Book People Archive

Scientific publishing corporations get nervous about open access

There's a fairly well-known saying attributed to Gandhi, and often
used by activists battling injustice: "First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

If recent news from Nature Online is any indicator, it looks like
open-access scholarship is well into the third stage of Gandhi's
prediction.  Once just experiments, open access scholarly journals
are now quite well established, with over 2500 tracked by the
Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org).  These aren't
just random unvetted papers, either: to get listed in DOAJ, journals
must have peer review or other editorial oversight, ISSNs, and
primarily consist of research papers written by and for appropriate
researcher communities.  And they're all free for everyone to access.

Many scholars are quite happy about this trend.  After all, they don't
make money from the articles they write.  Neither subscription-based
nor free journals pay researchers for the articles they write.  Scholars
don't get paid by the journals for refereeing submissions either--
reviewers do it for free, as part of their jobs.  And the cost of
distributing articles is lower than ever, thanks to the Internet.
So why shouldn't research journals be dropping in price, or even be
available to read by anyone, with no toll barriers?   That makes
scientific results easier to find, build on, and disseminate further,
which is how science progresses, after all.

And indeed, that's what we're seeing in part of the scientific journals
world, as tracked by sites like DOAJ and SPARC (http://www.arl.org/sparc/).
But in other parts of the journals world, we're seeing the opposite trend.
Large publishing conglomerates like Elsevier and Wiley have bought up scads
of established journsls, and raised the prices dramatically, not uncommonly
by double-digit percentages each year.  Not surprisingly, jacking up the
prices for "must have" journals has fattened the profit margins of many
of these commercial publishers, at the expense of universities and their
library's materials budgets.  (I'm particularly aware of this, since I work
for a university library.)  I've seen examples in my own field where a
particular computer science journal published by a for-profit publisher
costs *eight times* that of a journal in the same subject area (with a
similar page count and impact factor) by the non-profit Association for
Computing Machinery.

Such a distorted economic environment can keep going for a while.
After all, professors going for tenure and promotion prefer to publish in
the most prestigious journals (which the commercial publishers have
largely bought up), and libraries will want to subscribe to the most
significant journals as well.  But it doesn't last forever.  Eventually,
scholars defect to lower-cost forums, deposit their work in openly
accessible repositories, and start up open access or low-cost journals,
and libraries cancel subscriptions that are no longer cost-effective.
We're seeing all these trends at work today.  Funders are also getting
in the act.  There have been a number of government initiatives proposed
to require the researchers they fund to make their papers openly accessible
at some interval after initial publication.  After all, if citizens are
paying for the research through their taxes, why should they have to pay
again to see the results?

All this has made certain publishers quite nervous by now.  You'd expect
that commercial scholarly publishers, facing competition, would try to make
an intellectually sound case-- they are aiming at the *scholarly* market,
after all-- about how their products are superior to the alternatives,
if they could make that case.  But what if their case is not so sound?
Then, the temptation is to go for PR and propaganda.  And it looks like
that's what a number of publishers have now resorted to.  But don't take
my word for it: read these quotes from an article published by Nature online
at http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070122/full/445347a.html

   From e-mails passed to Nature, it seems Dezenhall [the PR person
   they hired] spoke to employees from Elsevier, Wiley and the American
   Chemical Society at a meeting arranged last July by the Association of
   American Publishers (AAP). A follow-up message in which Dezenhall suggests
   a strategy for the publishers provides some insight into the approach they
   are considering taking.

   The consultant advised them to focus on simple messages, such as "Public
   access equals government censorship". He hinted that the publishers should
   attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review, and
   "paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed
   articles".

   [...] In an enthusiastic e-mail sent to colleagues after the meeting, Susan
   Spilka, Wiley's director of corporate communications, said Dezenhall
   explained that publishers had acted too defensively on the free-information
   issue and worried too much about making precise statements. Dezenhall noted
   that if the other side is on the defensive, it doesn't matter if they can
   discredit your statements, she added: "Media messaging is not the same
   as intellectual debate".

Reaction to the email leak, and the simplistic and misleading messages the
program advocates, has been swift and derisive online, and followup
articles have appeared in places like the Washington Post, Salon, and
Scientific American. A good place to track the reactions, and some
of the damage control attempts from publishers, is Peter Suber's
Open Access news blog, at

   http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

It looks like the "public access equals government censorship" meme
is pretty much damaged beyond recovery at this point.  But I do notice
in some of the publisher responses, and even in some of the outside comments,
one of the other propaganda points slipping through: the assumption that
high-priced journals are necessary to have high quality, peer-reviewed science.
As I've indicated, that's not the case: most peer review is done for free by
professors, and many open access journals are peer reviewed, and a number
of them have developed quite strong reputations in their fields.  There
are also some online resources that don't use traditional prepublication
peer review but that are still considered essential resources in a field.
ArXiv.org, the global physics preprint archive that supports both open
access and open comments and critiques by other researchers, is
one well-known example.

I'd expect profiteering commercial publishers to act like this once
they're faced with threats to their business model.  As Barbara Meredith
of the AAP put it in the _Nature_ article, "It's common to hire a PR firm
when you're under siege."  But it's more of a surprise to see groups that
are supposedly nonprofit and member-driven, such as the American
Chemical Society, resorting to these tactics.  I have to wonder whether
they're doing this because a lot of their membership is not yet aware of
what can be done, and is being done, in the open access community.

So I think I'll help make people in those areas more aware.
The Online Books Page does include a serials section.  It's certainly
not comprehensive, and it mostly concentrates on historic serials, which
DOAJ and other indexes concentrating on current scholarship tend not to
cover.  But I am also happy to add listings for current scholarly journals
when they meet my listing criteria, I can easily add them in, and they're
particularly noteworthy.  (DOAJ and similar sites that I have links to
are likely to remain more comprehensive for current journals.)

Starting today, then, I'll be going through the 50+ open access chemistry
journals tracked by DOAJ and selecting entries for my index as well,
complete with subject indexing.  (My online book listings in chemistry are
already fully subject-indexed by now.)  And I'd be happy to add entries from
other fields as well, if folks are interested in finding qualified
journals in areas of interest, selecting and formatting entries to
my standards, and sending me copies.  (I already have a volunteer
doing this for Office of Technology Assessment publications.)  If you
want to get involved with journals, and have some time to volunteer,
email me for details.  Based on some other articles I've seen online, such as
 
http://savageminds.org/2006/11/02/so-much-for-open-access-anthrosource-steering-committee-liquidated-by-aaa/

it looks like it would be also useful to do the same thing for
anthropology, to take one example.

I hope these new listings will be useful to readers.  And I look
forward to seeing how faat we can get to Gandhi's "you win" stage.

John