OA advocate Stevan Harnad withdraws support for RCUK policy

When on July 16^th Research Councils UK (RCUK) published its updated Policy on Access to Research Outputs the Open Access (OA) movement greeted the news with enthusiasm. This was hardly surprising: unlike the recommendations in the controversial Finch Report (published a month earlier), RCUK stressed that it continues to view both gold OA publishing and green OA self-archiving as equal partners in any OA policy.

Stevan Harnad

Gold and green are the two strategies outlined eight years ago when the OA movement was born, and are viewed as being essential components of any successful transition to OA.

By contrast, Finch concluded that the main vehicle should now be gold OA, either via pure open access journals or via hybrid journals, and that this should be funded by article processing charges (APCs).

At the same time, Finch argued, it was time to downgrade green OA, and reduce the role of institutional repositories to merely, "providing access to research data and to grey literature" and assisting in digital preservation. 

Set alongside the Finch proposals, OA advocates quickly concluded that RCUK’s policy was a godsend.

One of the first to applaud the new policy was long-standing OA advocate, and self-styled archivangelist, Stevan Harnad. The minute the report was published a relieved Harnad began flooding mailing lists with messages congratulating RCUK on coming up with a policy that not only defied Finch, but was stronger than its current OA policy. 

But as Harnad set about talking up the policy, and seeking to win over sceptics and doubters, he himself began to have doubts. And eventually he was driven to the conclusion that he had no option but to withdraw his support for the RCUK policy — which he now characterises as “autistic”, and a “foolish, wasteful and counterproductive step backwards”.

How has what at first sight seemed so desirable rapidly become something terrible? Curious to find out, I contacted Harnad. Below I publish the email interview that emerged from our conversation.

The OA Interviews: Martin Hall, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Salford, and member of the Finch Committee on OA

The past month has seen a flurry of activity in the Open Access (OA) space, most of it focused on the UK.

Martin Hall, Vice-Chancellor, University of Salford

Events were triggered by the publication on 18^th June of the eagerly awaited Finch Report. Chaired by Dame Janet Finch, a sociologist at the University of Manchester, the Finch Committee was set up last year by the UK Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts, who asked it to consider how access to research could be expanded in the UK.

As I noted last week, the Committee concluded that a clear policy direction should be set towards supporting publication in gold OA or hybrid journals, funded by APCs, as the main vehicle for the publication of research.

To understand the reaction that the Committee’s proposals have received from some in the research community we need to remember that when the OA movement was born — with the 2004 Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) — two complementary strategies were agreed: BOAI-1 and BOAI-2, now more usually referred to as green OA (self-archiving) and gold OA (OA journals).

Gold OA generally implies that instead of charging readers to access scholarly journals (by means of subscriptions), publishers charge authors, or their funders or institutions, to publish their papers (via an article-processing charge, or APC). This allows publishers to make research papers immediately and freely available on the Internet.

With green OA, researchers continue to publish in subscription journals (without payment), but also self-archive their papers in their institutional repository, usually after an embargo period. This approach means that researchers can make their papers freely available themselves.

What was radical (and surprising) about the Finch Report was that it proposed abandoning BOAI’s double-pronged strategy in favour of an exclusively gold approach. As such, it downgraded green OA and institutional repositories to bit players merely, “providing access to research data and to grey literature” and assisting in digital preservation.

Where self-archiving did continue to take place, Finch suggested, it would be unfair on publishers if the papers they published were self-archived before a 12-month embargo had elapsed (except where the publisher provided no mechanism to pay for gold OA).

Protest

The report sparked a firestorm of protest, with many researchers bridling at the thought of having to pay to publish all their papers, and green OA advocates expressing dismay that all the time and hard work that had been put into building a network of institutional repositories, had been so casually dismissed.

It did not help that Finch estimated its proposals would cost the UK research community an additional £50-60 million a year. Since in the current economic climate there is no hope of receiving additional funding from the UK government, universities would have to find these extra costs from their existing budgets. 

Moreover, as the cost burden would primarily fall on the Russell Group universities, the Report has proved somewhat divisive.

