[GOAL] Re: Scope of the GOAL list and discussions on "open access"

[Heather Morrison]

Welcome to the list, Peter Murray-Rust, and thanks so much for all  
your work for open science and open access! In my opinion, GOAL is the  
best list for this discussion, so here goes a few of my thoughts.

PMR:  There is no body which represents the "Open Access" community in  
negotiations with publishers on, say, licences or author charges  
(which are among the issues I wish to discuss).

HGM:  the open access community includes a very great many scholars,  
publishers, libraries and librarians, funders, repository managers,  
policy-makers and other advocates (e.g. patient-advocates), around the  
world. We differ in culture, nations, laws, disciplines, economic  
considerations, and perspectives. I don't believe that one body to  
speak for all is possible or even desirable.

For example, here are a few of the existing groups - there are a very  
great many more groups, so apologies for all of the omissions,  
including very important groups for open access - this list is simply  
meant to illustrate the diversity. Corrections for any misperceptions  
of mine would be appreciated.

OASPA (open access publishers)
http://www.oaspa.org/
SPARC (libraries and publishers)
http://www.arl.org/sparc/
Enabling scholarship (university and research organization  
administrators)
http://www.openscholarship.org/
Compact for open access publishing equity (libraries)
http://www.oacompact.org/

Some thoughts on licenses and author charges:

Libraries. Currently, library subscriptions account for about 80-90%  
of the financial support for the scholarly publishing system, with  
68-73% coming from academic libraries alone. (Ware and Mabe, 2009). I  
argue that transitioning this economic support from subscriptions to  
open access is key to a successful transition to open access. Library  
budgets need not be the only source of support, however they should be  
one of the main sources of support.  Librarians have a lot of  
experience negotiating terms including pricing for subscriptions which  
can easily translate into open access negotiations. [Disclosure: this  
is my day job].  The SCOAP3 project is doing just this, transitioning  
one sub-discipline from subscriptions to open access.

Fiscal prudence. Scholarly journal articles can be peer-reviewed and  
made open access by professional publishers in countries like the U.S.  
and the U.K. for $1,350 per article (PLoS ONE and Scientific Reports,  
for example). I recommend that funding agencies and others supporting  
open access via article processing fees cap contributions at this  
amount. My perspective is that it is important that funding agencies  
curtail any desire to be generous and provide more support for open  
access publishing. Much as I applaud these sentiments, I believe that  
funding agencies' willingness to pay is likely to set a standard. If  
funders are willing to pay $5,000 per article, I would predict that  
the overall system of scholarly communication will be more than 3  
times as costly as it would be if funding were limited to $1,350.  
Also, once a standard is set, this will impact authors and funders who  
may not be able to be as generous as the trend-setter.

One model that might be optimal for reasons of fiscal prudence, which  
is the approach of N.I.H. and the Canadian Institutes of Health  
Research, I understand, is to allow researchers to use grant funds or  
some portion thereof for dissemination purposes, without specifying  
that these be OA article processing fees or if so, how much. This  
gives the researcher an incentive to look for cost-effective  
alternatives, to use the remaining funds for other purposes, for  
example sending grad students to conferences to present on the  
research. [Disclosure: I'm a grad student, and have many friends who  
are grad students]. This approach also avoids the possibility of the  
research funder setting an overly generous trend.

Another model that is common in Canada and many other countries, is  
for funding agencies to provide support directly to journals. Canada's  
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has a regular granting  
cycle, with journals being approved via a peer-reviewed process.  
Libraries in Canada and the U.S. also often provide hosting and  
support services for journals their faculty are involved with. This  
may be a particularly cost-effective model; for example, Edgar &  
Willinsky (2010) found through a survey of journals using OJS that  
their average costs were $188 per article.

I realize that some think that OA is so valuable that we should not  
worry so much about the costs, however I would suggest that there are  
really good reasons to look for cost savings in the transition. One  
reason is that the high costs of STM journal publishing over the past  
few decades has resulted in a decrease in funding available for  
scholarly monographs and social sciences and humanities publishing.  
With a bit of prudence, I believe that a transition to open access is  
possible with all the quality we need for scholarly journals in every  
discipline, re-invest in monographs, and also have enough funding to  
support some of the economic needs emerging with the need to support  
research data and electronic preservation services. [Disclosure: this  
is part of my thesis - I am working on the economics chapter, but it  
is not quite ready for open posting yet].

License terms:  there is a wide range of options available, from full  
open access to ridiculous pseudo-open-access. I recommend that funding  
be limited to full open access, which I would describe as, at minimum,  
the ability for anyone, anywhere, to read, copy, download, and re- 
share the item. There are a number of ways of indicating full open  
access, such as the default OJS Open Access Policy, which states:   
"This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the  
principle that making research freely available to the public supports  
a greater global exchange of knowledge".  The Directory of Open Access  
Journals is a vetted list of fully open access, peer-reviewed  
journals, so DOAJ titles may be assumed to be OA. Another way of  
indicating open access is the use of CC licenses. Here is a link to a  
post that I wrote with some examples of what I consider to be journals  
with good creative commons models for open access:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/12/journals-with-good-creative-commons.html

In brief - in all cases, the copyright remains with the author; when  
noncommercial is used, the journal has information on its website  
explaining what this means; one journal commits to providing funds to  
Creative Commons for use of the license.

It might be easier to articulate what should NOT be supported - some  
examples:

Sage CHOICE - a critique. Excerpt (my writing):  "Under SAGE Choice,  
authors cannot even post their own work to their institutional  
repository for open access right away, but must wait for the standard  
one-year" http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/11/sage-choice-critique.html

Elsevier sponsored articles. From the Elsevier article sponsorship  
form, "Select Elsevier journals offer authors the option of sponsoring  
their article and making it available to non-subscribers on Elsevier's  
electronic publishing platforms. The charge for exercising this option  
is $3,000".  In other words, articles are free, but only on the  
Elsevier platform (or specific other platforms as required by  
funders). This is NOT open access - no wonder takeup has been low, as  
reported by Elsevier.
Downloaded December 28, 2011 from:
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authors.authors/sponsoredarticles

References

Edgar, B. D., & Willinsky, J. (2010) (In press). A survey of the  
scholarly journals using open journal systems. Scholarly and Research  
Communication, Retrieved August  27, 2011 from http://pkp.sfu.ca/node/2773
Ware, M., & Mabe, M. (2009). The stm report: An overview of scientific  
and scholarly journal publishing. Oxford: STM: International  
Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers. Retrieved  
2010 from http://www.stm-assoc.org/document-library/

best,

Heather Morrison, MLIS
Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser University School of Communication
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com