Scholarly Publishing: Where is Plan B?

To the intense joy of Open Access (OA) advocates, Elsevier announced Monday that it has withdrawn its support for the controversial US Research Works Act (RWA). Shortly afterwards, it was reported that the two sponsors of the bill — Representatives Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) — would not be “taking legislative action” on the RWA. In short, the bill is now dead on its feet.

One person who took particular note of the news was Claudio Aspesi, a senior research analyst at the sell-side research firm Sanford Bernstein. Aspesi tracks Elsevier for investors, so on Tuesday he published a new report on the company. While welcoming Elsevier's decision, Aspesi concluded, “Consensus is still treating Elsevier’s problems as cyclical, in spite of the rising evidence the issues are deeper”. So when I received a copy of the report I took it as a sign that it was time to re-interview Aspesi. The interview follows my own thoughts on the current situation below.

Claudio Aspesi

The RWA was introduced into the House of Representatives at the end of last year. Had it become law, the bill would have reversed the 2005 National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy requiring that taxpayer-funded research is made freely accessible online within 12 months of publication. It would also have prevented other federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on their funded researchers.

In short, the RWA would have been a serious setback for the OA movement. But the danger has been averted.

Sadly for Elsevier, however, its flirtation with the RWA appears to have wreaked havoc on its relationship with the research community. The blogosphere has been alive with criticism of the publisher, several petitions were launched to stop the bill and, most damagingly, in January a blog post by highly regarded Cambridge University mathematician Timothy Gowers sparked a boycott of the company, with thousands of researchers pledging that henceforth they will not publish in, or referee and/or perform editorial services for any Elsevier journals.

It is important to note, however, that this anger was not just over Elsevier’s support for the RWA. It was soon apparent that researchers have a number of historic grievances against the company, grievances that were reawakened by its support for the bill.

The boycott site (Cost of Knowledge) lists a number of these grievances, including the complaint that Elsevier charges “exorbitantly high prices” and that it has used the Big Deal (aka journal bundling) as a way of forcing librarians to “agree to buy very large ‘bundles’” of journals, including “many journals that those libraries do not actually want.”

As such, the danger is that having opened Pandora’s Box, Elsevier may not be able to close it again, and its retreat from the RWA may fail to stem the tide of researchers joining the boycott. At the time of writing, the number who had pledged to shun the publisher had grown to 7,690, and continues to grow by the hour.

Given the PR crisis it sparked, and the embarrassing climb-down that Elsevier has had to make, one is bound to wonder why the publisher ever supported the RWA in the first place.

Ask Elsevier why and it will tell you that self-archiving mandates like the NIH policy represent an unfair threat to its business — by depriving it of vital subscription revenue it needs to fund the publishing of research papers. It also claims that the NIH policy amounts to unwarranted government interference in the market.

But is it true that self-archiving mandates inevitably cause libraries to cancel subscriptions, as Elsevier claims? This is far from self-evident.

Elsevier steps away from Research Works Act

Elsevier has today posted a statement on its web site indicating that it no longer supports the Research Works Act (RWA). 

Michael Eisen design

The news follows an outcry against the publisher for supporting the bill, and the launch of a site encouraging researchers to commit to boycott Elsevier. Currently the number of researchers who have signed on to the boycott is approaching 7,500.

I attach some excerpts from Elsevier's statement below:

At Elsevier, we have always focused on serving the global research community and ensuring the best possible access to research publications and data. In recent weeks, our support for the Research Works Act has caused some in the community to question that commitment.

We have heard expressions of support from publishers and scholarly societies for the principle behind the legislation. However, we have also heard from some Elsevier journal authors, editors and reviewers who were concerned that the Act seemed inconsistent with Elsevier’s long-standing support for expanding options for free and low-cost public access to scholarly literature. That was certainly not our intention in supporting it. This perception runs counter to our commitment to making published research widely accessible, coming at a time when we continue to expand our access options for authors and develop advanced technologies to enable the sharing and distribution of research results.
... 

While we continue to oppose government mandates in this area, Elsevier is withdrawing support for the Research Work Act itself. We hope this will address some of the concerns expressed and help create a less heated and more productive climate for our ongoing discussions with research funders.
... 

