Publishing Management Consultant: "Open Access Is Research Spam"

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

     ** Cross-Posted: For fully hyperlinked version of this posting, see:
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/329-guid.html

             "Open Access Is Research Spam"

SUMMARY: Joseph Esposito, a management consultant, says Open 
Access (OA) is "research spam": 
http://www.the-scientist.com/podcast/theweek/audio/2007/11/07/normal.mp3

But OA's explicit target content is the 2.5 million peer-reviewed 
articles published annually in all the world's 25,000 
peer-reviewed research journals. (So either all research is spam 
or OA is not spam after all!).

Esposito says researchers' problem isn't access to journal 
articles (they already have that): rather, it's not having the 
time to read them. This will come as news to the countless 
researchers worldwide who are denied access daily to the articles 
in the journals their institution cannot afford, and to the 
authors of those articles, who are losing all that potential 
research impact.

Search engines find it all, tantalizingly, but access depends on 
being able to afford the subscription tolls. Esposito also says 
OA is just for a small circle of peers: How big does he imagine 
the actual usership of most journal articles is?

Esposito applauds the American Chemical Society (ACS) executives' 
bonuses for publishing profit, even though ACS is supposed to be 
a Learned Society devoted to maximizing research access, usage 
and progress, not a commercial company devoted to deriving profit 
from restricting research access only to those who can afford to 
pay them for it (and for their bonuses).

Esposito describes the efforts of researchers to inform their 
institutions and funders of the benefits of mandating OA as 
lobbying, but he does not attach a name to what anti-OA 
publishers are doing when they hire expensive pit-bull 
consultants to spread disinformation about OA in an effort to 
prevent OA self-archiving from being mandated. (Another surcharge 
for researchers, in addition to paying for their bonuses?)

Esposito finds it tautological that surveys report that authors 
would comply with OA mandates, but he omits to mention that over 
80% of those researchers report that they would self-archive 
willingly if mandated. (And where does Esposito think publishers 
would be without existing publish-or-perish mandates?)

Esposito is right, though, that OA is a matter of time -- but not 
reading time, as he suggests. The only thing standing between the 
research community and 100% OA to all of its peer-reviewed 
research output is the time it takes to do the few keystrokes per 
article it takes to provide OA. That is what the mandates (and 
the metrics that reward them) are meant to accomplish at long 
last.

                   --------

Joseph Esposito is an independent management consultant (the 
"portable CEO") with a long history in publishing, specializing 
in "interim management and strategy work at the intersection of 
content and digital technology."

In an interview by The Scientist (a follow-up to his article, 
"The nautilus: where - and how - OA will actually work"), 
Esposito says Open Access (OA) is "research spam" -- making 
unrefereed or low quality research available to researchers whose 
real problem is not insufficient access but insufficient time.

In arguing for his "model," which he calls the "nautilus model," 
Esposito manages to fall into many of the longstanding fallacies 
that have been painstakingly exposed and corrected for years in 
the self-archiving FAQ. (See especially Peer Review, Sitting 
Pretty, and Info-Glut.)

Like so many others, with and without conflicting interests, 
Esposito does the double conflation (1) of OA publishing (Gold 
OA) with OA self-archiving (of non-OA journal articles) (Green 
OA), and (2) of peer-reviewed postprints of published articles 
with unpublished preprints. It would be very difficult to call OA 
research "spam" if Esposito were to state forthrightly that Green 
OA self-archiving means making all articles published in all 
peer-reviewed journals OA. (Hence either all research is spam or 
OA is not spam after all!).

Instead, Esposito implies that OA is only or mainly for 
unrefereed or low quality research, which is simply false: OA's 
explicit target is the peer-reviewed, published postprints of all 
the 2.5 million articles published annually in all the planet's 
25,000 peer-reviewed journals, from the very best to the very 
worst, without exception. (The self-archiving of pre-refereeing 
preprints is merely an optional supplement, a bonus; it is not 
what OA is about, or for.)

Esposito says researchers' problem is not access to journal 
articles: They already have that via their institution's journal 
subscriptions; their real problem is not having the time to read 
those articles, and not having the search engines that pick out 
the best ones.

Tell that to the countless researchers worldwide who are denied 
access daily to the specific articles they need in the journals 
to which their institution cannot afford to subscribe. (No 
institution comes anywhere near being able to subscribe to all 
25,000, and many are closer to 250.)

And tell it also to the authors of all those articles to which 
all those would-be users are being denied access; their articles 
are being denied all that research impact. Ask users and authors 
alike whether they are happy with affordability being the 
"filter" determining what can and cannot be accessed. Search 
engines find it all for them, tantalizingly, but whether they can 
access it depends on whether their institutions can afford a 
subscription.

Esposito says OA is just for a small circle of peers ("6? 60? 
600? but not 6000"): How big does he imagine the actual usership 
of most of the individual 2.5 million annual journal articles to 
be? Peer-reviewed research is an esoteric, peer-to-peer process, 
for the contents of all 25,000 journals: research is conducted 
and published, not for royalty income, but so that it can be 
used, applied and built upon by all interested peer specialists 
and practitioners; the size of the specialties varies, but none 
are big, because research itself is not big (compared to trade, 
and trade publication).

Esposito applauds the American Chemical Society (ACS) executives' 
bonuses for publishing profit, oblivious to the fact that the ACS 
is supposed to be a Learned Society devoted to maximizing 
research access, usage and progress, not a commercial company 
devoted to deriving profit from restricting research access to 
those who can afford to pay them for it.

Esposito also refers (perhaps correctly) to researchers' 
amateurish efforts to inform their institutions and funders of 
the benefits of mandating OA as lobbying -- passing in silence 
over the fact that the real pro lobbyists are the wealthy anti-OA 
publishers who hire expensive pit-bull consultants to spread 
disinformation about OA in an effort to prevent Green OA from 
being mandated.

Esposito finds it tautological that surveys report that authors 
would comply with OA mandates ("it's not news that people would 
comply with a requirement"), but he omits to mention that most 
researchers surveyed recognised the benefits of OA, and over 80% 
reported they would self-archive willingly if it was mandated, 
only 15% stating they would do so unwillingly. One wonders 
whether Esposito also finds the existing and virtually universal 
publish-or-perish mandates of research institutions and funders 
tautological -- and where he thinks the publishers for whom he 
consults would be without those mandates.

Esposito is right, though, that OA is a matter of time -- but not 
reading time, as he suggests. The only thing standing between the 
research community and 100% OA to all of its peer-reviewed 
research output is the time it takes to do a few keystrokes per 
article. That, and only that, is what the mandates are all about, 
for busy, overloaded researchers: Giving those few keystrokes the 
priority they deserve, so they can at last start reaping the 
benefits -- in terms of research access and impact -- that they 
desire. The outcome is optimal and inevitable for the research 
community; it is only because this was not immediately obvious 
that the outcome has been so long overdue.

But the delay has been in no small part also because of the 
conflicting interests of the journal publishing industry for 
which Esposito consults. So it is perhaps not surprising that he 
should see it otherwise, and wish to see it continue at a 
(nautilus) snail's crawl for as long as possible...

Stevan Harnad