a virtue in government - and not
just in California. Last year, the US Senate passed a funding
bill with an amendment prohibiting the IRS from developing its
own "income tax electronic filing or preparation products or
services."...[I]ncreasingly, the [Republican] party - as conservative
columnist Bruce Bartlett says of George Bush in his book, Impostor -
is "incapable of telling the difference between being pro-business
and being for the free market." It favors specific competitors rather
than favoring competition....Such pro-business and anti-efficiency
policies will continue to prevail until someone in our political
system begins to articulate principles on the other side....Free
markets aren't pro-business - they don't favor incumbent companies
if upstarts do the job better. Competition is good wherever it
comes from - even the government - so long as it lowers social
costs and increases wealth. And efficiency is good regardless of
who it might hurt; it is especially good if it hurts those who feed
off inefficiency. Thus, lawyers are good, but a world that needed
fewer of them would be much better. Doctors are great, but that's
no argument against better health. And TurboTax is fantastic, but
it shouldn't prevent the government from making paying taxes easier."
Received on Sun Apr 30 2006 - 06:57:17 BST