Giving open access a bad name

I am continually being pestered to review papers for journals that are quite outside the scope of my interests from editorial assistants working for the open access publisher Academic Journals.  I imagine that I am not the only one suffering in this way and the publisher ought to understand that this practice is damaging the open access movement.  Clearly, the people involved have no idea of how to select referees for papers and are presumably relying on a mailing list developed by the publisher without reference to the range of interests of the people involved.  The latest was a request to review for the International Journal of Peace and Development Studies a paper on "Creating space for community-based conservation initiatives (CBCIs) in conventional academics" - I assume that "academies" is intended here.  The paper would need an enormous amount of language editing to make it suitable for any Western journal and my impression is (judging from papers in other journals from this publisher) that they do not receive that kind of attention. This serves only to feed the notion that open access = low quality.  One can't imagine how these journals (and the publisher's home page lists more than 100 titles) are going to survive.

Another reason for Open Access

I've just learnt from one of my authors that Wiley want $130.00 for reproduction rights of a diagram in one of their journals - which is ridiculous.  I doubt if the authors even know about Wiley's charges and, in any event, they won't see a penny of it.  I'm doubtful whether Wiley are on secure legal grounds anyway.  What is the difference between quoting a paragraph of text (with due attribution) and quoting a diagram (with due attribution)?  Rest assured - if you want your diagrams, etc. to be used by others, so that they get wide publicity and citation, Information Research will not prevent it by charging!

Open access and the publishers

In her latest blog entry Heather Morrison takes apart the publishers' arguments on their contribution to the economic well-being of Denmark.   Worth reading.

Open access - again

The Research Information Network (a very worthy organization which, consequently,will probably be axed under the new coalition government regime) has produced An introduction to open access.  As is so often the case, the guide (which is intended for researchers) fails to distinguish effectively between true open access, where there are neither subscription costs nor author charges and partial open access, which involves author charging.  Both of these go under the label of gold access, following a distinction suggested years ago by Steven Harnad.  But these are not identical methods of achieving open access, which is why I describe true open access as Platinum access.  So-called "gold" simply transfers the production costs to the author, from the subscriber; "platinum" calls upon neither of these sources for finance but relies upon either subsidies or voluntary work, or a combination of the two.

Governments, universities and research funding agencies around the world have been slow to see the potential of the platinum route - largely it seems (at least in the case of governments) to protect the publishers. The exceptions are countries in the smaller language groups, where publication of scholarly research has generally been through journals produced by universities, produced with subsidies, and exchanged around the world for other journals to reduce library acquisition costs.  In such cases, the transfer to free, subsidised open access has been quite logical and simple to achieve.

The economics of scholarly publishing undoubtedly support the platinum route since social benefit is maximised in this way.  It is possible, although I hold out little hope, that the current financial crisis in the UK will lead institutions to embrace the platinum method: individual universities, or, better, collaboration between universities would enable the publication of journals in specific disciplines which could be funded at very low costs, and universities could require researchers to publish in these journals, just as they mandate the deposition of papers in institutional archives.

How low are the costs?  Well, taking Information Research as an example of the platinum journal, the only direct costs of production are borne by the University of Lund and those costs amount to whatever proportion of server maiintenance costs can be attributed to the journal: I imagine that these costs are rather low.  All other costs: editing, copy-editing, reviewing, layout, production, are borne by the voluntary workers of the journal.  Is there really any economic case to answer?

Openness and Google

There's an interesting item on openness on the Google blog - but before everyone gets excited, note that it is about openness in two contexts: open systems and software and openness about the information Google collects about us. It's not about any plans Google may have towards open access to the information it stores. I think we can expect the controversy over Google Book Search to continue as long as Google fails to take my advice (:-) on creating a foundation and making the books openly available.

Academic Journals - the open access publisher

I was asked recently to review a paper for the International Journal of Library and Information Science - and declined, through pressure of work. However, I decided to take a look at the site and found a very odd animal indeed!

The current issue (September, 2009) has two papers, one is entitled:

Spectral sensitivity coefficients (SSCs) of the based materials for photonic devices under optical wavelength and temperature sensing variations in modern optical access networks

This is a predominantly mathematical paper, which appears not to have been copy-edited by any native English speaker and the text is almost completely without paragraphs. Regardless of editorial issues such as these, however, I am bewildered as to what definition of "library and information science" this paper is intended to fit.