David Price, Vice-Provost (Research), University College London (UCL), has been particularly critical. “The result of the Finch recommendations would be to cripple university systems with extra expense,” he said to me on the day the report was published. “Finch is certainly a cure to the problem of access, but is it not a cure which is actually worse than the disease?”

Discontent was fuelled further by the publication on July 5^th of a report commissioned by the UK Open Access Implementation Group (OAIG). This revealed that green OA could provide a much more cost-effective route to OA than gold. Specifically, the report concluded, if the UK undertook a unilateral move to gold OA the cost to large research intensive institutions (i.e. Russell Group universities) would be about £1.7 million a year. A unilateral move to green OA, by contrast, would cost them only around £100,000 a year.

These turbulent waters were further muddied on July 16^th, when Research Councils UK (RCUK) announced its new OA policy. RCUK had ignored the Finch recommendations, reinstating green OA as an equal partner to gold, and insisting that publishers be given no more than a 6-month embargo (except for humanities and social science papers).

In fact, suggested OA advocate Peter Suber, the RCUK policy reverses Finch, favouring green over gold. And where RCUK makes clear what CC licences should be used, Suber added, Finch is vague “about what license to require (or what reuse rights to demand) when taxpayers pay the costs of publication.”

To add to the drama, RCUK’s new policy was published just hours before David Willetts announced his acceptance of all the Finch proposals, bar one on VAT rates for e-journals. Unsurprisingly perhaps, OA advocates concluded that the timing was no accident.

Then to cap it all, the next day (17^th July) the European Commission issued a Communication proposing a Europe-wide OA strategy that essentially mimics the RCUK policy.

The Finch Report and its implications for the developing world

There are two routes to Open Access. With gold OA, publishers cease to charge readers to access scholarly journals (in the form of subscriptions), but instead charge authors, or their funders or institutions, to publish their papers (by means of an article-processing charge, or APC). This allows publishers to make research papers freely available on the Internet.

With green OA, researchers continue to publish in subscription journals (without payment), but then self-archive their papers in their institutional repository, usually after an embargo period. In this way, researchers can make their papers freely available themselves.

Over the years there has been much debate as to which is the better method for achieving OA, but no consensus has ever been reached. In the past month, however, a number of developments have served to focus minds on the respective merits of green and gold as never before.

It began with the publication on 18th June of the Finch Report. Chaired by Dame Janet Finch, a sociologist at the University of Manchester, the Finch Committee was formed last year by the UK Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts, and asked to consider how access to research could be expanded.

Clear policy direction

After giving the matter due consideration, the Finch Committee concluded that a clear policy direction should be set towards supporting publication in open access or hybrid journals, funded by APCs, as the main vehicle for the publication of research, especially where the research has been publicly funded.

In other words, Finch recommended that gold OA should be viewed as the norm for publishing research papers.

By contrast, Finch recommended that the institutional repository (i.e. green OA) should be relegated to the role of bit player, merely “providing access to research data and to grey literature” and assisting in digital preservation. Where self-archiving does take place, Finch suggested, it would be unreasonable to allow papers to be deposited before an embargo period of at least 12 months had passed (except where publishers do not offer a mechanism to pay for OA gold).

The Finch report ignited a firestorm of protest, not least because it estimated that its recommendations would cost the UK research community an additional £50-60 million a year. Since it was clear that there would be no additional funding from the UK government, this meant that universities would have to find the additional money from existing budgets.

University College London (UCL) Vice-Provost (Research) David Price concluded, “The result of the Finch recommendations would be to cripple university systems with extra expense. Finch is certainly a cure to the problem of access, but is it not a cure which is actually worse than the disease?”

Serving to spur on the complaints, a few weeks later a report commissioned by the UK Open Access Implementation Group (OAIG) concluded that green OA offered a much more cost-effective route. Specifically, OAIG said, where a unilateral move to gold OA in the UK would cost large research intensive institutions about £1.7 million a year, a unilateral move to green OA would cost only around £100,000 a year.

In this light, it is perhaps unsurprising that when on July 16th Research Councils UK (RCUK) announced its new OA policy, it reinstated green OA as an equal partner to gold, and insisted on no more than a 6-month embargo (except for humanities and social science papers), apparently ignoring many of the Finch recommendations.

