FRPAA and paying publishers to self-archive

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

           ** Apologies for Cross-Posting **

The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) proposes to 
mandate that all federally funded researchers must make all their 
research journal articles reporting federally funded research 
openly accessible (OA) to all users by self-archiving them free 
for all on the web within 6 months of publication. 
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/05-02-06.htm#frpaa

Peter Suber has announced in OA News, that a publisher (Springer) 
has recommended to the sponsors of the FRPAA that because a 
6-month embargo on self-archiving is too long for researchers and 
too short for publishers, the FRPAA should instead mandate 
immediate self-archiving and pay the publisher to do it. The 
recommendation does not mention the amount that the publisher 
should be paid, but currently publishers are charging between 
$500 and $3000 or more for making articles OA (Springer charges 
$3000).

I would like to make some comments on this suggestion. Please 
note that they contain some nested contingencies:

     (1) If the federal funding agencies have the extra cash, and
     are willing to pay publishers whatever amount they ask today
     (or to impose a capped amount of their own), and the FRPAA can be
     successfully passed as an immediate-OA mandate in this way, this
     would be a perfectly fine outcome -- acceptable to research and
     researchers as well as to publishers.

     (2) If, however, the federal funding agencies do not have the extra
     cash to pay publishers the amount they ask today (or an acceptable
     capped amount), and/or if the FRPAA cannot be successful enacted
     into law if burdened with a commitment to pay publishers the amount
     they ask today (or an acceptable capped amount) for OA, then the
     suggestion that FRPAA should be revised to do so is just another
     way to delay or doom the passage of the FRPAA.

     (3) The present version of the FRPAA does not propose to pay anyone
     anything: it merely mandates that federally funded research must be
     made OA by the fundee, by self-archiving it, within (at most) 6 months
     of publication, in the fundee's own institutional repository (or a
     central one).

    (4) To date there is no evidence at all that self-archiving reduces
    publisher subscription revenues; and the two publishers whose authors
    have been self-archiving the longest and the most, the American
    Physical Society and the Institute of Physics, both report that they
    have (4a) no detectable subscription declines and are (4b) unopposed
    to an immediate (no-embargo) OA self-archiving mandate.

    (5) The objective, empirical way to test whether there is any truth
    to other publishers' hypothesis that self-archiving will reduce
    subscription revenue -- and the only way to find out how much and how
    fast it would reduce subscription revenue if ever it did so at all -- is
    to adopt the FRPAA and to monitor its outcome annually, making further
    adjustments only as and when there is evidence that they are necessary.

    (6) It is true that a 6-month embargo is bad for research; but
    an interim way to minimize that damage to research is to require
    immediate deposit and to allow only the date at which access to the
    deposited full text is set to Open Access (OA) to be delayed (for up
    to 6 months) where necessary (Closed Access until then).

    (7) 94% of journals already endorse setting access immediately to OA.

    (8) For the remaining 6% of articles set to Closed Access, the
    article's bibliographic metadata will still be visible to all
    immediately, and the self-archiving repository software provides a
    semi-automatic feature for individual would-be users to request -- and
    authors to provide -- an individual eprint of the full text by email.

    (9) This immediate-deposit/delayed-OA compromise is the preferable
    one if the federal funding agencies do not have the extra cash,
    or are unwilling to pay publishers whatever amount they ask today
    (or to impose a capped amount of their own).

    (10) At the moment, institutional subscriptions are paying the costs of
    peer review. If/when subscription revenues were indeed ever to decline
    to unsustainable levels because of institutional cancellations, the
    institutional windfall savings from the cancellations would themselves
    be a natural candidate source for covering the peer-review costs of
    the institution's own researchers, rather than any arbitrary amount
    requested from federal research funders today -- especially as
    subscription decline would first generate pressure toward publisher
    cost-cutting, downsizing and readjustment to the new reality of OA
    publishing, and hence a more realistic, market-driven figure for the
    true costs of peer review (which publishers manage, but researchers
    themselves perform for free).

Stevan Harnad

> Springer's unexpected response to FRPAA
>
> I've learned --and Jan Velterop has confirmed-- that Springer has sent
> a letter to Sen. Susan Collins, chair of the Senate committee
> considering FRPAA, raising an unusual objection to the six-month
> embargo allowed by the bill. The letter argues that six months is too
> short to satisfy publishers and too long to satisfy researchers. In
> its place, Springer proposes a policy that would require full-text
> open access immediately upon publication --provided that the policy
> makes clear that publishing in peer-reviewed journals is an
> inseparable part of research and therefore that the funds for doing so
> (article processing fees) will be available to researchers as a
> special overhead on their publicly-funded research grants. The letter
> proposes that the new policy might be phased in after a short grace
> period to give publishers a chance to modify their business models.
>
> Permanent link to this post Posted by Peter Suber at 6/14/2006 12:54:00 PM.
>
> http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_06_11_fosblogarchive.html#115025133781474470