The second paper Indian journal of physics: A scientometric analysis is obviously within the usual definition of the field, but again, copy-editing is clearly absent, since occasional sentences are not only ungrammatical but unintelligible.

Others have drawn attention to this publisher of OA journals and, on the basis of this example, they can hardly be said to add to the reputation of open access publication in general.

The humanities and open access publishing

A recent report from the National Humanities Alliance reports that:

Even learned-society publishers in the humanities and social sciences may be taken aback by just how expensive it is to publish an article in their fields. It cost an average of $9,994 in 2007 to publish an article in one of the eight journals analyzed, compared with an average of $2,670 for STM journal articles.

Makes me wonder how I manage to publish Information Research on a budget of zero!

Bentham follow-up

Happily, the editor of The Open Access Information Science Journal, Bambang Parmanto, of the University of Pittsburgh has resigned - I wonder how long it will take the other Editorial Board members to do so? Tellingly, Dr. Parmato commented that he never saw the hoax manuscript and an Editorial Board member of another Bentham journal, who has also resigned, said that in his time on the Board he had never received a paper for review. Peter Suber comments: "In April, Marie-Paule Pileni, editor in chief of Bentham's Open Chemical Physics Journal, resigned when the journal published a 9/11 conspiracy-theory paper without her knowledge or approval."

It's a strange scholarly publishing activity where editors don't see what is to be published and where board members don't get papers to review. One wonders whether the term 'scholarly' should be used at all!

Dr Parmanto also commented, in respect of the author pays business model: "I see that [Bentham would] have the incentive to maintain the credibility of the journal, but I also see the potential for abuse."

Exactly.

Author pays, publisher profits & science loses?

Peter Suber reports on the successful submission of a hoax paper to the Bentham Science, The Open Information Science Journal, which claims to have peer-review. Last year Bentham Science announced about 200 new OA journals, all using author charges and, of course, the aim is to maximise profits. It does make one wonder, however, how far other more reputable publishers may be prepared to go in maximising profits and raises a question about the whole idea of OA based on author charging.

Readers of this blog will be well aware of my feelings on the subject: money spent to support corporate shareholders and executive bonuses should be spent, instead, on establishing really open journals, like Information Research. No money changes hands in any direction as far as publication or access are concerned: strict and strong peer review is applied because I don't need to fill pages. The only thing that counts is the quality of the content.

Any other process is flawed: author charging will encourage corruption, and 'toll access' puts money in the wrong place. Some day the policy makers are going to understand this, it's just a pity that it is a long time coming!

When this particular journal was announced several friends of mine and I were approached to be members of the Editorial Board - we conferred and we all declined. I trust that those who accepted the invitation will now resign - although I must admit that the names of only six of the Board members are known to me.

The missing link and open access

The Guardian newspaper had a number of items on the discovery of Ida - the 'missing link' in the evolution of primates. An interesting piece from one of them was this:

There will be some raised eyebrows in the scientific establishment that Hurum did not opt to publish the scientific description of Ida in either Science or Nature, widely regarded as the two most prestigious scientific journals in the world. Instead he and his team chose for PLoS ONE, an online open-access journal that does not charge people to read its papers.
Hurum said the main reason was to ensure that as many people as possible have the opportunity to read the paper. "I'm paid by the tax payers of Norway to do this research. I'm not paid by Nature or Science and still they charge money for other people to read my scientific results," he says. "This fossil really is part of our history, truly a fossil that's a world heritage. A find like this is something for all human kind."

Now, wouldn't it be a good idea for all scientists to take note of Jørn Hurum's stand?
Here's the paper.

Journal price increases

Bill Hooker has a blog called Open Reading Frame, which has an item on increases in journal prices. He shows that, in dollar prices:

From 1990 to 2008, total price increases ranged from 238% (astronomy) to 537% (general science); that's 3.7 and 8.3 times the increase in the CPI [consumer price index], respectively.

Would the publishers care to tell us how this is the case?

I thought of drawing a graph to show the difference between Information Research and other 'Platinum track' journals and the priced publications but, on reflection, I felt that a graph showing an annual zero percent increase from a base of zero would not be particularly interesting! (Later - in a comment, Bill Hooker points out that the flat line is interesting evidence that some publishing models can keep costs down. I'm happy to be able to support that!)

OA and copyright

There's a bit of a buzz in the OA world about a video journal, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, leaving the OA domain and becoming a subscription journal. The reason, essentially, was that the editors couldn't find a business model to allow them to continue as purely OA - although individuals can get a one-day free subscription.

