Thoughts on the House of Commons report (long)

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

To any who might feel (probably with good reason) that I have taken up
more than my share of bandwidth over the last couple of weeks, I
apologize, and I encourage them to delete this message without reading
further.  But I do feel compelled to offer some thoughts in reaction to
the report published early this morning by the House of Commons Science
and Technology Committee, which I have just finished reading.
 
Overall, I thought the report was very good and dealt fairly and
competently with some complex and vexing issues.  In particular, it helped
me come to a better understanding of the self-archiving vs.
third-party-archiving issue on which I've commented most recently on this
list.
 
I did have some concerns about several of the report's significant points
and conclusions, however.  For example:
 
1.  I still wish someone would define a threshold level of public funding
above which scientific research should be considered public property, and
below which it should be considered the intellectual property of the
author.  Simply calling for publicly funded research to be made publicly
available (see paragraph 3) is not helpful, given that the vast majority
of academic research can be said to have benefitted to some degree from
public funding.  This is a serious issue that needs more serious and
detailed attention -- and its ramifications will vary considerably from
country to country.
 
2.  On a single page (p. 3), the report simultaneously asserts that the
"set-up and running costs" of institutional repositories "are relatively
low, making [them] a cost-effective way of improving access to scientific
publications" and that "the preservation of digital material is an
expensive process that poses a significant technical challenge."  Given
that the purpose of an institutional repository is to preserve and provide
access to digital material, these two statements seem rather difficult to
reconcile.  This is not a nit-picky issue, but a fundamental one.
 
3.  In paragraph 43, the report seems to indicate that in the UK,
unaffiliated walk-in users are subject to significant access restrictions.  
This surprised me, since almost all of the licenses that I negotiate (even
those with UK publishers) explicitly grant unaffiliated walk-in users full
"authorized user" status.  Is this a difference between US and UK versions
of licenses used by the same publishers, or is it simply a function of the
Athens access system specifically?  (If the latter, does it affect all UK
institutions similarly?)
 
4.  In several places (notably paragraph 64), the Committee asserts that
the lack of formal usage tracking in the print world means that there is
no meaningful way to compare former use of print journals with current use
of bundled online journals.  (In the words of the report, it is
"impossible to prove that electronic journal bundles have generated an
increase in usage.")  This is rubbish.  At my institution, patrons
downloaded 56,270 journal articles from Science Direct between July 2002
and June 2003.  Based on reshelving statistics, our 3,000 print journals
are looked at by patrons an average of .5 times per issue.  While the two
measures are obviously not exactly equivalent, it is ridiculous to suggest
that our purchase of the Elsevier package cannot reaonably be seen to have
dramatically increased usage of journal content.  (Whether this increase
in usage is enough to justify the Big Deal is a separate issue, of
course.)
 
5.  Professional societies have expressed the concern that a universal OA
policy would significantly undermine scientists' incentives to maintain
their society memberships, since a major benefit of membership is usually
a subscription to the society's journal (see paragraph 181).  The
Committee responded that "if learned societies are valued by their
communities, which we believe to be the case, members are likely to remain
loyal irrespective of the publishing model employed by their society."  
This strikes me as a remarkably naive stance.  It reminds me of those who
say that we don't need to worry about commercial fishermen overharvesting
fish stocks, since such behavior would only hurt the fishermen themselves
in the long run.  The reality is that most people are neither that
long-sighted nor that altruistic, and are, in fact, powerfully motivated
by the promise of short-term benefit.  The hope that most scientists will
continue to pay significant annual fees to their professional societies
despite the fact that the most (or even the only) concrete benefit of
membership has disappeared is, I believe, a faint one.
 
I'll stop there.
 
---
Rick Anderson
rickand@unr.edu