June 29, 2008, 11:52 AM ET

Thunderstorms and Open Access

Yesterday I did something both mad and responsible — I flew to Montreal just for the morning to give a talk to the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses. I had not realized that “American” in AAUP referred to the continent, but in fact Canadian presses are members, and the chair of the meeting was Phil Cercone of the University of Montreal Press. Phil had written me about 10 days ago trying to put together a last-minute panel on open access. I said I could not do it, even though I had a paper on the subject, since my wife and I had to be in New York City Friday evening for a dinner with friends from out of town. But Phil is not easily put off, and after his third request (accompanied by information on airline schedules), I agreed. So I spent Saturday evening at a grungy motel across the highway from LaGuardia airport, caught a 6:30 a.m. flight, and arrived at Le Centre Sheraton in Montreal at 8:45 a.m., in time for my 9 a.m. panel, “Open Access: From the Budapest Open to Harvard’s Addendum.”

I am not going to try to describe open access, or the documents we discussed, but you will be able to find my talk on my Princeton Web site in a week (our webmaster is on vacation!), and the slides used by the other speaker, Stevan Harnad, will be mounted on the AAUP Web site. Harnad is a cognitive scientist on faculties both at the University of Montreal and at the University of Southampton in the UK. He is one of the leading proponents of Open Access, which in (too) brief is the notion that all scholarly articles ought to be mounted on free public access Web sites maintained by their universities.

I blogged several months ago, concerned by the Harvard announcement of such a Web site, when I expressed concern about what the implications of Open Access were for the humanities and social sciences. I will come back to the topic in another post, but for the moment let me say that I fear that the obligation to “publish” by mounting articles on free Web sites will make it impossible for nonprofit presses (such as the university presses I was addressing in Montreal) and learned socieites to sustain themselves. Harnad’s suggestion is that the universities transfer the payments they are currently making to their academic presses to subsidize peer review and archiving of their faculty scholarly output. I argued that there are at least two problems with this approach. One is that universities increasingly expect their presses to be self-sustaining economically, and are unlikely to put up the necessary funding. The other is that not all scholars (and nonprofit publishers) are connected to universities. Who will subvene their publications?

Harnad is an accomplished advocate, and I agree with much of what he has to say. But I also think that we are living in interesting times from the perspective of scholarly publication. And I am worried.

But (here comes the madness) I should have been even more worried about getting home than about getting to Montreal. My session was over around 10:30 a.m., when I had coffee with publisher friends before heading to the airport at 11:30 a.m. There I discovered that the 2 p.m. flight to Newark had been cancelled due to thunderstorms in the New York area. I was offered a hotel room, but, determined to get home if possible, accepted an offer of a flight to Toronto and a 5 p.m. flight home from there. Well, there were of course further delays due to continuing bad weather, but I did reach Newark by 8 p.m., only fifteen and a half hours after leaving my LaGuardia motel.

As my wife has been telling me for years, I need to learn to say “no.” But saying “yes” to Phil was the right thing to do, and I hope to continue the conversation about the need for rethinking our system of scholarly communication.