"We are ready and willing to work constructively and cooperatively to continue to promote free and low-cost public access through a variety of means, as we have with research funders and other partners around the world.

The full statement can be read here.

UPDATE: Elsevier has today also published a Letter to the Mathematics Community. Amongst other things, this addresses the issues of pricing, open access and the RWA.

FURTHER UPDATE: Elsevier's vice president marketing communications Chrysanne Lowe has posted a message to the library community on the Liblicense mailing list.

The message confirms that Elsevier has withdrawn its support for the RWA, and ends, "We recognize that the recent legislative debate is far from the only issue at hand. We acknowledge that, as the largest of the commercial publishers, we take a sizable share of your serials budget. However, relative to our competitors, we are also confident that we deliver a significant share of value in terms of articles, usage, citations, and improved research productivity."

FURTHER UPDATE:  Alexander Howard reports that he has received a joint statement from the sponsors of the RWA -- Reps. Darrell Issa and Carolyn B. Maloney -- saying that they "will not be taking legislative action" on the RWA. The statement adds:

As the costs of publishing continue to be driven down by new technology, we will continue to see a growth in open access publishers. This new and innovative model appears to be the wave of the future. The transition must be collaborative, and must respect copyright law and the principles of open access. The American people deserve to have access to research for which they have paid. This conversation needs to continue and we have come to the conclusion that the Research Works Act has exhausted the useful role it can play in the debate.

Elsevier’s Alicia Wise on the RWA, the West Wing, and Universal Access

In recent years I have noticed that it is pretty difficult for journalists not attached to big media to obtain interviews with Elsevier executives — except where the purpose of the interview is to talk about a new product, or the company’s latest financial results. Certainly, Elsevier has appeared very reluctant to talk about Open Access (OA). 

This led me to conclude that the company believes it only needs to talk to two groups of people: its shareholders and its customers — where customer implies not the researchers whose papers provide the content published in its journals, but the librarians who purchase those journals, invariably by means of the controversial Big Deal (aka “bundling”).

All changed

Alicia Wise

If my conclusion was correct, it seems safe to say that this has all changed in the past month or so. And the reason why is clear: At the end of last year a new bill was introduced into the US House of Representatives called the Research Works Act (RWA).

Co-sponsored by Representatives Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), the RWA would reverse the Public Access Policy introduced in 2005 by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). This policy requires that taxpayer-funded research is made freely accessible online with 12 months of publication. The bill would also prevent any other federal agency from imposing a similar requirement on the researchers it funds. As such, the RWA would pose a significant threat to the Open Access movement.

Shortly after its introduction, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) — an organisation of which Elsevier is a senior member — published a press release welcoming the new bill. The RWA, it said, is “aimed at preventing regulatory interference with private-sector research publishers in the production, peer review and publication of scientific, medical, technical, humanities, legal and scholarly journal articles.”

However, the problem is that the research community views things rather differently, and so news of the bill quickly ignited a firestorm of protest, especially amongst OA advocates.

Elsevier needs to get out more

As many in the research community will now be aware, a controversial piece of legislation was introduced into the US House of Representatives at the end of last year.

Known as the Research Works Act (RWA), or HR 3699, the proposed new law would reverse the Public Access Policy introduced in 2005 by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH Policy requires that taxpayer-funded research is made freely accessible in the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central database within 12 months of publication.

The RWA would also prevent other federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on their funded researchers. As such, it poses a serious threat to the Open Access (OA) movement.

The bill is backed by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and its Professional and Scholarly Division (PSP), which last December published a press release describing the bill as, “significant legislation that will help reinforce America’s leadership in scholarly and scientific publishing in the public interest and in the critical peer-review system that safeguards the quality of such research.”

In the past week or so a number of AAP members have publicly disavowed the RWA, including MIT Press, ITHAKA, Pennsylvania State University Press, California University Press, Rockefeller University Press, Nature Publishing Group, and the non-profit American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes the journal Science.

