[Air-L] open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals

Thu Feb 7 09:05:23 PST 2008

In general, I completely agree with danah boyd on this one, but
convincing scholars to adopt open access models is but one of the
challenges in moving to an open-access model of publishing. Thus, I
thought I'd bring up some of the complications, given that I'm from
library and information science. If we, as academics who care, are
going to solve this, I think it would be productive to consider the
barriers that currently exist. I wish I could write more, but I have
some deadlines I need to meet today.

1) Journals are as much a service as a product. Thus, publishers
advertise, distribute, index, abstract, pay for the costs of
reviewing, etc. I'm not from the publishing world, but I've seen some
statistics on the costs. How will these costs be paid for? (I know
Carole Palmer http://people.lis.uiuc.edu/~clpalmer/ has done some
research on this, but I can't quickly find a representative
publication.)

2) One of the biggest problems facing the open access movement is
finding economic models which work. After a bit of web research, my
impression is that all open-access publishers which are free for both
authors and readers, are supported by foundations, or in rare cases,
by universities. Thus, their economic models are *not*
self-sustaining. If everybody who wants to start a journal needs to
depend on a foundation to get started, it will be very difficult to
start a journal, as competition for foundation funding will be very
tight (and likely biased in the same direction that grant money is
currently biased). Furthermore, there are individuals who are wary of
this model, because they do not want foundations to be the gatekeepers
of academic research. They feel that academics should be the
gatekeepers of academic research, like they are now. The one good
thing is that under the reader-pays models, a group of scientists can
start their own journal, even their own publishing company, and thus
short-circuit any price, content, or other controls that they are
being subject to by their current publisher. There are in fact
examples of this in the academic publishing world.

3) Remember that a common alternative to the reader-pays model, is the
author pays model. This is a very common "open access" model. But do
we really want to force researchers to have grants, so that they can
afford to pay for their articles to be published? There have been
several attempts at creating fully automatic journals, where,
theoretically, the only costs would be to pay for the bandwidth, the
hosting, and some maintenance of the code. But these have all failed.
Why? I don't know. Issues of indexing and browsing might be relevant.

4) There is a *huge* difference between for-profit and non-profit
publishers. Research indicates that the costs of journal publishing
are about the same, but the access fees for-profit publishers charge
are often many times more expensive than the fees of non-profits.
(Check out Cristina Lopez's link for some stats on journal costs:
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/scholcomm/journalcosts.htm )

5) The Institutional Repositories movement is in no small measure an
attempt by libraries to reduce journal costs, by providing faculty
with an alternative means of publication. The problem, is that no
faculty member makes the time to submit their publications, so the
adoption rates of the repositories are dismal, thus limiting the funds
libraries can secure for their operation. People who are leading the
movement, are trying to figure out ways of providing alternative
publication venues. But, of course, that means that such venues are
often limited to members of the university, due to university policy.
Academics who do not work in universities, or academics from poor
universities are at a disadvantage if this model is the major
publishing model.

6) People these days often hype the digital born journal, as
addressing some of these concerns. The truth is, that the fixed costs
of digital journals and print journals are about the same. And, if
things are digital born-and-bred, what are the preservation mechanisms
in place to make sure these articles exist 10-100 years from now?
Currently, libraries, not publishers, take on this role by physically
storing and maintaining print runs of journals. But if print runs
disappear, what then? Libraries often *cannot* store digital versions
(publisher rules, formats that are not preservation-friendly, etc.),
unless they have control over the format of the document--another
reason for the Institutional Repository movement. And publishers don't
seem to be actively (or at least intentionally) taking on this role.

So, any ideas for addressing these problems? In particular, I would
love to see a self-sustainable economic model, that is not directly
subject to foundation whims or University budget cuts.

Until solutions to this and other problems are found, however, I like
the ACM model, where access to the ACM digital library is pay-only,
and thus libraries, companies, and some individuals subscribe (and
keep it alive), but all authors are free to publish their own work
either on their website, or on an institutional website (such as an
Institutional Repository), as long as they establish clearly that the
article was originally published in the ACM. Thus, if you, the author,
is motivated, you can make your work free to access by everybody, drop
it in an institutional repository so that it gets preserved even if
you can't preserve it yourself. And doing so boosts citation rates
too! This solution is not systematic enough for preserving our
academic heritage over the long-term, but it is a start.

Ingbert

On Feb 7, 2008 9:15 AM, Casey O'Donnell <odonnc at rpi.edu> wrote:
> Yes, replying to my own post, but I should have checked my RSS feed
> this morning:
>
> http://savageminds.org/2008/02/07/anthropology-news-special-safety-valve-edition/
> http://dev.aaanet.org/publications/articles.cfm
>
> Best.
> Casey
>
> On Feb 7, 2008 10:13 AM, Casey O'Donnell <odonnc at rpi.edu> wrote:
> > There has been a fair amount of talk related to this by
> > anthropologists. I think your article also falls into what Chris Kelty
> > wrote about as "Recursive Public Irony," about access to articles
> > about access can be quite limited:
> >
> > http://savageminds.org/2005/05/24/recursive-public-irony/
> > http://blog.openaccessanthropology.org/?p=43
> >
>
>
> --
> Casey O'Donnell
> RPI STS Department - PhD Candidate
>
> http://homepage.mac.com/codonnell/
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-- 
==========================================
Ingbert Floyd
PhD Student
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
http://ingbert.org/     ||     skype: spacesoon

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