Who Needs Open Access, and Why?

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

Sally Morris <chief-exec@alpsp.org> wrote:

> Curiously, there seems to be remarkably little evidence of author demand
> for Open Access publication according to all the studies I have seen.  

Well, there's "remarkably little evidence" only if one ignores the fact
that authors have been and are providing open access to their articles in
growing numbers by either publishing them in OA journals or self-archiving
them:

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0023.gif
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0049.gif

And to ignore also the evidence from author petitions (such as the 30,000
PLoS open letter)

http://www.plos.org/support/openletter.shtml

And most important of all, it is to ignore the evidence on research
impact-loss owing to access-denial. This is the most important evidence
of all, and as it grows, and as scientist/scholar awareness of it grows,
the outcome is inevitable:

http://opcit.eprints.org/feb19oa/kurtz.pdf
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0006.gif
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0025.gif

> There's a straw poll running on the ALPSP discussion list at the moment,
> and so far no society publisher has reported demand from a single society
> member.

Authors have not yet made the connection between the access/impact facts
and their Learned Societies, but as the facts are made known, they will.
Does Sally really believe that if the trade-off were really put to members
in a transparent way -- "Are you willing to continue subsidising your
Learned Society's good works with your own lost research impact, or should
your Society find other ways to fund its meetings, scholarships and
lobbying?" -- that any researcher would reply anything other than the
obvious and inevitable?

http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#19.Learned

> In the end, it is author behaviour which will drive change

Indeed it is. And what will help drive author behaviour in providing open
access to their publications will be the very same factor that helps drive
author behaviour in providing access to their publications by publishing
them at all, namely, their own institutions' and researchers'
publish-or-perish policies, now extended quite naturally in the online age
to: "publish with maximized access/impact"

http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
http://opcit.eprints.org/feb19prog.html

> We have to be careful not to confuse revenue per article (which is what 
> these figures from Blackwell and Nature represent) and cost per article. 

Indeed we do. For who knows what the essential costs will prove to be,
once all distribution, access-provision, and archiving has been offloaded
onto the distributed interoperable network of institutional OA Eprint
Archives, each providing OA to its own article output? After all this
cost-cutting and downsizing, the only remaining essential learned-journal
cost (and function) may well prove to be the implementation of peer
review.

    Distinguishing the Essentials from the Optional Add-Ons
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1437.html

Stevan Harnad