In his blog Common Knowledge, John Wilibanks suggests that

If you don't use a permissive copyright license you are not an Open Access publisher. JoVE was never OA. They simply weren't charging for their publications. JoVE was shareware, and the bill's come due.

Now, by permissive he appears to mean that the user can use the content in any way s/he wishes, but quotes in support of this proposition the Budapest Open Access Initiative statement that

The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

However, giving the author these rights, does not imply that the user should have the total right to do whatever s/he wishes with the content. If the author retains copyright, as Information Research authors do, it is up to the author to determine what should be done with his or her work. A journal publisher cannot allow the author to retain copyright and then encourage infringement of this copyright by suggesting that users of the material may do whatever they wish with it. (Slightly revised 17 Apr 2009)

The electronic textbook

Peter Suber reports a paper in Nature - accessible only to subscribers - on the potential of the electronic open access text-book. I'm surprised that this has not developed sooner - I was forecasting back in 1995 that one of the first things to go open access would be the text book. And it hasn't happened.

I still find it curious: most text book authors decide to write a new one because they find the existing ones imperfect, from their point of view. They trial material with their own students (often mentioning this in a dedication) and then try to sell it in a market already packed with text books. I put the search terms "statistical" and "introduction" into Amazon.com and it came up with 8,393 results Who actually needs another introduction to statistics?

So, instead of chopping down the trees - when, given the odds, it is likely that only your own students are going to benefit, why not create an open access text and invite others of like mind to contribute? Build in links to Websites and OA journals and you'll have a richer resource for your students (and more easily kept up-to-date) than any print on paper version.

Come to think of it - and putting my money where my mouth is - if there is anyone out there who would like to collaborate on an "introduction to modern information management", please get in touch. I'll be happy to create a site at InformationR.net and take it from there.

Open Access - a Netherlands' perspective

Wouter Gerritsma's blog, WoW! Wouter on the Web carries a YouTube video in which a number of senior scholarly figures from the Netherlands make statements about the virtues of Open Access. As Wouter says, it's a pretty boring video (spoken in Dutch with English sub-titles) but, from my point of view, the worst thing about it is the lack of vision in the statements. Here, OA is viewed simply as consisting of open archives (or repositories), and these are the kind of people who are actually involved in making decisions about the future of scholarly communication. Not a word about free, OA journals when, for a country the size of the Netherlands, creating a pool of such journals would be very much cheaper than funding repositories.

When are the so-called 'leaders' of the academic and research communities going to understand what is at stake here? To remain in the grasp of the commercial world, with ever-rising 'author charges' or denial of archiving rights, or to break free and begin to take advantage of what the technology now offers?

Journal prices and exchange rates

Today's Times Higher Education Supplement has an item on the damage done to library budgets by shifts in the exchange rates in favour of the dollar and the euro against the pound.

This could be good news for open access, paradoxically - but only if university administrations take on board the fact that spending money on toll access journals (whether author tolls or reader tolls) is not the best use of money. They should be advising their researchers to publish in genuinely 'open' journals, that is those that are totally free, and to engage actively in the development of such journals. The collective buying power of universities would be better put to producing rather than buying. The market advocates love the idea of competition, so why not compete?

I'm not too sanguine, however: I doubt very much that Vice-Chancellors will get together on this and decide upon an open access publishing programme to challenge the vice-like grip of the commercial publishers. Their reaction in the past to the problems of library funding do not give one much hope that they will adopt it as an issue of major concern, since their attitude has generally been that if cancellations are necessary, it's just too bad.

More on open access

Peter Suber's newsletter drew my attention to The Coming Change in Humanities Publishing (6): Open Access in Gideon Burton's Blog. Gideon draws attention to the toll access, open access distinction, but somewhat blurs the distinction, giving the impression that all OA journals charge author fees. Peter Suber picks up on this and quotes Harnad on the 'gratis'/'libre' distinction - which doesn't seem to have caught on, and which, in my opinion is unlikely to. The fact is that there is only one form of open access, that is, one that has neither subscription charges, nor author charges - and a significant number of OA journals are truly free. It is not OA that requires a distinction to be made, but Toll Access - of which there are now two types - Author Tolls, and Reader Tolls - neither of which results in truly Open Access.

...and things happen.

While the Weblog has been dormant a number of developments of potential interest have happened. The first I noticed was the decision by the American Library Association to make American Libraries open access. You have to load the ebrary reader (which needs a workaround if you use Firefox 3.0).

