Conflicts of Interest in Open Access

From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_GMAIL.COM>
Date: Fri, 1 May 2009 11:00:26 -0400

[This posting with hyperlinks and figures: Here . Background: See
"Pre-Emptive Gold Fever Strikes Again"] 

A Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) article (29 April) writes:
      "The research councils are looking at what more they can
      do to support open access to research results after
      an independent study found that their current policies
      were having a 'limited impact'."

First, the SQW/LISU study is simply incorrect in opining that
current Green OA deposit mandates (when adopted and monitored) are
"having a 'limited impact'." As objective deposit-counts for the NIH
mandate have shown, the NIH deposit rate jumped from 4% to over
60% within a year of mandate adoption. Much the same is true
for university self-archiving mandates.

Rather, the ambivalence seems to be largely originating from EPSRC,
the last of the adopters of the least clearcut of the seven UK
research council policies. What EPSRC had finally mandated was not
unequivocal deposit, like the other six councils, but rather a hybrid
between Green OA deposits and Gold OA journal publishing.
      "The councils have previously baulked at requiring all
      council-funded researchers to deposit papers in openly
      available repositories."

This is incorrect: Six of the seven UK research councils have
required all fundees to deposit all published articles in an open
access repository: Only EPSRC leaves it open whether (1) to publish
in a subscription journal and deposit in a repository or (2) to
publish in an open-access journal (and pay publishing fees, if any).
This is the EPSRC policy:
            EPSRC Council agreed at its December [2008]
            meeting to mandate open access publication,
            but that academics should be able to choose
            whether they use the so-called green option
            (ie, self-archiving in an on-line repository)
            or to use the gold option (ie, pay-to-publish
            in an open access journal).

It is interesting how the divergent view of the last and most
ambivalent -- but also the biggest -- of the councils to adopt a
mandate is now being presented as the new prevailing view among the
seven. (Is it, really? And has EPSRC really thought it through, or
are a few strongly held opinions ruling the roost?)
      "Now, after a study by SQW Consulting concluded that open
      access is increasingly popular with UK researchers and
      that institutions are setting up their own repositories,
      the councils... will have to tread carefully because open
      access threatens to undermine the business model of
      publishers and learned societies."

This sounds like a non sequitur. OA is becoming increasingly popular
with researchers and institutions (and at least 6 of the 7 funders)
and yet now funders must "tread carefully" because of publishers'
business interests? How did publishers' business interests get into
this?

(I suspect that in the case of EPSRC, this may partly be driven by an
ongoing experiment in paying pre-emptively for Gold OA publishing in
(part of) the physics community: Instead of just mandating Green OA
deposits and letting subscriptions continue to pay for publication
until and unless Green OA makes subscriptions unsustainable,
the SCOAP3 consortium of institutions is simply redefining their
institutional subscription fees as "institutional Gold OA publishing
fees" in exchange for the publishers providing Gold OA. It is
virtually certain that this ill-thought-out experiment cannot and
will not scale beyond parts of physics, but meanwhile it is yet
another retardant on the growth of Green OA mandates. Here it is not
just publishing-lobby self-interest, but institutional serials-budget
myopia that are (each for its respective reasons, both of them
irrelevant to the primary interests of the research community) doing
the all-too-familiar conflation of the journal-affordability
problem with the research-accessibility problem, to the great
disadvantage of the latter.)
      "The study also reports that more than three quarters of
      2,100 council-funded researchers surveyed were unaware of
      the councils' current mandates."

It would seem that a more straightforward remedy for unawareness of
funders' grant fulfillment conditions would be to increase the
awareness of fundees and their institutions of the conditions on the
funding they have received -- and to monitor and reinforce
compliance with those conditions, just as with other grant
fulfillment conditions. It would seem an unusual remedy to instead
spend scarce research funds on paying publishers to do what fundees
are neglecting to do, for free, as a condition of their funding.
      "Paul Gemmill, chair of the research outputs group at
      Research Councils UK, said the next stage was to decide
      whether a specific model should be adopted. He said the
      process would involve learned societies, publishers and
      academics."

How did the publishing community come to thus dominate a research
community issue? (Both publishers and learned-society publishers are
publishers.) This is really quite puzzling. One can quite well
understand why they would try to do so, but how did they succeed?
Could it be that the publisher-budget defenders and the
library-budget defenders are making common cause with pre-emptive
Gold OA, at the expense of cost-free Green OA and the interests of
the research community and research itself? Or is this just blind
a-priori ideology (regarding "publishing reform") in place of the
direct of interests of research that are the real concern of the
research funding councils (as well as the research community itself)?
      "Open-access advocate Stevan Harnad, professor of
      electronics and computer science at the University of
      Southampton, said scarce research money should not be
      used to pay open-access journal fees, where the costs
      normally borne by the publisher are picked up by
      funders."

The costs of publishing are borne by subscribing institutions, not by
funders.
      "'If good sense were to prevail, funders and universities
      would just mandate repositories,' he said."

What he said was:
            "If good sense were to prevail, funders and
            universities would just mandate Green OA for
            now, and then let supply and demand decide,
            given universal Green OA, whether and when to
            convert from subscriptions to Gold OA, and
            for what product, and at what price."

For now, subscriptions are paying for publication, and what is needed
is more Green OA, not a new non-research expense (Gold OA publication
fees) on which to squander the little research money there is to go
round. Wait till universal Green OA actually causes subscriptions to
become unsustainable (if and when it ever does do so) and then
the subscription cancellation savings themselves can be used to pay
for the Gold OA -- that's then, when it's actually needed, rather
than using research money to pay for Gold OA pre-emptively, now, when
Gold OA is not even needed yet.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Received on Fri May 01 2009 - 16:02:28 BST