The "Double-Pay"/"Buy-Back" Argument for Open Access is Invalid
Stevan Harnad
[For the fully hyperlinked version of this essay:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/290-guid.html ]
SUMMARY: There are many valid arguments for Open Access (OA),
but the claim that researchers or their universities are currently
"double-paying" to "buy back" access to their own research output --
by (1) paying for the conduct of the research, giving it to journals,
and then (2) paying for subscriptions to access it -- is invalid.
Researchers already have their own results, and so does their
own university. What their university library subscriptions are
paying for is to buy-in (not buy-back) the research output of other
universities, exactly as with books written by authors from other
universities. (Some research, universities and university libraries
are funded by public funds, some not. Unless OA is to be limited to
only that subset, that is not a sufficient rationale for OA either.)
There is a valid "double-payment" argument, though, when it is
not the payer (the researcher, funder, or university) paying
twice, but the payee -- the publisher -- getting paid twice
(not necessarily by the same payer): This is the "Trojan Horse"
of paying a "hybrid Gold OA" publisher (i.e., not a pure Gold
OA publisher but a subscription-based publisher who offers the
option of making individual articles OA in exchange for a fee)
at a time when the potential funds for doing so are still tied
up in the university subscriptions that are already paying that
publisher's costs in full.
Publishers need only be paid once. If mandated Green OA should
ever make cost-recovery from subscription payments unsustainable
(because it makes university subscription demand disappear),
then the resultant university subscription windfall savings can
be redirected to pay for the peer review on the Gold OA model,
with all access-provision and archiving off-loaded onto the
distributed network of university OA Repositories.
There are many valid arguments for Open Access (OA): It maximizes
research usage and impact, it enhances research and university
visibility as well as researcher and university income, it accelerates
national and international R&D productivity and progress, it helps
developing countries, it helps inform the general public, it is useful
for education and training, it might eventually reduce university
library subscription costs.
But the widespread claim that researchers or their universities are
currently "double-paying" to "buy back" access to their own research
output -- by (1) paying for the conduct of the research, giving it to
journals, and then (2) paying for subscriptions to access it -- is both
invalid and unnecessary.
If you ask those who are making this argument exactly what they mean,
you will get two different answers, neither of them coherent or
defensible:
(1) "I am salaried, and government-funded, to do my research. I give
the report of my research findings to my publisher for free. Then
I or my university must buy a subscription to the journal in order
to access my results."
This is incorrect. You already have your own research results, and so
does your university. What your university library subscriptions are
paying for is to buy in the research output of other universities. And
the ones to whom your publisher is selling your research are other
universities, not your own.
This is no more "buy-back" or "double-paying" than it is to pay for the
books written by authors from other universities. Or any other output
that the university both itself generates and also buys in from other
universities.
Nor does the fact that books sometimes generate royalty revenue change
this picture: Most books generate negligible royalty revenue or none at
all.
(It is relevant however -- not as a buy-back/double-pay argument, but as
a conflict of interest -- that researchers, unlike other authors, ask
for no royalty income from their publisher, and publish their articles
purely for the sake of their research impact, not their royalty income.
Hence this royalty-free author give-away writing is not a "work for
hire," and publishers are unjustified in trying to prevent or embargo
its authors' attempts to maximize access to it by self-archiving it free
for all online.)
(2) "My research is funded by public funds; so is my university, and
so is my university's library. Hence it is somehow buy-back/double-pay
for them to be paying for subscription access to it too."
This no longer sounds like buy-back/double-pay but something much more
complicated, with some grains of truth. But those grains of truth are
only being buried or distorted in calling this buy-back/double-pay. Not
only is a lot of published research not publicly funded, not only are
neither university researcher salaries nor institutional library budgets
all or wholly derived from public funds, but again, much the same
argument could be made for books and other university outputs (even
commercial ones) if the underlying problem were indeed the
buy-back/double-payment one.
So unless you think that OA should only be accorded to research if --
and in proportion to the degree to which -- public funders or
universities are literally drawing twice from the same pot, you may be
narrowing OA to a smaller and more difficult-to-determine subset of OA's
real target, which is all of peer-reviewed research. (And you may also
be making an argument against either the public funding of R&D or the
selling of its output: That may be arguable, but it is a far, far bigger
argument than OA!)
There is, however, one "double-payment" argument that is valid, but it
is not the one the buy-back/double-payment complainants have in mind:
rather the opposite. For in this valid double-payment argument it is not
the payer (the researcher, his funder, or his university) who is paying
twice, but the payee -- the publisher -- who is getting paid twice (but
not necessarily by the same payer)
I am referring to the "Trojan Horse" of paying an extra fee to a "hybrid
Gold OA" publisher (i.e., not a pure Gold OA publisher but a
subscription-based publisher who offers the option of making individual
articles OA in exchange for a fee) at a time when the potential funds
for paying for that fee are still tied up in the university
subscriptions that are already paying that publisher's costs. Hence
universities or funders who opt for optional-Gold in a hybrid OA journal
today must find extra funds to pay that optional-Gold OA fee (e.g., by
redirecting money from research), even while all publishing costs are
still being fully covered by subscriptions.
But this is not the kind of "double-payment" that the
buy-back/double-pay complainants are agitating against: On the contrary,
this is the kind that they are (prematurely, and unwittingly) agitating
for.
The resolution of the "double-payment" puzzle is very simple: Publishers
need only be paid once. Today they are mostly being paid (once, via
subscriptions), for providing both (1) the peer-review service and (2)
the paper and online editions. As long as the subscription market covers
the costs, the only thing researchers need do for immediate OA is to
self-archive the final, peer-reviewed drafts of their own published
articles in their own university OA Repositories (Green OA); and the
only thing their universities and funders need do is to mandate that
they do so.
If and when Green OA should ever make cost-recovery from subscription
payments unsustainable (because university subscription demand
disappears), then the resultant university subscription windfall savings
can be redirected to pay for the peer review (on the Gold OA
cost-recovery model). And both the paper and online editions, for which
there is (ex hypothesi) no longer any demand at that time, can be
terminated (along with their expenses), off-loading all access-provision
and archiving onto the distributed network of university OA Repositories
that has already assumed the access-provision role de facto, in virtue
of providing Green OA.
That's a tad more complicated than "buy-back/double-pay," but it is
coherent, reflective of the facts and factors (actual and hypothetical)
involved, and leads to the same outcome: 100% OA (first Green, and
perhaps eventually Gold), but without any fuzziness, double-talk, or
unsupportable arguments.
Hyperlinked text:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/290-guid.html
Stevan Harnad
Received on Sun Sep 09 2007 - 18:22:14 BST