Re: Calculating the cost: inspired by the author's rejoinder

["Peter Banks" <pbanks@diabetes.org>]

"Quit acting as if the society publishers are the bad guys."

Yeah! What he said!

Seriously, if every proponent of Open Access could be as open and honest
as this, we could have a much more contructive debate sooner. When so much
of the OA community simply repeats inane slogans like "Taxpayers have a
right to read the research they have already paid for" or "Publishers get
tremendous profits from material they get and peer review for free," it's
extremely hard not to respond to the whole movement with with pit bull
ferocity.

No less than librarians, researchers, and the public, publishers want (and
have) expanded access to information. With more people like Mr. Plutchak,
we might find the compromises and partnerships that will get us there.

Peter Banks
Publisher
American Diabetes Association
1701 North Beauregard Street
Alexandria, VA 22311
703/299-2033
FAX 703/683-2890
Email: pbanks@diabetes.org

>>> tscott@uab.edu 1/19/2005 7:50:12 PM >>>

(My apologies for the length of this message, but the issues are complex
and not easily addressed in snippets.  I've posted a version of this
message on my blog where it may be easier to read than as an email
message:  http://tscott.typepad.com/tsp/2005/01/phil_points_out.html)

Phil points out the obvious and incontrovertible conclusion of the data
presented in the ARL spreadsheet -- a shift to a producer-pays from a
reader-pays model is going to shift an increased portion of the burden for
funding scholarly publishing to the research intensive institutions. I
have not seen open access advocates address this issue directly; rather,
it seems there is an attempt to ignore or avoid the conclusion, and I
think this is a serious tactical mistake.

Many librarians have been drawn to supporting open access out of the
belief that a shift to some version of open access would reduce the
financial pressures that we have found increasingly frustrating in recent
years.  I see no reason that this should be the case. (This is not to say
that we might not be able to do a better, more efficient, and less costly
job of scholarly publishing -- only that open access, by itself, doesn't
introduce those efficiencies).  The ARL spreadsheet helps to put some
concrete numbers to that issue for a particular subset of libraries.  As
Goodman pointed out in a recent post, it's not the library's money, it's
the institution's money.  The ARL numbers make the case that research
institutions will need to find additional sources of funding in an open
access world; I would suggest that in the non-research institutions, the
administration will have a long list of potential uses for any savings,
and library directors are going to have to fight just as hard for their
share of the pie as ever.

If, then, "interest" is defined strictly as reducing one's costs, the
answer to the first of Phil's specific questions is, "No, the producer
pays model will never be in the institution's self-interest."  But, I
would argue, this defines "interest" far too narrowly.

The benefit of open access is not cost-savings, it is ACCESS -- and we
need to do a much better job of articulating what the benefits of enhanced
access really are.  The AT@ (http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/) has been
doing a pretty good job of trying to get very complex issues boiled down
into publishable soundbites in their attempt to argue that this is a case
of the public's need to know.  But I'm not really persuaded that there is
a significant cohort among the general public so desperate for the
embargoed content of the American Journal of Pathology (12 months embargo;
complementary articles available by request from the publisher), that we
should be clamoring quite so self-righteously that the American Society
for Investigative Pathology should bear the risks of immediately up-ending
their economic model in order to move to a producer-pays model.  We need
to do a better job of explaining how better access is going to be a
benefit to the students and faculty in our institutions.  We need to do a
better job of articulating exactly what problem open access is intended to
address.

This morning, at the bi-weekly Deans meeting, I sat next to the editor of
the Journal of Immunology.  When I go to the basketball game this weekend,
I'll swap editing stories with the editor of the aforementioned American
Journal of Pathology.  I see in a note in my mail this week that my wife's
oncology surgeon has just been named editor of the American Journal of
Surgery.  I could go on.  My point is that I know that these people are as
interested in expanding access to the journals they are responsible for as
anyone on this list.  They are also, however, deeply, and very
appropriately, concerned about the financial implications.  What do these
shifts mean for their societies?  What do they mean for the institutions
that they are a part of?

Those of us who believe that the electronic technologies provide the
opportunity to expand access far beyond what we could have dreamed a
decade ago need to do a much better job of making the case.  And part of
that comes from acknowledging that for certain segments of the scholarly
community, these shifts will involve greater costs and greater risks. I
think it is perfectly reasonable and appropriate for the research
intensive institutions to take on a greater share of this burden.  It
seems to me to be perfectly in keeping with the role that we play in
society in so many other areas.  But it will require balancing priorities
and looking hard at the funding issues.  Another discussion I was involved
with yesterday concerned how we might come up with some additional full
scholarships to get a few more of the highly-qualified under-represented
minority students we're interested in into our medical school.  These are
$20k and $30k packages, annually.  They're on the same table as the costs
of scholarly information.  These are tough choices.

It seems as unlikely to me that a producer-pays model (in whichever of the
current flavors) will come to dominate scholarly publishing as that the
traditional subscription model of periodically produced issues will
sustain over more than half a decade to come.  The ground is shifting too
fast.  I would suggest that if we are to participate in creating a world
in which the promise of the new technologies is met we need to do a couple
of things:

1) Recognize that "open access" is not a means to solving library funding
problems.

2) Quit acting as if the society publishers are the bad guys.

The community need as much experimentation as we can manage.  And
librarians need to do a much better job of reaching out to those highly
influential individuals on our campuses who are involved in their society
publishing programs.  We have many shared interests.  We need to build on
them.

T. Scott Plutchak 
Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences
University of Alabama at Birmingham 
tscott@uab.edu