Пока рак на
горе не свистнет, мужик не перекрестится
 |
| Mikhail Sergeev |
While open access was not conceivable
until the emergence of the Internet (and thus could be viewed as just a natural
development of the network) the “OA movement” primarily grew out of a conviction
that scholarly publishers have been exploiting the research community, not
least by constantly increasing journal subscriptions. It was for this reason
that the movement was initially driven by librarians.
OA advocates reasoned that while the
research community freely contributes the content in scholarly journals, and
freely peer reviews that content, publishers then sell it back to research
institutions at ever more extortionate prices, at levels in fact that have made
it increasingly difficult for research institutions to provide faculty members with
access to all the research they need to do their jobs.
What was required, it was concluded,
was for subscription paywalls to be dismantled so that anyone can access all the
research they need — i.e. open access. In the process, argued OA advocates, the
ability of publishers to overcharge would be removed, and the cost of scholarly
publishing would come down accordingly.
But while the movement has persuaded
many governments, funders and research institutions that open access is both inevitable
and optimal, and should therefore increasingly be made compulsory, publishers have
shown themselves to be extremely adept at appropriating OA for their own ends,
not least by simply swapping subscription fees for article-processing charges
(APCs) without realising any savings for the research community.
This is all too evident in Europe
right now. In the UK, for
instance, government policy is enabling legacy publishers to migrate to an open
access environment with their high profits intact. Indeed, not only are costs
not coming down but — as subscription publishers introduce hybrid OA options that
enable them to earn both APCs and subscriptions from the same journals (i.e. to
“double-dip”) — they are
increasing.
Meanwhile, in The Netherlands
universities are signing new-style Big Deals that
combine both subscription and OA fees. While these are intended to manage the
transition to OA in a cost-efficient way, publishers are clearly ensuring that
they experience no loss of revenue as a result (although we cannot state that
as a fact since the contracts are subject to non-disclosure clauses).
More recently, the German funder Max Planck has begun a campaign intended to
engineer a mass “flipping” of legacy journals to OA business models. Again, we
can be confident that publishers will not co-operate with any such plan unless they
are able to retain their current profit levels.
It is no surprise, therefore, that many
OA advocates have become concerned that the OA project has gone awry.
Alternative models
As the implications of this have
sunk in there has been growing interest in alternative publishing models, particularly
ones that hold out the promise of disintermediating legacy publishers.
So, for instance, we are seeing the
creation of “overlay journals”, and other
new publishing initiatives in which the whole process is managed and controlled
by the research community itself. Examples of the latter include the use of institutional repositories
as publishing platforms, and the founding of new OA university
presses like Collabra and Lever Press.
Others have cast their eyes to the
Global South (where the affordability problem is both more longstanding and far
more acute) for possible alternative models. In doing so, they frequently point
to Latin American initiatives like SciELO and Redalyc. (See, for instance, here, here, and here).
Both these services started out as regional
bibliographic databases, but over time have added more and more freely-available
full-text journal content. Today SciELO hosts 573,525 research articles from 1,249
journals. Redalyc has more than 425,000 full-text articles from over 1,000
journals.
But does Western Europe need to look
as far afield as Latin America for this kind of model? The Moscow-based CyberLeninka, for
instance, reports that it currently hosts 940,000 papers from 990 journals, all
of which are open access, and approximately 70% of which are available under a
CC BY licence. Moreover, it has amassed this content in just three years.
Significantly, it has achieved this
without the support of either the Russian government, or any private venture
capital, as CyberLeninka’s Chief Strategy Officer Mikhail Sergeev explains in
the Q&A below. The service was created, and is maintained, by five people working
from home. Their goal: to create a prototype for a Russian open science
infrastructure.
What struck me in speaking to Sergeev is that many of the
problems the Russian research community faces today are strikingly similar to
those facing the research community everywhere, if somewhat more extreme in both
scope and effect. So could CyberLeninka be developing solutions that the West
could learn from?
On one hand it would seem not, since
CyberLeninka does not currently have a business model, and so no income. It is
also not entirely clear to me how the 990 journals it hosts fund and manage
themselves. One would also want to know more about the quality and topicality of
the 940,000 papers on the service. What is
clear is that the most prestigious Russian journals are not freely available
today. We in the West can certainly identify
with that problem.
On the other hand, to focus on business models alone is perhaps to miss the
point. Surely the Russian government should be funding CyberLeninka, and surely it should be seeking to get the
prestigious journals published by the Russian Academy of Sciences on
CyberLeninka too? Admittedly the latter could present challenges as the
journals were in, effect, (and mistakenly) “privatised” in the 1990s. But that does not
mean it should not happen.
The point to bear in mind is that
the OA strategies currently being
pursued in the West appear to be no more sustainable than the subscription
system. Better solutions are therefore needed, and so the more experimentation
the better.
And remember, CyberLeninka says it has achieved what it has achieved
with no source of revenue. Moreover, in the process of loading journals on its
system it is making them OA — without the
costs normally associated with journal “flipping”. That should focus minds on
the cost of scholarly publishing.
In the meantime, of course, CyberLeninka
continues to face a serious financial challenge. If
it is to prosper, and to embark on
the many new initiatives it has set its sights on — including developing overlay
journals and offering other repository-based publishing services — some source of funding will be essential.
####
If you wish to read the
interview with Mikhail Sergeev, please click on the link below.
I am publishing the interview
under a Creative Commons licence, so you are free to copy and distribute it as
you wish, so long as you credit me as the author, do not alter or transform the
text, and do not use it for any commercial purpose.
To read the interview (as a PDF file)
click HERE.
No comments:
Post a Comment