RCUK’s new policy, we should note, was published just hours before David Willetts announced that he was accepting all the Finch proposals, bar one on VAT rates for e-journals.

The very next day (yesterday) the EC issued a Communication on providing better access to scientific information in which it proposed an OA policy that mimics the RCUK policy.

No easy task

Where this leaves the Finch recommendations remains unclear. What is clear, however, is that adopting a national OA policy in a research environment that is truly global is no easy task — particularly where gold OA is viewed as the main vehicle for achieving OA.

As Graham Taylor of the UK Publishers Association pointed out to me recently, “6% of global research outputs derive from the UK, but if that is funded by APCs then the UK alone must cover that cost, which was previously spread over global subscriptions.”

However, there is perhaps a more important issue at stake here. In assuming that OA could or should be approached in a purely national way, the Finch Report failed to see (or simply ignored) the implications of establishing a model for OA that would inevitably have serious negative implications for researchers in more financially constrained parts of the world.

For years now scientists in the developing world have been locked out of much of the world’s research, simply because the very high costs of journal subscriptions means that their institutions are unable to afford to buy access to most science journals.

To replace that with an author-pays OA model would simply replace one problem with another, and possibly a more serious problem at that.

Thus where today researchers in the developing world are unable to read much published research, gold OA will surely prevent many of them from being able to publish their own research — threatening to turn them into passive witnesses to the development of science, not active players. After all, if UCL is wondering how it can afford to pay for gold OA, how on earth could impoverished research institutions in the developing world hope to pay the necessary charges for their researchers to publish their papers were gold OA to become the norm?

In this light, Finch’s one-dimensional approach to OA appears most unfortunate. And it is no surprise that many OA advocates have welcomed the more balanced approach adopted by RCUK and the EC.

Who better to explain the problems that Finch poses for the developing world than the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (EPT) — a charity whose mission it is to support the electronic publication of reviewed bioscience journals from countries experiencing difficulties with traditional publication, and which promotes open access initiatives in the developing world.

Below I republish EPT’s formal response to the Finch report, which was signed by EPT chairman Professor Derek Law.

The OA Interviews: Jeffrey Beall, University of Colorado Denver

In 2004 the scholarly publisher Elsevier made a written submission to the UK House of Commons Science & Technology Committee. Elsevier asserted that the traditional model used to publish research papers — where readers, and institutions like libraries, pay the costs of producing scholarly journals through subscriptions — “ensures high quality, independent peer review and prevents commercial interests from influencing decisions to publish.”

Jeffrey Beall

Elsevier added that moving to the Open Access (OA) publishing model — where authors, or their sponsoring institutions, paid to publish research papers by means of an article-processing charge (APC) — would remove “this critical control measure” from scholarly publishing.

The problem with adopting the gold OA model, explained Elsevier, is that publishers' revenues would then be driven entirely by the number of articles published. As such, OA publishers would be “under continual pressure to increase output, potentially at the expense of quality.”

This is no longer a viewpoint that Elsevier promulgates. Speaking to me earlier this year, for instance, Elsevier’s Director of Universal Access Alicia Wise said, “Today open access journals do generally contain high-quality peer reviewed content, but in 2004 this was unfortunately not always the case.”

She added, “Good work in this area by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) has helped to establish quality standards for open access publications. For several years now Elsevier has taken a positive test-and-learn approach to open access and believes that open access publishing can be both of a high quality and sustainable.”

Prescient

While many OA publishers today are undeniably as committed to the production of high-quality papers as subscription publishers ever were, Elsevier’s 2004 warning was nevertheless prescient.

No one knows this better than Jeffrey Beall, a metadata librarian at the University of Colorado Denver. Beall maintains a list of what he calls “predatory publishers”. That is, publishers who, as Beall puts it, “unprofessionally exploit the gold open-access model for their own profit.” Amongst other things, this can mean that papers are subjected to little or no peer review before they are published.

Currently, Beall’s blog list of “predatory publishers” lists over 100 separate companies, and 38 independent journals. And the list is growing by 3 to 4 new publishers each week.

