Author: Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

The Association of American University Presses has issued a statement on Open Access. Peter Suber and Ben Vershbow have commented the statement. Also, there was an article about it in Inside Higher Ed ("University Presses Take Their Stand").

Here is an excerpt from that statement (minus footnote numbers):

From the founding of the first American university presses in the late 19th century, the purpose of the university press has always been to assist the university in fulfilling its noble mission "to advance knowledge, and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures—but far and wide," in the famous words of President Daniel Coit Gilman of the Johns Hopkins University. Universities acknowledged then that for most scholarly works there was insufficient commercial demand to sustain a publishing operation on sales alone, and recognized an obligation to establish and subsidize their own presses in order to serve the mission of universities to share the knowledge they generate.

Knowledge is expensive to produce, and requires—in addition to the scholar’s own work—knowledgeable editorial selection and careful vetting as well as a high level of quality in copyediting, design, production, marketing, and distribution in order to achieve the excellence for which American universities have come to be widely praised. Universities have made substantial investments in their presses, and the staffs who run them are expert at what they do. The system of scholarly communication that these presses support has played a vital role in the spread of knowledge worldwide. Calls for changing this system need to take careful account of the costs of doing so, not just for individual presses but for their parent universities, and for the scholarly societies that also contribute in major ways to the current system.

And, indeed, while proud of their achievements, university presses and scholarly societies have never been averse to change. Rather, being embedded in the culture of higher education that values experimentation and advances in knowledge, presses have themselves been open to new ways of facilitating scholarly communication and have been active participants in the process. Prominent examples from the last decade include Project MUSE, the History E-Book Project, the History Cooperative, California’s AnthroSource and eScholarship Editions, Cambridge Companions Online, Chicago’s online edition of The Founders’ Constitution, Columbia’s International Affairs Online (CIAO) and Gutenberg-e, The New Georgia Encyclopedia, MIT CogNet, Oxford Scholarship Online and Oxford’s recent experiments with open access journals, Virginia’s Rotunda, and Michigan’s new press and library collaboration digitalculturebooks.

The phrase "open access" has come to symbolize the pressure for change in the system, largely in response to the financial burden on academic libraries of maintaining subscriptions to commercially published journals in science, technology, and medicine (STM). Without reform to this system many fear that the results of new research will increasingly be accessible to an ever-shrinking number of the wealthiest universities. Hence the call has arisen for a new publishing model of open access that will ensure the continued ability of universities to disseminate knowledge "far and wide."

The well-known Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), in promoting a solution to the high price of STM journals, defines open access as "permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself." In principle, this definition of open access could be applied to all types of scholarly publishing, and calls for widespread use of institutional repositories and for self-archiving by individual scholars in order to promote such open access are by no means limited to just STM journal literature. Although the debate over open access has centered almost exclusively on one sector of publishing, STM journals, there is no reason to limit the discussion to that sector and indeed, given the interconnectedness of knowledge, it is unwise not to explore the implications of open access for all fields of knowledge lest an unfortunate new "digital divide" should arise between fields and between different types of publishing. The recently proposed legislation known as the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (FRPAA) would affect a wide range of research that receives funding from 11 federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Departments of Energy, Education, and Defense. The American Council of Learned Societies, in its 2006 report on "Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences," has advocated such open access for all social science and humanities scholarship. However, there is a wide range of models that can be subsumed under the generic term "open access," with both risks and benefits to the entire system of scholarly communications that are as yet not fully understood.

The member presses of AAUP, which include scholarly societies, recognize that they have an obligation to confront the many challenges—economic, legal, and technological—to the existing system and to participate with all willing partners, both within and outside the university, to strengthen and expand scholarly communications. Many of them, often in collaboration with research libraries, are already experimenting with new approaches, including varieties of open access that seek to balance the mission of scholarly communication with its costs.

Those costs today are covered by a combination of institutional subsidies and sales in the marketplace. On average, AAUP university-based members receive about 10% of their revenue as subsidies from their parent institution, 85% from sales, and 5% from other sources. Therefore the AAUP believes it is important to keep an open mind about what constitutes open access, since some kinds of open access are compatible with a market-based model. The National Academies Press, for instance, makes all of its books available online for free full-text browsing worldwide while offering both downloadable PDFs and print copies for sale.

