Open Access could spell end for journals
Harvard University has just announced that academics in their Faculty of Arts and Sciences have voted to henceforth make their [...]
Posted on April 2nd, 2008 by Steven Schwartz
Harvard University has just announced that academics in their Faculty of Arts and Sciences have voted to henceforth make their scholarly papers available free on the internet.
Academics will be able to make a case for an exemption, but the default position will be to make their articles freely available. It is the latest victory for what is known as the “Open Access” movement, which seeks to make research accessible by anyone.
In recent years, some research funding bodies have been requiring grant recipients to deposit their articles in accessible archives, but the Harvard faculty decision represents a quantum leap. For the first time, scholars in less developed countries, where the cost of journal subscriptions is prohibitive, will have inexpensive access to important research papers.
As you might expect, the commercial publishers of scholarly journals are not at all happy. Who will buy print journals (or subscribe to their electronic versions) if they could obtain the same articles for free?
Scholarly societies that rely on journal revenues for their budget will also complain. But they will be fighting a worldwide trend toward making research information more democratic.
Ironically, Open Access is taking place at the same time as the Australian government is proposing to use the number of times a journal article is cited as a measure of research excellence. By the time they get this process off the ground, journals may have disappeared altogether.
Disruptive technology and a move toward greater access have already hit music publishers, movie studios and newspapers. As their products become increasingly available free on the internet, their revenues are plummeting. Based on falling sales, the New Yorker magazine estimates that the last newspaper will be tossed into the rubbish in 2043. If more universities follow Harvard, scholarly journals may not even last half as long.
Comments
Open Access will not end refereed research journals, it will just optimise what was always their essential function. Professor Schwartz notes, correctly, that as self-archiving mandates of universities like Harvard and funders like NIH, become universal, they will make all 2.5 million articles published yearly in the world's 25,000 refereed research journal Open Access (OA). That means they will all be accessible free online to all would-be users worldwide, rather then just being accessible, as they are now now, to those users whose universities can afford to subscribe to the journal in which a given article happens to be published. But we already know that there is an alternative way to sustain journals if subscriptions become unsustainable: The cost-recovery model used by many of the over 3000 OA journals that already exist: Apart from the majority of OA journals that are either subsidized or continue to be sustained by subscriptions to their print editions, the top OA journals (such as the Public Library of Science journals, the BioMed Central journals, and the Hindawi journals) recover their costs by charging the author-institution per article published, rather than by charging the user-institution per journal subscribed to. The OA journal cost-recovery model is a luxury rather than an economy today, when 90% of journals are still sustained by institutional subscriptions. But if -- once OA self-archiving mandates like Harvard's and NIH's spread worldwide -- institutions cancel their journals till the subscription model becomes unsustainable, journals will simply (1) cut obsolete costs (like printing, PDF production, and distribution), (2) offload all access-provision and archiving functions onto the worldwide network of OA institutional repositories (in which the OA mandates have ensured that the authors' OA versions are deposited), and (3) downsize to provide their one permanent essential service, which is to implement peer review. (The peers themselves review for free, as now.) Journals' much reduced costs per article for providing the peer review service alone will easily be covered out of just a small portion of institutions' annual windfall savings from having cancelled all their journal subscriptions. This does not mean the end of refereed research journals. It means the end of a print-based cost-recovery model that never fit this special kind of literature -- written by researchers, for researchers, not for royalty income but for research impact, as measured by the many new research impact metrics that the UK and Australia will be using to assess and reward research productivity and impact in the online age, such as downloads and citations. OA will maximise research access, uptake, usage and impact, at the same time as providing powerful new ways to monitor, measure and manage it. - Stevan Harnad Brody, T., Carr, L., Gingras, Y., Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web: Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics. CTWatch Quarterly 3(3). http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/14418/ Shadbolt, N., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2006) The Open Research Web: A Preview of the Optimal and the Inevitable, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects. Chandos. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12453/
Stevan Harnad - April 2, 2008
Stevan, Thank you. Cogent, logical and lucid.However I am troubled by what seems too good to be true.I hope you are right but... GP.
George Parsons - April 4, 2008
Stevan, Thank you. Cogent, logical and lucid.However I am troubled by what seems too good to be true.I hope you are right but... GP.
George Parsons - April 4, 2008