Beall’s opening salvo against predatory publishers came in 2009, when he published a review of the OA publisher Bentham Open for The CharlestonAdvisor. Since then, he has written further articles on the topic (e.g. here), and has been featured twice in The Chronicle of Higher Education (here and here).

His work on predatory publishers has caused Beall to become seriously concerned about the risks attached to gold OA. And he is surprised at how little attention these risks get from the research community. As he puts it, “I am dismayed that most discussions of gold open-access fail to include the quality problems I have documented. Too many OA commenters look only at the theory and ignore the practice. We must ‘maintain the integrity of the academic record’, and I am doubtful that gold open-access is the best long-term way to accomplish that.”

When presented with evidence of predatory publishing, OA advocates often respond by saying that most OA journals do not actually charge a processing fee. 

But as commercial subscription publishers increasingly enter the OA market it would be naïve to think that the number of journals that charge APCs will not grow exponentially in the coming years.

Whether this will lead to an overall increase in quality remains to be seen. It must be hoped that as more and more traditional journals embrace OA, so quality levels will rise, and predatory publishers will begin to be squeezed out. 

However, if Beall’s growing list is anything to go by, the omens are not currently very good. Moreover, if it turns out that there is indeed an inherent flaw in the gold OA model — as Elsevier once claimed — then the research community would appear to have a long-term problem.

The OA Interviews: Audrey McCulloch, ALPSP Chief Executive

On 1^st June, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), along with the Publishers Association (PA), distributed a press release advertising the results of a survey that had recently been commissioned. 

Audrey McCulloch

The objective of the survey had been to estimate the likely impact of making journals freely available after a six-month embargo — as many advocates of Green Open Access (OA) have been proposing.

The results of the survey, the press release said, suggest that a six-month embargo would cause  research libraries to cancel 65% of their Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences journals and 44% of their Scientific, Technical and Medical journal subscriptions. “ALPSP is very concerned about the effect this may have on non-profit publishers, many of whom may not survive,” commented ALPSP’s Chief Executive Audrey McCulloch.

The press release indicated that the report had been prepared by Linda Bennett of Gold Leaf. 

Below is an email Q&A I had with McCulloch about the survey, and the report.

Survey

RP: I have a number of questions about the ALPSP survey undertaken in May 2012. I understand this was done by someone called Linda Bennett of Gold Leaf.

AM: Please let me have your questions. I’d be happy to help you where I am able.

RP: Can you say who or what Gold Leaf is, who Linda Bennett is, and why she was commissioned to do the 2012 survey? Was the work put out to competitive tender and she submitted the best proposal, or what?

AM: Goldleaf is the name of Linda Bennett’s consultancy. The survey started life as a question I wanted to know the answer to and wished to speak to a small number of librarians about. Linda works regularly with librarian groups so I contacted her to ask a UK sample of librarians the simple question you see in the full survey. 

The responses that Linda received were concerning and I then wondered if this was peculiar to a small UK subset or if they were reflected in the wider library community.

RP: I believe the survey was jointly commissioned by the ALPSP and the Publishers Association? Was the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC) involved in any way?

AM: ALPSP and the PA together decided to extend the scope of the limited survey. PRC was aware but was not involved.

In order to ensure that we could compare the results of the wider survey with the responses from the original survey, the PA and ALPSP asked Linda to send out the same question as before but to a global sample of librarians.

RP: Bennett is herself Chair of the ALPSP research committee is she not?

AM: In both the original and wider survey, Linda clearly declared her position as Chair of the ALPSP research committee.

RP: To those she contacted yes. I believe Bennett is also the ALPSP representative on the steering group of the PRC, a publishers’ organisation. And she describes herself on the Book Fair web site as a field reporter for the PA. I am wondering whether — given the sensitivity of the issues surrounding self-archiving and Green OA, and the way the results of the survey have been used to promote the cause of the publishing industry — it might not have been better to hand the initial work that Linda had done over to an independent consultant, and to have commissioned them to do the follow-up study?

AM: The responses to the survey speak for themselves and are presented as an opinion piece. Linda was not commissioned to interpret the responses, only to report the answers to the question. The PA pays Linda as a field reporter for selected events, but this does not make her an employee of the PA and as an independent consultant she works for many other organisations. 

