Forwarding Peter Suber's letter from the SPARC Open Access Forum
(Needless to say, I would agree with just about every word in it!)
SH
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2007 09:31:12 -0400
From: Peter Suber <peters -- earlham.edu>
To: SPARC Open Access Forum <SPARC-OAForum_at_arl.org>
Subject: [SOAF] Letter to the Editor, Learned Publishing
This letter was published in the July 2007 issue of Learned Publishing,
where the pay-per-view fee is $24.
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/alpsp/lp/2007/00000020/00000003/art00014
Here's an OA copy, at least of the text I submitted.
Peter Suber
----------cut here----------
To the editor,
I write in response to Rick Anderson's editorial in the April 2007 issue,
"Open access - clear benefits, hidden costs."
http://www.alpsp.org/ngen_public/article.asp?aid=723
Anderson is right that open access (OA) has both benefits and costs and I
fully support his conclusion that we ought to take both into account as we
move forward. At the same time, of course, we ought to take the costs and
benefits of conventional non-OA or subscription-based publication into
account as we move forward. Here, though, I'd like to focus on some of his
claims about OA.
(1) Anderson writes that "A decision to make content freely available does
not make the costs of publication disappear, but only shifts
them...." This is true. But for some readers, it may give the false
impression that OA proponents assert that OA does make costs disappear. On
the contrary, no serious OA proponent has ever made that claim.
Nor have OA proponents denied that it shifts costs or regarded the shifting
of costs as a disadvantage to be hidden away. On the contrary, shifting
costs is an explicit strategy. The question is not whether journal
publishing can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay
the bills than by charging readers and creating access barriers. If we can
shift costs, or redirect the funds now spent on subscriptions, we can pay
for the OA alternative and remove access barriers for users at the same time.
OA does more than shift costs; it also reduces them. OA journals dispense
with print (or price the optional print edition at cost), eliminate
subscription management (soliciting, negotiating, tracking, renewing
subscribers), eliminate DRM (authenticating users, distinguishing
authorized from unauthorized, blocking access to latter), reduce legal
overhead (drafting, negotiating, monitoring, enforcing licenses), and
reduce or eliminate marketing. In their place they add back little more
than the cost of collecting author-side fees or institutional
subsidies. Any comprehensive account of the costs and benefits of OA must
include these cost reductions.
(2) Anderson writes, "In the case of an OA journal, costs are most commonly
borne by authors...."
If this means that most OA journals charge author-side fees, then it's
untrue and I'm surprised to see it asserted in an ALPSP journal with the
unusually strong ALPSP endorsement represented by the call for
signatures. For it was an ALPSP-sponsored study that showed that only a
minority of OA journals charge author-side publication fees. See "The
Facts About Open Access," October 2006, esp. pp. 1, 44, and Table 30,
<
http://www.alpsp.org/ngen_public/article.asp?id=200&did=47&aid=270&st=&oaid=-1>.
For more detail on the majority of OA journals that charge no fees, see my
article, "No-fee open-access journals," SPARC Open Access Newsletter,
November 2006,
<
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/11-02-06.htm#nofee>.
(3) Anderson refers to "the danger in saying that OA self-archiving is not
publishing and therefore cannot harm publishers...."
He is mixing up two lines of OA advocacy here. It's true that some argue
that OA archiving should not be called "publishing" and it's true that some
OA advocates argue that OA archiving will not harm publishers. But the two
arguments are unconnected. The argument that OA archiving might not harm
publishers has never been based on the claim that OA archiving is not
publishing. It has been based on the evidence from physics, the field with
the highest levels and longest history of OA archiving. Not only have the
American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd
(IOPP) seen no cancellations to date arising from OA archiving
<
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/>, they both host mirrors of arXiv,
the premier OA archive for the field.
It's one thing to insist that OA archiving is a kind of "publishing". (I'm
sympathetic with that position myself.) But any serious attempt to show
that OA archiving will harm publishers must go beyond this verbal dispute
and address the evidence from physics.
Moreover, most OA advocates, myself included, don't argue that OA archiving
"cannot" harm publishers. My own position is two-sided: on the one hand,
there's no evidence yet that high-volume OA archiving will kill
subscriptions, and even strong evidence to the contrary from physics; and
on the other hand, it might eventually have this effect in some fields.
(4) Anderson writes that OA "assumes that publishers add no value to the
scholarly information chain, and can therefore be harmed with impunity...."
It's very rare to find an OA proponent assert that publishers add no value,
but very common to find defensive publishers claim that this is an
essential premise of the OA movement. To suggest that it's widespread or
essential is simply untrue.
My own view is that publishers undoubtedly add value, starting with the
facilitation of peer review. To me the issue is not whether publishers add
value, or how to do without publishers, but how to pay for the most
essential kinds of added value without creating access barriers for readers.
(5) Anderson asks "from which is the public likely to benefit more - free
and universal public access to articles based on less medical research, or
more medical research?"
It's true that the NIH (for example) spends money to provide OA to
NIH-funded research. But it's also true that without this program the
expensive and useful research funded by the NIH would never be seen by many
people who need it or who could make use of it. I'm thinking primarily of
academic researchers, industry researchers, practicing physicians, and
other healthcare professionals not affiliated with institutions that can
afford subscriptions. But secondarily I'm also thinking of lay readers,
like patients and their families. Up to a point, making a small investment
to amplify the utility of a large investment is good economics and good
public policy. The logic is roughly the same as buying textbooks for a
school and then paying a bit more to deliver them to each student rather
than putting them in distant locations where only the affluent can pick
them up.
If the wisdom of this extra spending depends on the ratio of the small
investment to the large one, then the case for the NIH policy is very
clear. The cost of providing OA to NIH-funded research ranges from $2 to
$4 million/year (depending on the level of grantee compliance with the
NIH's OA request), which is about 0.01% of its $28 billion/year
budget. This a bargain. It would be perverse to spend nearly $28 billion
in public money for medical research and then refuse the extra increment
needed to make it available to all who could make use of it.
Studies by John Houghton and others have shown that diverting a bit from a
funding agency's research budget in order to make all funded research OA
greatly amplifies the return on investment. See for example John Houghton
and Peter Sheehan, "The Economic Impact of Enhanced Access to Research
Findings," Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University, July
2006, <
http://www.cfses.com/documents/wp23.pdf>: "With the United
Kingdom's GERD (Gross Expenditure on Research and Development) at USD 33.7
billion and assuming social returns to R&D of 50%, a 5% increase in access
and efficiency [their conservative estimate] would have been worth USD 1.7
billion; and...With the United State's GERD at USD 312.5 billion and
assuming social returns to R&D of 50%, a 5% increase in access and
efficiency would have been worth USD 16 billion."
(6) Finally, Anderson writes that we ought to "move forward while taking
full account of costs as well as benefits, and to work towards solutions
that offer a net benefit to society." I agree and I honestly don't know
any OA proponents who would disagree. The case for OA has always been that
it provides a greater net benefit to society than non-OA forms of
dissemination. If we're all interested in finding the forms of scholarly
communication that do the most for science, scholarship, and society, and
if we all focus more on that goal and the evidence for and against specific
proposals than on saving existing practices or institutions, then the
debate and analysis should be more amicable, cooperative, and productive.
Peter Suber
Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College
Received on Fri Jun 22 2007 - 15:36:17 BST