[GOAL] Open Access: "Plan S" Needs to Drop "Option B"

Fri Sep 14 21:29:45 BST 2018

For what is worth, I am in profound disagreement with the both of you, and I’m also fed up of reading superficial articles such as the one served to us by Monbiot in The Guardian yesterday.

There has never been so many ways of diffusing research results in scholarly journals for free – you can find thousands of journals which do not have an APC, and are fully OA. You absolutely do not have to pay $1,000 or $2,500 to publish and have your paper being made widely available, just like you don’t need to buy a Model S Tesla if you want a car. The market for scientific publishing is currently more diversified that it ever was in the history of publishing. If you loathe commercial publishers, then use a free one, use a not-for-profit one or publish through a learned society - the choice is all yours. If you want to have more services and more impact through a large publisher, then you are starting to recognize there is value in what they are doing. However loud I scream that Tesla’s cars should be available to everyone for free as we need them to tackle global warming, it remains Tesla’s decision to price their cars in the way they see fit and for customers to decide whether to buy them.

The world is unequal, scientific publishing also is. It steams from academia which is tremendously unequal itself, and often vastly wealthier that its surrounding. Many professors are in the world’s top 1% income bracket – truly unfair for all those who are toiling for a few nickels and paying huge income tax to provide for these lofty salaries. The University of California spends USD 7-8 billion in salary annually, that is more that the whole research budget of most of the countries on earth. Should we also ask professors to stop “ripping off” society – surely earning 1 million dollar per year is extortionately profitable compared to the salary earned by poor labourers in the rust belt, let alone by those in the Global South. The problem at the moment is that we are conflating discussions on the value of different economic models and egalitarianism with means of making scholarly results more broadly available. We should stop focusing all the time on the profits of a few publishers – these profits are peanuts in absolute terms – Apple itself earns more on its own in two months than all the world’s 20,000 publishers combined in one full year and I haven’t seen so many academics scorning Apple like there is no tomorrow on their way back from the Apple Store. Outrageous, these MacBook shouldn’t cost $2500, we should be able to get them for $250.

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Green is a general failure. The Open Journal Systems by the Public Knowledge Project is a vastly superior solution – thousands upon thousands of journals which quality is rapidly increasing are flourishing – gold is here but for the price of salted water – it’s all yours for the taking. We’re offering green OA in 1findr and many librarians complain about them – they would like us to filter them out. I agree with Stevan that green is great, and recognize their quintessential role in pivoting the world towards OA (which I am a fan of) but the general “market” doesn’t want them – it scares people as folks don’t know whether these papers have been reviewed. On top of this, green is tremendously expensive in practice (yes, I know, it COULD be cheap, but the reality of it is that it isn’t because of complex workflows outside of what’s offered by academic social networks, which are also scorned by half the population of librarians). The metadata that accompanies green is frequently dismally poor which creates substantial problem of aggregation and for understanding where our billions spent on public research is going and how it’s used.

The world of OA is changing faster than people realize because we are still used to look at scientific publications through peep holes (the traditional analytic databases that dominate the market) and through hurricanes (the mess offered by advertising companies that also offer free databases to scholars as a hobby).

BTW - The big five do not publish half the papers in the world though they may publish half of the papers in the databases that concentrate on the Western half of the papers published – their share has been going down globally and they now publish about 1/3 of the papers produced globally, and in fact, this is an overestimation of their share as at 1science we’ve found most of the papers they publish, but we still have thousands of journals and millions of papers by smaller publishers to add to 1findr.

Now, you and Monbiot can call me a capitalistic pig for siding with these dreadful commercial publishers and for being a profiteering entrepreneur myself, but for disclaimer I suspect my salary is on a par with the median salary of US university professors, so I guess I’m not the only one sleeping in the sow stalls. 😉

Éric

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From: goal-bounces at eprints.org <goal-bounces at eprints.org> On Behalf Of Peter Murray-Rust
Sent: September 14, 2018 2:21 PM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) <goal at eprints.org>
Subject: Re: [GOAL] Open Access: "Plan S" Needs to Drop "Option B"

I am in agreement with Stefan.
The situation with all commercial publishers (including many scholarly societies) is now unacceptable. I see very little value for the citizens of the world, who either cannot read Northern Science or can't be authors. Closed Access Means People Die, and so do outrageous APCs.