We commissioned Linda because she has practical experience in conducting surveys. But the nature of the survey makes the contractor irrelevant. Using someone else would not have influenced the result.

I have also mentioned in our exchanges several times that I represent ALPSP on the PRC Steering Committee. Linda is an invited attendee.

The OA Interviews: Keith Jeffery, UK Science & Technology Facilities Council

Keith Jeffery has been developing ICT solutions to “support, enhance and assist in research and the management of research” since the 1960s. It is this mission that lies at the heart of his current post as Director of IT and International Strategy at the UK Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC).

Keith Jeffery

Jeffery’s extensive knowledge and experience of how IT systems can be used to assist in the research process has also earned him a place at the table of the research outputs committee of Research Councils UK (RCUK), the umbrella body for the seven UK research councils. There he serves as a special “expert” member of the committee.

In light of his professional interests, it is no surprise that Jeffery is a keen advocate for Open Access (OA). OA, after all, assumes a world in which research is made freely and immediately available on the Web, not locked behind a paywall — and thus available only to those who can afford access.

But Jeffery is not an undiscriminating advocate for OA. He has firm views not just on its benefits, but also on how it can best be realised. Specifically, he is convinced that Gold OA — where authors pay to publish their papers in OA journals — risks taking the research community down a very expensive, unproductive and risky cul-de-sac.

A far more fruitful and rational approach, he suggests, is to push for Green OA, where researchers continue to publish in subscription journals and then self-archive copies of their papers in their institutional repositories.

As he puts it, “I am firmly pro-Green Libre, anti-Gold and very anti-Hybrid … My arguments against Gold relate predominantly to its cost, coverage, access, and the way it encourages vanity publishing.” 

Next logical stage

Only Green OA, he adds, can usher in the next logical stage in the development of scholarly communication, which Jeffery characterises as “hyperlinked multimedia and Web 2.0”.

Importantly, he says, by exploiting institutional repositories, research organisations can ensure that their intellectual property is “in a place where it is surrounded by additional relevant information”.  Moreover, when it is located directly in the institution, the information can be “managed and curated more appropriately, and within the research business processes of the organisation.”

With exactly this vision in mind, Jeffery has devoted a lot of time and effort (as lead architect) to developing a new information format able to implement his vision — an information standard known as the Common European Research Information Format, or CERIF.

CERIF, an EU Recommendation to member states now used in 42 countries, allows the use of rich metadata. This provides greatly improved retrieval capabilities, and enables institutions to create linkages between all relevant data — not just research papers, but information about the authors, research datasets and software, funding information, project information, experiments, and even data on the facilities and equipment used by researchers.

Given his belief that Green OA based on a network of sophisticated institutional repositories offers the most cost-effective and rapid migration path from print to electronic for scholarly communication, we should not be surprised that Jeffery is disappointed with the recommendations made in the recently published Finch Report.

Headed up by Dame Janet Finch, the Finch Committee was set up last year by UK Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts, and tasked with establishing how access to research can be expanded. 

Retrograde step

When it published its Report in June, the Finch Committee recommended that the research community single-mindedly pursue the gold route to OA, with institutional repositories consigned to bit players as access providers for data and grey literature, and as preservation tools.

Jeffery believes the RCUK will now be obliged to follow the Finch recommendations. This would be a retrograde step: earlier this year RCUK — which has had an OA policy since 2006 — released the draft text of a new, stronger OA policy. Amongst other things, this made a commitment to Libre OA and proposed that the Research Councils stipulate an embargo period of no more than 6 months (except in the case of humanities and social sciences).

By contrast, the Finch Report argues that it would be “unreasonable” to require embargo periods of less than twelve months.

And while Finch encourages non-commercial re-use, there is no similarly explicit support for full CC-BY licencing. As such, it will not facilitate the unrestricted re-use of articles, including text mining, which Jeffery believes to be an essential component of OA.

“[A]s an employee of a Research Council, I am obliged to support Finch, although privately I have grave misgivings,” he says.

Jeffery expands on his work, and his disappointment with the Finch Report, in more detail below.