One one member of the AAP that does clearly support the RWA is Amsterdam-based Elsevier, and a few days ago the company emailed me the following statement explaining why:

Our support for the Research Works Act comes down to a question of preferring voluntary partnership with government agencies and other funders to promote access to research works, rather than being subjected to inflexible government mandates like the NIH policy, which don't take into account the needs of different journals.

One of Elsevier's primary missions is to work towards providing universal access to high-quality scientific information in sustainable ways. We support the bipartisan bill, which seeks to prevent US government policies, like the one imposed by the NIH, that mandate the dissemination of journal articles published and funded by the private sector. Elsevier and other publishers have embraced and nurtured a whole range of access options to ensure broad dissemination — author pays journals, delayed access, manuscript posting, and patient access, to name a few. We've worked constructively with a number of government agencies to develop new ways to expand access to journal articles reporting on, analyzing and interpreting agency-funded research. But like other publishers and societies we have always opposed the adoption or extension of the NIH policy, which restricts the author's freedom to choose where to publish and undermines the sustainability of journals published by the private sector. The legislation is an effort to prevent such unsustainable policies.

And it is Elsevier that is bearing the brunt of the outcry against the RWA, being widely vilified as “evil” and/or wicked. 

But while there can be little doubt that Elsevier played an important role in the introduction of the RWA, and that it has donated money to the two lawmakers who sponsored the bill, it would be naïve to think that it is the only publisher that supports the RWA. Most of the others have apparently chosen to keep their heads down and let Elsevier take the hits.

For that reason Elsevier has become the primary target for critics of the bill. But why is the criticism quite so vitriolic? Partly, no doubt, because Elsevier is the world’s largest and most dominant subscription publisher, and has long been held to overcharge for its journals, and partly because it resisted Open Access for so long, and with such obduracy.

But I think there an important additional reason. Since Derk Haank departed Elsevier for Springer in 2003, the company has had no human face. In many people’s eyes, therefore, the company is viewed not so much as a publisher, but as a faceless, anonymous, and unheeding, moneymaking machine intent only on sucking the lifeblood out of the research community in order to feed the insatiable appetite of its shareholders.

For current purposes, I am not interested in exploring whether this characterisation of Elsevier reflects reality in any way, and I am not interested in the rights and wrongs of the RWA. I do, however, think that the company could do itself a big favour if it began to communicate more directly, and more effectively, with the research community. 

If Elsevier is indeed now committed to Open Access, and if its publishing services really do — as it maintains — provide good value for money, it really needs to demonstrate as much. And to do that it needs to step out from its Amsterdam publishing tower and talk to people. Rather than lobbying behind closed doors, and communicating by means of press releases and statements, it needs to engage in more public discussion, and in open forums rather than private meeting rooms.

As it happens, the company has shown signs of moving in this direction recently. Earlier this month, for instance, Elsevier’s vice president of global corporate relations Tom Reller entered the lion’s den of a social networking site, and posted comments on the blog of Michael Eisen, a co-founder of OA publisher Public Library of Science, and one of Elsevier’s fiercest critics.

And last week Elsevier’s director of universal access Alicia Wise braved the torrid waters of the Liblicense mailing list to explain “how it is possible for Elsevier to be both positive about PubMed Central and the Research Works Act.”

Image from Bernt Rostad

But this needs to be just the start of the process. And it was in order to make this point that I sat down earlier this month outside the Mad Bishop and Bear pub in London’s Paddington station to speak with Reller and Wise (I bought my own coffee, so I don’t expect to find myself listed on a journalist’s version of MapLight).

In doing so, I discovered that neither of them has horns, and they did not breathe fire at me. Of course, there was much that we could not agree on, but we did have a civilised discussion, and I think both sides learned from the exchange of views.

One thing I repeatedly stressed is that Elsevier needs to get out more, and talk to people — not just to its shareholders and larger customers, but to the wider research community. If it doesn't do that, I believe, then it risks later discovering that commenting on Eisen’s blog, and posting to Liblicense, was simply too little, too late.

The good news is that Reller gave me a personal commitment that he would arrange for me to do an interview with someone from Elsevier, likely Alicia Wise.

All that remains is for him to call me with a date and time.

I am waiting for Reller’s call! 

(The call came, and the interview with Alicia Wise is now available here).