The Cash Cow Has Left the Room | Peer to Peer Review
What will it take for publishers to wake up to our reality? Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN Jan 13, 2011| Photo by Debora Miller |
This past year has seen some real progress on the open access front, as measured by Heather Morrison at the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics. There are now nearly 6000 titles in the Directory of Open Access Journals, with 1,401 added in 2010. More journals participate in PubMed Central, and 83 new open access mandate policies were passed, bringing the total to 261. This feels like momentum.
Yet publishers still try to persuade the world that libraries are perfectly capable of providing their users with all the published research they might need. There's nothing wrong with the status quo, publishing officials told Congress when they testified against the Federal Research Public Access Act, a bill which would expand the open access deposit requirements of the National Institutes of Health to other federal agencies that fund basic research. "Why fix something that isn't broken? Trust us, the system works just fine."
I figured that was just a shameless performance for Congress, whose members don't know better. I guess I was wrong; they really think there is no problem.
Don't worry, be happy
Steven Bell, as kept up as always, just pointed me toward an extraordinary article in the January 2011 issue of Information Today. (It is not available online as yet, though it looks as if there will be an expanded version on the website in due course.) It's an interview with Derek Haank, former chairman of Elsevier Science and current head of Springer. He brings good news: that serials crisis we used to have? Relax, that ended years ago. He explains "there was once a serial pricing problem. But it was the Big Deal that solved it."
I'm not making this up. According to Haank, the Big Deal enabled libraries to "get back all the journals they had had to cancel, and they gained access to even more journals in the process." And because electronic publishing saves the publisher money, that means the Big Deal is affordable. Who knew?
Moreover, since the end of the serials crisis, publishers like Springer are now able to publish more without increasing prices the way they used to, at rates far higher than inflation. "Those days are long gone, and I strongly feel that our products now offer value for the money." How reassuring. Too bad I don't have the money it takes to find out. (And did anyone check in with us before deciding we were going to finance publishing more material? No, I didn't think so.)
No problem!
Haank says he's not concerned by the OA movement. With the acquisition of BioMed Central in 2008, Springer claimed a major stake in author-pays OA, but from this executive's perspective, it's a revenue stream, not a movement, and it's more of a trickle than the wave of the future. "OA is just a business model," he says, a new but small revenue stream funded by the odd eccentric who has leapt on the bandwagon. His company is moving (as many publishers are) to offering authors the chance to buy their research's freedom for a few thousand dollars per article, costs that will probably be passed on to the taxpayer. But he doubts many scientists will bother. "The reality is that (outside the biomedical field) most people just don't see a sufficient problem for OA to become a big movement," he says.
I'm pretty sure he's not including librarians in this depiction of "reality"—we're just the intermediary, and our opinion isn't relevant. Growth is inevitable. There will always be an increasing amount of scientific research to publish, more research that scientists will have to consult, and libraries will simply have to magically come up with the funds to make it happen. "Our first priority" he says "is to continue as we are."
There is one scenario that does make him a little less sanguine. He doesn't mind if the occasional author self-archives an article; not enough people can be bothered to do it, and they are inconvenient enough to locate that it shouldn't upset Springer's business model. Well-organized mandates, however, such as grantee requirements set by the National Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust, are troubling. He say, "there is a real danger of destroying the equilibrium that we have achieved over OA." The equilibrium he's talking about is continuing to reap most of their profits from library subscriptions, adding a new revenue trickle as a tiny minority of scientists purchase freedom for their ideas, and a smidgen of green OA, provided it remains largely ineffective. Oh, some libraries may be forced to cut back on subscriptions, he acknowledges, but publishers will make up the difference by selling direct to unaffiliated researchers who, in the days of print, were an untapped market.
Making change
Jonathan Miller, library director at Rollins College, has just contributed an essay to the Scholarly Communication column in College & Research Libraries News describing how and why his liberal arts college adopted an OA mandate (the third to do so, following in the footsteps of Trinity University in San Antonio and Oberlin College). He writes:
Our OA policy is one part of a larger strategy to refocus the faculty and students on a larger world of information and not solely a local library collection. With the enthusiastic support of many faculty, we have repositioned the library as one (we hope important) node in an information network that requires ever closer cooperation and collaboration with other libraries and information providers and which includes local print and digital collections, licensed access to a lot more, and open access to even more scholarly and nonscholarly information. In this model the librarians are the faculty and students' guides and partners in a larger, richer, but more complicated information environment.
None of us can be complacent and assume that someone else will figure out how to make this open access thing work. We can't continue to pinch pennies and hope that somehow we'll be able to meet the research needs of our students and faculty through nips and tucks and a wish that things will get better. All of us need to play a role in creating a sustainable future for knowledge, no matter how small or underfunded we are.
Because however invisible it is to publishers, the system is broken—and the only way we will fix it is to make sure the open access movement is a force to be reckoned with.
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), was published last year by Minotaur Books.
