Re: UK Inquiry: Conclusions and Recommendations

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btopenworld.com>]

I have been at all the hearings of this committee and at the press
conference last week. What a sad way to spend ones time!

I am attaching a comment on the report from one of the two or three
serious newspapers in the UK - The Independent. As it is rather different
from other reports that you will see I am giving it in full. The URL is

http://news.independent.co.uk/business/comment/story.jsp?story=3D542723

"Scientific journals such as The Lancet are not everyone's idea of a good
bedtime read, yet for Reed Elsevier and a number of other top drawer
British publishers, they are more profitable than Harry Potter.  With more
than 35 per cent of the global market for scientific publishing in UK
hands (besides Reed Elsevier, there's Taylor & Francis and Blackwell
Publishing), Britain doesn't so much lead this industry as dominate it.
There is no other global industry where this is the case.  You might have
thought the body politic would be careful to nurture and encourage such an
outstanding British success story.

Regrettably, that's not always the case. Dr Ian Gibson, chairman of the
Commons Science and Technology Committee, has long had a bee in his bonnet
about scientific publishing, which he seems to think profits excessively
at the British taxpayer's expense, and for choice he would have mandated a
complete upheaval in the way the industry operates by moving it from a
subscriber pays basis on to an author pays, open access model.  
Fortunately his bark has turned out to be worse than his bite.

There's a consistent anti-business bias that runs through today's select
committee report "Scientific Publications: Free for all?" but mercifully
the MPs retreat from pulling down the entire house and beginning again
from scratch. Though the report is generous in its support for the open
access model, it stops well short of recommending mandatory adoption.
Rather its tone is that the market should decide.

Reed and the others are perfectly capable of defending themselves. They
don't need me to do it for them. But the case for the prosecution never
really stacked up. At 14 per cent, Reed Elsevier's after-tax profit margin
is good but hardly excessive. Furthermore, although it might arguably help
the developing world to make all British research freely available over
the internet, it wouldn't benefit Britain at all.

Supporters of open access argue that squeezed educational and research
budgets are no longer able to support the sometimes heavy cost of
subscribing to scientific journals. Libraries are therefore forced into
rationing what research they carry, depriving the public of access.  
Under the open access model, the author pays for the cost of publishing
his research. If all research is open access, then inevitably this will
work out cheaper for the public than allowing Reed to make a profit out of
it.

Of course, it only works if everyone agrees to move over to the same
system. Otherwise the university would be in danger of both paying for its
research to be published for free and for the non-free research of others.
Author pays also assumes that Reed and other subscriber-based publishers
add no value to the research, which plainly they do through peer group
review, aggregation and decent editing.


But the bigger problem with open access is that Britain is a more
substantial producer of research than it is a consumer of it. Britain
would thus be a net loser from any system that makes the author rather
than the subscriber pay. Indeed, the main beneficiaries would not be
university libraries and the developing world at all, but Big Pharma and
other commercial interests who as things stand are among the largest
subscribers to these publications.

Having failed to pin any charges of significance on Reed, the MPs reserve
their greatest strictures for the Government, which they accuse of failing
to respond in a coherent manner to the "problem" of scientific publishing.
Perhaps that's because the Government, unusually for an organisation which
likes to meddle, has figured out that the changes demanded would almost
certainly cost the taxpayer a great deal more than the present system
while undermining a hugely successful British industry in the process.  
If that's the way the market eventually develops, then so be it, but it
would not serve British interests at all well to be blazing the trail down
this route."

***

Most of the other reports like a second report in the Independent
(http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/story.jsp?story=3D542736)  
have taken the recommendations and spiced them up with some quotes from
the press release. It will be interesting to see if there is further
analysis.

What is not surprising is that Dr. Gibson, a very dominant figure in his
committee, has produced a report which is in favour of OA. For him it is
both a moral crusade and a matter of what the public pays for they should
have access too. However, as the Independent report suggests, Gibson is
hardly a solid citizen. He is a critic of his own government on a whole
range of issues including the Iraq war and he seems to have no interest at
all in the way that OA might work in practical terms.  This is all a
problem for the government to work on. I strongly suspect that we shall
see a nominal acceptance of many recommendations coupled with a reluctance
to come up with all the extra money required. How much influence does
Gibson have in the corridors of power, which along with "business" and the
academic community itself, he seems to despise?

For me the most interesting aspect of the report is the emphasis on
institutional repositories. North American readers may not appreciate that
institutional repositories in the UK do not reflect, in the way they are
constituted, the views of thinkers like Clifford Lynch or practical
exercises such as is happening at MIT. They are not repositories designed
to accept content that faculty wants to keep such as digital grey
literature but rather repositories aimed mainly to take on board
postprints of refereed articles and with a mission to "educate"  
reluctant academics into populating these spaces. The philosophy is
expressed at www.sherpa.ac.uk - an ably run programme with a strong
Harnadian flavour.

In the original remit for the report and during the hearings there was
little discussion of repositories. Professor Harnad (as I recall) was not
happy that he was not called upon to give evidence. Someone has worked
with Gibson to give an unexpected spin quite late in the day. The
interesting message is that the government through the funding bodies (the
research councils) should mandate all researchers accepting grants from
such bodies to either deposit refereed (postprints)or the final public
version of articles (it is not clear which) in the repository of the
relevant university. Government has now been told (urged) to tell
academics what to do. I do not envy Government this proposed task.

Anthony Watkinson