For the more radical approaches that abandon the market as a viable basis for the recovery of costs in scholarly publishing and instead try to implement a model that has come to be known as the "gift economy" or the "subsidy economy," the AAUP urges that the following points be kept in mind:

1) BOAI-type open access will require large contributions from either the authors or other sources (including foundations and libraries, which pay "member" fees instead of paying for subscriptions). Scholars at less wealthy institutions or those with no institutional affiliations may experience greater difficulty in publishing unless fees are waived or reduced (a process that will increase the burden on other authors, who will have to pay higher fees to offset the waivers). This will be especially true for monographs, the publishing cost for which now runs around $25,000 to $30,000 (for an average monograph of 250 pages with no illustrations) and would still be close to $20,000 to $25,000 if no printing were done or inventory maintained by the publisher. While inequities among users may be resolved by open-access publishing, they may resurface as inequities among authors.

2) Costs for scholarly communication overall will not change radically, but merely be shifted from one sector of the university to another. For university presses and scholarly societies currently, only 17% to 20% of the publishing costs of monographs are spent on manufacturing, so most of their other expenses will still need to be covered Even so, many end users will prefer to print out what they want to read, especially longer articles and books, using printing devices that are less economical than dedicated printing presses. Moreover, since traditional print publishing will not disappear overnight, there will be the continuing costs of maintaining that part of the system in addition to the new costs of supporting online publishing ventures. Finally, if faculty are asked themselves to become publishers, they will spend more of their time performing tasks for which they are not trained and less on the teaching and research for which they are, resulting in an overall loss in economic efficiency for the university as a whole.

3) Requirements for fully free-to-user open access publishing of journal articles, whether through the journals themselves or by way of open institutional repositories or authors’ self-archiving, will undermine existing well-regarded services like Project MUSE (the electronic database of more than 300 journals in the humanities and social sciences jointly operated by the library and press at Johns Hopkins) that rely on institutional site licensing to be sustained. BOAI-style open access is inherently incompatible with site licensing as a model for journal publishing and archiving.

4) In 2005, university presses recovered 90% of their operating costs, roughly $500 million, from sales. Of that $500 million, sales to libraries account for 15% to 20%, or $75 to $100 million. The rest comes from sales to general and college bookstores, to online retailers, and directly to individual scholars. Under free-to-user open access, universities that operate presses would need to be prepared to decide how much of the cost of maintaining the system they would want to continue bearing and how much they would expect other universities to absorb by providing full or partial faculty subsidies for publication of both journal articles and monographs. Any university opting for full support could expect its costs to rise dramatically. Conversely, if any parent university decided to maintain only its current support, other universities not now supporting the system, or doing so only through small and occasional subsidies for faculty publication, would also see their costs increase. Offsetting these costs would be whatever amounts their libraries would save in journal subscriptions and monograph purchases, but since commercial publishers (and many society publishers) would not have the option of converting to a full "subsidy economy," those amounts would be equivalent to only what libraries currently spend on university press publications.

5) If commercial publishers should decide to stop publishing research under the constrained circumstances envisioned by advocates of free-to-user open access, what happens to the journals abandoned by these publishers? How many of them could universities afford to subsidize through faculty grants? How much could universities with presses increase the output of their presses to accommodate the monographs now published commercially? The answers to these questions could involve significant new capital investments. In addition, the case of scholarly societies under BOAI-style open access is particularly worrying. As non-profit organizations committed to supporting effective scholarly communications and professional standards in their fields, these societies provide a wide range of services to scholars and scholarship, including annual conferences, professional development opportunities, recognition of scholarly excellence, and statistical information on such matters as enrollment and employment in their fields, as well as respected publishing programs. Whether a given society’s publishing activities underwrite other services or must be supported by other revenues, funding for essential professional and scholarly activities would be jeopardized by a mandated shift to free-to-user open access, increasing the financial burdens on individual scholars as both authors and professionals.

For university presses, unlike commercial and society publishers, open access does not necessarily pose a threat to their operation and their pursuit of the mission to "advance knowledge, and to diffuse it. . . far and wide." Presses can exist in a gift economy for at least the most scholarly of their publishing functions if costs are internally reallocated (from library purchases to faculty grants and press subsidies). But presses have increasingly been required by their parent universities to operate in the market economy, and the concern that presses have for the erosion of copyright protection directly reflects this pressure. Any decision to switch from a market to a gift economy requires very careful thought and planning. The AAUP and its member presses welcome the opportunity to collaborate with university administrators, librarians, and faculty in designing new publishing models, mindful that it is important to protect what is most valuable about the existing system, which has served the scholarly community and the general public so well for over a century, while undertaking reforms to make the system work better for everyone in the future.