On Fri, Sep 14, 2018 at 1:33 PM Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at gmail.com<mailto:amsciforum at gmail.com>> wrote:

To combine Peter Suber's<https://plus.google.com/u/0/+PeterSuber/posts/iGEFpdYY9dr>post with George Monbiot<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/13/scientific-publishing-rip-off-taxpayers-fund-research?CMP=share_btn_fb>'s: The only true cost (and service) provided by peer-reviewed research journal publishers is the management and umpiring of peer review, and this costs an order of magnitude less that the publishers extortionate fees and profits today.
Yes. I am now appalled at the scale of OA APC charges. I have outlined these in

https://www.slideshare.net/petermurrayrust/scientific-search-for-everyone
slides 3-11

where I contend that probably >1000 USD of an APCs goes to shareholder profits and corporate branding and gross inefficiency. The (failed) Springer IPO effectively argued that they would use the flotation to invest in brands so they could charge higher prices. The effect of APCs on the Global  South is appalling (one publisher make no discount for anyone - see my slides).
I believe the true cost of publishing and hosting a peer-reviewed scholarly article is less than 200 USD. It's probably true that in some regulated fields (e.g. clinical trials) reviewing needs more input but that's the sort of amount that it costs for a single review cycle, no typesetting (the publishers cost ca 200 USD and it destroys information) and hosting on a public site. Of course many journals do it for zero.
The actual transaction costs of preprint servers are about 8 USD.

The researchers and peer-reviewers conduct and report the research as well as the peer reviewing for free (or rather, funded by their institutions and research grants, which are, in turn, funded mostly by tax-payers).
Yes

Peer-reviewed research journal publishers are making among the biggest profit margins on the planet through almost 100% pure parasitism.
Totally agreed.

Alexandra Elbakyan's Sci-Hub<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub>is one woman's noble attempt to fix this.

But the culprits for the prohibitive pay-walling are not just the publishers: They are also the researchers, their institutions and their research grant funders -- for not requiring all peer-reviewed research to be  made Open Access (OA) immediately upon acceptance for publication through researcher self-archiving intheir own institutional open access repositories.
Yes, this is what I refer to as the Publisher-Academic complex

Instead the OA policy of the EC ("Plan S<https://ec.europa.eu/commission/commissioners/2014-2019/moedas/announcements/plan-s-and-coalition-s-accelerating-transition-full-and-immediate-open-access-scientific_en>") and other institutional and funder OA policies worldwide are allowing publishers to continue their parasitism by offering researcher' the choice between Option A (self-archiving their published research) or Option B (paying to publish it in an OA journal where publishers simply name their price and the parasitism continues in another key).
I agree. I approve of the motivation of PlanS to reassert control, but I doubtb it will lower pricess to the real cost (200 USD)

Unlike Alexandra Elbakyan, researchers are freeing their very own research OA when they deposit it in their institutional OA repository.
Agreed. It's a pity that in some countries the repositories are scattered and incredibly difficult for machines to search . We need central aggregations like Core, Dare, HAL

Publishers try to stop them by demanding copyright, imposing OA embargoes, and threating individual researchers and their institutions with Alexandra-Elbakyan-style lawsuits.

Such lawsuits against researchers or their institutions would obviously cause huge public outrage globally -- an even better protection than hiding in Kazakhstan.

And many researchers are ignoring the embargoes and spontaneously self-archiving their published papers -- and have been doing it, inclreasingly  for almost 30 years now (without a single lawsuit).

But spontaneous self-archiving is growing far too slowly: it requires systematic mandates from institutions and funders in order to break out of the paywalls.

The only thing that is and has been sustaining the paywalls on research has been publishers' lobbying of governments on funder OA policy and their manipulation of institutional OA policy with "Big Deals" on extortionate library licensing fees to ensure that OA policies always include Option B.

The solution is ever so simple: OA policies must drop Option B.
I think there is a synergistic solution, which is to provide a better search system (especially for STEMM) than Google and WebOfScience. These closed megacorporations are very poor for data and semantic search. They are also completely nonTransparent and unanswerable to us. There is a growing movement for the community to build its own search engines (#dontLeaveItToGoogle) and I am delighted personally to be able to provide some key Open Source (sic) technology for this. slides (35 onwards)

What is required now is to build a better system. Not just talk, but build.
Would be very interested to hear from like-minded people (on separate channel or @petermurrayrust on Twitter).

P.

--
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader Emeritus in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dept. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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