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About the Author
Stan Katz teaches public and international affairs and directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is a past president of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for Legal History. He comments frequently on policy issues relating to higher education, particularly liberal education, and on the humanities and social sciences, philanthropy, scholarly relations with Cuba, and the interplay of civil society, constitutionalism, and democracy. And on his beloved Cubs.
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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.
Posted at 10:52:21 AM on June 29, 2008 | All postings by Stan KatzComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
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Green and Gold OA Clarified
It was nice to meet Stan Katz (again, as he reminded me: we overlapped at Princeton for years, but the only times we actually met were at publisher meetings!). I’m also relieved that Stan’s heroic voyage had a happy if breathless ending. (An 8 pm arrival at Newark airport still leaves Manhattan within about 90 minutes reach.)
Six little clarifications:
(1) SK: “Open Access [OA] [means that] all scholarly articles ought to be mounted on free public access websites maintained by their universities.”
This brief description definition is fine as a 1st cut.
(2) SK: “[T]he obligation [i.e., recent mandates like Harvard’s] to “publish” by mounting articles on free websites will make it impossible for nonprofit presses and learned societies to sustain themselves.”
The mandates are for authors to mount (i.e., self-archive) the final, refereed draft of their published article, not to “publish” it by mounting it. This self-archived “Green OA” draft is a supplement, provided for all users whose institutions cannot afford access to the publisher’s version. It is not itself another publication.
The publisher might be nonprofit or commercial; that is not the pertinent variable. The pertinent variable is whether or not the supplementary OA draft causes cancellations, rendering subscriptions unsustainable for covering costs. So far, in the few fields where OA self-archiving has been taking place the longest (15 years) and most extensively (100%) — e.g. high-energy physics, published by American Physical Society (APS), Institute of Physics (IOP) and Elsevier — the publishers report no detectable subscription cancellations associated with self-archiving: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/
However, if and when OA self-archiving ever does cause catastrophic cancellations, making subscriptions unsustainable, then, and only then, journals can (a) offload all access-provision and archiving functions, with their costs, onto the network of institutional repositories, (b) downsize to peer review alone, and © convert to the “Gold OA” publication-cost-recovery model, charging the author-institution, per paper, for peer review and certification instead of charging the user-institution, per journal, for access. The institutions will have more than enough annual windfall subscription cancellation savings out of which to cover those charges.
(3) SK: “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.”
No, my suggestion is that universities should mandate self-archiving and if and when the resulting universal OA makes subscriptions become unsustainable, the university’s subscription savings will pay for the university’s peer-review costs. This is not a subsidy: It is direct payment for a service.
(4) SK: “[U]niversities increasingly expect their presses to be self-sustaining economically, and are unlikely to put up the necessary funding,”
Extra funding for what? While universities are subscribing to journals, that pays for peer review. If and when journal subscriptions collapse, the university savings will pay for the peer review. (And again this has nothing to do with university presses in particular.)
(5) SK: “[N]ot all scholars (and nonprofit publishers) are connected to universities. Who will subvene their publications?”
Unaffiliated scholars are rare enough, and the per-paper costs of peer review alone are low enough, so a small small surcharge on the charges of the affiliated authors (the vast majority) will take care of this.
And as noted, neither whether publishers are nonprofit or commercial, nor whether they are university or learned-society publishers, is relevant to any of this.
(6) SK: “[OA has] different… implications…for the humanities and social sciences”
OA pertains to refereed journal articles publication in all disciplines. Humanities and social sciences are not exceptions in any way. All research, in all scholarly and scientific disciplines, benefits from access, usage and impact.
Stevan Harnad
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/
— Stevan Harnad · Jun 29, 08:48 PM · #