Hard on the heels of the "Brussels Declaration on STM Publishing" by STM publishers, the Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science Coalition has issued a statement condemning the Federal Research Public Access Act and similar measures.

An excerpt from the press release follows:

"The long tradition of methodical scientific inquiry and information sharing through publication in scholarly journals has helped advance medicine to where it is today," said Martin Frank of the American Physiological Society and coordinator of the coalition. "We as independent publishers must determine when it is appropriate to make content freely available, and we believe strongly it should not be determined by government mandate."

The Coalition also reaffirmed its ongoing practice of making millions of scientific journal articles available free of charge, without an additional financial burden on the scientific community or on funding agencies. More than 1.6 million free articles are already available to the public free of charge on HighWire Press.

"The scholarly publishing system is a delicate balance between the need to sustain journals financially and the goal of disseminating scientific knowledge as widely as possible. Publishers have voluntarily made more journal articles available free worldwide than at any time in history — without government intervention," noted Kathleen Case of the American Association for Cancer Research.

The Coalition expressed concern that a mandatory timetable for free access to all federally funded research could harm journals, scientists, and ultimately the public. Subscriptions to journals with a high percentage of federally funded research would decline rapidly. Subscription revenues support the quality control system known as peer review and also support the educational work of scientific societies that publish journals.

Undermining subscriptions would shift the cost of publication from the publisher who receives subscription revenue to the researcher who receives grants. Such a shift could:

Divert scarce dollars from research. Publishers now pay the cost of publication out of subscription revenue; if the authors have to pay, the funds will come from their research grants. Nonprofit journals without subscription revenue would have to rely on the authors’ grant funds to cover publication costs, which would divert funding from research.

Result in only well-funded scientists being able to publish their work. The ability to publish in scientific journals should be available equally to all.

Reduce the ability of journals to fund peer review. Most journals spend 40% or more of their revenue on quality control through the peer review system; without subscription income and with limitations on author fees, peer review would suffer.

Harm those scientific societies that rely on income from journals to fund the professional development of scientists. Revenues from scholarly publications fund research, fellowships to junior scientists, continuing education, and mentoring programs to increase the number of women and under-represented groups in science, among many other activities.

Prominent open access advocates Stevan Harnad and Peter Suber have both critiqued the statement in detail.

The recent "Brussels Declaration on STM Publishing" by major scholarly publishers, such as Elsevier and Wiley, can be boiled down to: the scholarly publishing system ain’t broke, so don’t try to fix it. It provides an interesting contrast to the 2004 "Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science" by not-for-profit publishers, which outlined a variety of strategies for making content freely available.

Sadly, it suggests that the "Brussels Declaration" publishers fail to fully understand that the decades-old serials crisis has deeply alienated several generations of librarians, who are their primary customers. Publishers count on libraries being captive customers because scholarly publishing is monopolistic in nature (e.g., one journal article does not substitute for another article) and, consequently, demand is relatively inelastic, regardless of price. However, it is a rare business that thrives by alienating its customers. As the SPARC initiative and similar efforts illustrate, many librarians want to dramatically change the existing scholarly publishing system.

Driven by endless library serials cuts for journals in their disciplines, a growing belief that scholarly literature needs to be freely available for global scholarship to flourish, and excitement over the new potentials of digital publishing, scholars increasingly want to change the system as well. As has often been noted, the open access movement is not anti-publisher, but it is publisher-neutral, meaning that, as long as certain critical functions (such as peer review) are adequately performed, it does not matter how freely available scholarly works are published.

In my view, publishers add significant value to scholarly journals and other works. Some of these value-added functions are currently difficult to replicate; however, given technological advances in open-source digital publishing software, the number of these functions has been dwindling. A key question is: How long will it be before the most difficult production-oriented functions can be easily replicated, leaving non-technical functions, such as branding and prestige, to be dealt with? Another is: How long will it be before viable new modes of scholarly publishing, supported by open source software, are developed that compete with existing publishing models?

The clock is ticking. The more intransigent publishers are, the stronger the incentive for those who want change to improve open source publishing tools, to fund low-cost or open access publishing alternatives, to seek remedies from governments and other organizations that fund research, and to develop new modes of scholarly publishing.

Dialog, openness to new funding strategies and publishing practices, compromise, and imagination may serve publishers better in the long run than denial, rigidity, and attack. A more flexible outlook may reveal opportunities, not just dangers, in a scholarly publishing system in flux.