The next item to come to my notice was a similar decision by the British Medical Association to make the British Medical Journal (which now seems to be known only by its initials) entirely open access. I imagine this will mean more obscure diseases being reported to GPs by their usual hypochondriacs!

Finally, there's been the launch of academia.edu, a kind of social networking site for academics. It is rather sparsely populated at present with both institutions and people. For example, my old university, Sheffield, appears not be present at all, while the University of Boras, where I now work part-time, is present, but with only one staff member. Perhaps it will grow.

OA books from Bloomsbury Academic

An interesting announcement about a new publisher and a new strategy for academic texts. Bloomsbury Academic is a new imprint from the Harry Potter publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing.
According to the press release:

All books will be made available free of charge online, with free downloads, for non-commercial purposes immediately upon publication, using Creative Commons licences. The works will also be sold as books, using the latest short-run technologies or Print on Demand (POD).

The imprint will initially publish in the Social Sciences and Humanities building thematic lists on pressing global issues, with approximately fifty new titles online and in print by the end of 2009.

The new imprint has its own Website where the FAQ contains answers to questions you might think of asking, such as:

Is this like the open access model for journals where authors (or their institutions) have to pay for the publishing process?
No, Bloomsbury Academic finances the publishing process and expects to recover its costs through sales of hardback copies.

This is an interesting development, which we shall watch with interest - Bloomsbury is taking a chance on the potential for profit from demand for print copies, which it will produce on demand. Given the usually small print runs of academic books, and some anecdotal evidence on the scale of this kind of demand, Bloomsbury may well be right.

Open access and scholarly neglect

Thanks to Peter Suber's OA News for drawing attention to a forthcoming Communications of the ACM paper, 'Open access publishing in science: why it is highly appreciated but rarely used', by Florian Mann and colleagues. And what is holding things back? According to Mann et al. it is the "short-term performance related concerns and the wait and see attitude of the majority of researchers". One can understand, at least in the UK - because of the impact of the Research Assessment Exercise, the concerns over performance, but I am less impressed by the wait and see attitude. It speaks of a total lack of concern over the wider dissemination of scholarly information that says more about ego than it does about social responsibility.

It is not entirely clear what Mann and co. mean by the Golden route to open access: once again, as so often, there is a suspicion that they mean the use of author charging to subsidise publishers. The position would be made much clearer if the notion of the Platinum route was separated from author-charging, and, of course, by Platinum I mean publication in journals that are open access and free of author charges. Only the Platinum route gives truly open access, since it is 'open' at both ends of the process - no author charges and no subscription charges. If all the resources that are currently, in my view, wasted on supporting repositories and author charging were put to the development of Platinum journals, true open access would rapidly become the dominant mode of scholarly publishing. However, it is not likely to happen as long as university administrators remain ignorant of the potential and as long as the scholarly community remains in a wait and see posture. If you believe that open access is beneficial to society, why are you publishing in restricted journals? Instead of waiting and seeing, start getting out and doing!

Another OA categorisation

Peter Suber, whose Open Access Newsletter is a great source for anyone interested in OA has come up with a new classification of types of open access - he suggests the term 'gratis' where 'price barriers' are removed, and 'libre' for the removal of 'permission barriers'. However, since both words mean "free", I'm not sure that the distinction would be retained in general parlance.

However, I'm not sure it is necessary - the aim seems to be to overcome the problem that so-call "Gold OA" (in terms of journals) can mean those that are completely free, like Information Research, and those that use author charging to enable free access. I distinquish between these by reserving "Gold" for the author-charging mode, since it is that mode that has become associated with the notion in the mind of officialdom, and use "Platinum" for what Peter would now call "libre Gold" (or "Gold libre") - I think :-)

The situation is confused by the association between open access publishing and institutional or disciplinary repositories. While the latter provide open access to a proportion of the total literature in any field they are at present a somewhat disorganised collection of sources - some of which provide good coverage of an institution's output, some of which merely skim the surface. A couple of years ago I surveyed the repositories in the UK and found, for example, that although the University of Cambridge had more than 30,000 items in its repository only 16 were preprints of scientific papers. I regard repostitories as an interim solution: the future, inevitably, will be the "Platinum" publishing mode. The economics will drive inexorably towards this mode of scholarly communication - not, perhaps, in what is left of my lifetime, but inevitably.