Journal Affordability, Research Accessibility, and Open Access

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

Poynder, Richard (2008) Open Access: Doing the Numbers. Open and Shut.
Wednesday, 11 June 2008

Excerpt: "Can OA reduce the costs associated with scholarly 
communication? If so, how, and when? If not, what are the 
implications of this for the "scholarly communication crisis?" 
These are important questions. But without accurate numbers to 
crunch we really cannot answer them adequately. Wouldn't it be 
great therefore if other publishers decided to be as "open" as 
APS in discussing their costs? One thing is for sure: If OA ends 
up simply shifting the cost of scholarly communication from 
journal subscriptions to APCs without any reduction in overall 
expenditure, and inflation continues unabated, many OA advocates 
will be sorely disappointed..."

Richard Poynder has written another of his penetrating, timely 
and incisive analyses of the causal dynamics underlying the OA 
movement. His relentless probing is invaluable. Nor is it anodyne 
neutral journalism that he keeps offering us: Richard is engaged 
and thinking deeply, and causing more than one uncomfortable 
moment to both proponents and opponents of OA if ever they lapse 
in their own critical thinking or actions.


As usual, though, I cannot agree 100% with everything Richard 
writes in his latest provocative and stimulating essay, this time 
on the true costs of journal article publishing. My demurral is 
on two points: (1) whether the question of the true costs of the 
various components of journal publication (which I too have 
cited, as an important unknown, many times in the past) needs to 
be answered right now (i.e., whether any practical action today 
is in any way contingent on knowing those costs in advance -- I 
think not) and (2) whether reducing the costs of journal 
publication is or ought to be one of the explicit objectives of 
the OA movement. (I think journal unaffordability is merely one 
of the two principal factors that drew the research community's 
attention to the need for OA. Journal cost reduction is not 
itself the explicit objective of OA.)


The need for Open Access (OA) movement is driven by two problems: 
(i) journal affordability and (ii) research accessibility -- in 
other words, spending less money and accessing more research. 
Richard Poynder points out in his essay that it is not known 
whether or not universal Gold OA publishing would save money.


But OA is not the same thing as Gold OA publishing. (Richard is 
of course fully aware of this.) Once universally adopted, Green 
OA self- archiving and Green OA self-archiving mandates can and 
will (and do) provide 100% OA, solving the research accessibility 
problem, completely . This is not a matter of speculation: it is 
a simple, practical, inductive fact, already demonstrated by the 
existing Green OA self-archiving (15%) and the existing Green OA 
self-archiving mandates (45).


The rest, in contrast, is all a matter of pre-emptive (and 
paralytic) speculation and counter-speculation: Can-we, could-we 
should-we reach 100% OA directly via Gold OA alone? Would it save 
money? Would it make publishing unaffordable to some in place of 
making research inaccessible to others? Would Green OA give rise 
to Gold OA (and the above hypothetical problems)? Or would it 
lower the costs of publishing?


No one knows the answer to these (and many other) questions about 
hypothetical contingencies regarding universal Gold OA and its 
hypothetical costs. The only thing we do know is that Green OA, 
if all universities mandate it and all researchers do it, will 
provide OA itself, solving the research accessibility problem 
completely. And that is all we need to know. The rest is about 
what we need to do.


Publishers are fond of pronouncing embargoes. If I could 
pronounce an embargo, it would be on all irrelevant, ineffectual 
and irresolvable conjecturing and counter-conjecturing about the 
"true costs" of this and that, in place of doing the obviously 
doable, obviously beneficial (and so far orthogonal) thing, which 
is to self-archive and mandate self-archiving so as to provide 
open access to all our (peer-reviewed) research output at long 
last.


Because of its long period of co-habitation with the exigencies 
and eccentricities of print-era journal publication, the research 
community has forgotten that it itself provides (for free) both 
the research and the peer review, and that the research community 
(researchers, their institutions and their funders) is now, in 
the online era, also in the position to provide access to that 
peer- reviewed research output (for free). But instead of going 
ahead and doing that, we are instead taken up by the hypothetical 
economics of the journal publishing industry, as if that, and not 
the research itself, were the real issue.


Providing and mandating Green OA is a no-brainer, like providing 
and mandating seat-belts, or smoke-free zones. It is obvious in 
the latter two cases that speculating instead about hypothetical 
economic effects on the tobacco or car-manufacturing industry 
instead of doing the obvious would be absurd.


Richard Poynder's essay is hence for the most part correct, yet 
nevertheless inadvertently fanning the flames -- or perhaps I 
should say firming the wax -- of inaction in one sector (research 
accessibility) in favor of pre-emptive, ineffectual and, at 
bottom, unnecessary speculation and counterspeculation in another 
(journal affordability).


Still, Richard exposes the underlying dynamics so much more 
clearly and coherently than others that even if this latest essay 
feeds the filibuster, it sharpens the focus too...


Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum