Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity: Mistaking intent for action?

The recent launch of the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE) has attracted both plaudits (e.g. here and here) and criticism (e. g. here and here).

What is COPE? It is a call to universities and research funding agencies to "recognise the crucial value of the services provided by scholarly publishers, the desirability of open access [OA] to the scholarly literature, and the need for a stable source of funding for publishers who choose to provide open access to their journals' contents."

Signatories to COPE are asked to commit to, "the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds."

Specifically, signatories are invited to create Gold OA Funds to assist researchers to pay to publish their papers in OA journals — which instead of charging readers to read (via a subscription), impose an author-side article processing fee (APC). The deal is that by paying a fee an author can ensure that the publisher will make his or her paper freely available on the Web for anyone to read, and thereby increase its impact.

COPE is the brain child of Harvard's Stuart Shieber, a professor of computer science, and director of the university's Office for Scholarly Communication. Shieber outlined the thinking behind COPE in an article published in August in PLoS Biology. COPE is necessary, he explained, because OA journal publishing is currently "at a systematic disadvantage relative to the traditional [subscription, or Toll Access (TA)] model".

The implication is that authors would be willing to publish their papers in an OA journal, if someone else was prepared to pay the associated publishing fee.

Universities need to support OA publishing, concluded Shieber, in order for it to become "a sustainable, efficient system". Only then, he added, can the two journal publishing systems (OA and TA) "compete on a more level playing field."

To date five universities have signed up to COPE, including Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell, University of California at Berkeley, and Dartmouth University.

Bigger picture

What's the bigger picture here? For the past several decades scholarly journal publishing has been in the grips of the so-called serials crisis. This has made it increasingly difficult for research institutions to fund subscriptions to all the journals that their researchers need to do their work properly.

This is both an affordability problem (since it means that each year universities have to reduce the number of journals they subscribe to due to a shortage of funds) and an access problem (since researchers cannot read papers published in journals for which their institution has no subscription).

Open Access publishing (Gold OA) was devised as a way of overcoming these problems — by shifting costs from the reader side of the publication process to the author side by charging a one-off publication fee.

Although the access and affordability problems are part and parcel of the larger serials crisis if we want to understand the current situation more clearly, and assess the likelihood of COPE resolving matters, it may help to view them as two separate problems.

There are two reasons for doing this. First, as a result of pressure brought to bear on publishers by OA advocates the majority of TA journals now permit authors to self-archive copies of their papers in their institutional repository. Known as Green OA, this practice ensures that copies of papers published in TA journals can nevertheless be made freely available on the Web.

However, since universities still need to pay subscriptions to access all the papers that have not been self-archived, Green OA is unlikely to have any substantial impact on the affordability problem, at least in the short term. It does, however, hold out the promise of solving the access problem.

Indeed, so far as access is concerned Green OA has a significant advantage over Gold OA, because if all researchers began self-archiving their papers it would be possible to make 100% of the global research output freely available on the Web practically overnight. By contrast, it would take a considerable amount of time and effort to convert all journals to Gold OA — even assuming that publishers agreed to the conversion.

However, in practice today only around 15% of research is being self-archived by authors. And while research institutions can require self-archiving, very few have yet introduced self-archiving mandates, and it is not at all clear yet whether the growth in mandates will accelerate in the near future.

Moral hazard

What are the origins of the serials crisis? It is partly a consequence of a continuous growth in the number of journals, but mainly a result of price inflation, which appears to be endemic to the scholarly journal market.

Hyperinflation, argues Shieber is the result of "systemic dysfunctionalities" inherent to a subscription business model when applied to scholarly journals. As in insurance-based health markets, he says, it leads to moral hazard — "the phenomenon of overconsumption of a good by a consumer who is insulated from the good's cost".

In other words, he explains in PLoS Biology, "The 'consumers' of scholarly articles (the readers, typically faculty, students, and researchers at universities and other research institutions) are insulated from the cost of reading, that is, from the subscription fees paid by the institutions' research libraries."

This is a problem that anti-trust economist Mark McCabe outlined to me seven years ago. As he put in 2002, "One distinctive aspect of this market is that end users do not pay for the material they use since the actual purchases are mediated by the libraries. This means that the principals (the professors, the scientists, the researchers of a particular institution) ask their agent (the library) to buy whatever they need, and the agent has no way of enforcing price discipline on the users. So there is a disconnect."

The second reason for treating access separately from affordability is that while Gold OA could in theory eventually produce 100% OA (and so solve the access problem) it is not at all clear that it can solve the affordability problem.

Since COPE proposes Gold OA as a solution to the predicament that the research community finds itself in, a key question, therefore, is whether Gold OA can avoid the systemic dysfunctionalities characteristic of TA publishing.

Currently the signs are not good.

Unsustainable

When pioneer OA publisher BioMed Central (BMC) launched, for instance, it charged $525 to publish an article. Today its standard APC is nearly three times higher, at $1,535; and authors can pay anything up to $2,365 to publish an article in a BMC journal like the Journal of Biology.

Similar increases have been evident with other OA publishers. When Public Library of Science (PLoS) launched its first journal, for instance, it charged an APC of $1,500; today it charges nearly twice as much, with costs ranging from $2,250 to $2,900. (PLoS ONE charges $1,350, but is not a traditional journal).

Moreover with most researchers unable to fund the cost of paying APCs themselves a number of alternative payment options have been devised. This has led to the creation of Gold OA funds like those envisaged by COPE (there are currently 21 Gold OA funds, plus an ambitious project called SCOAP³ that hopes to convert the entire particle physics literature from a subscription model to Gold OA), and to the so-called "institutional membership scheme". Inevitably such schemes involve paying APCs from centralised funds.

Institutional membership, for instance, involves a research institution bulk-buying the right for all its researchers to publish their papers in any of a specific Gold OA publisher's portfolio of journals — with the costs generally charged to the library budget. Essentially, it is a quasi-subscription.

As a quasi-subscription institutional membership creates a similar "disconnect" between user and purchaser as occurs with TA publishing. Gold OA funds will inevitably have the same effect. As Shieber points out, the danger is that "since authors would not now have to pay the processing fee, they would over-consume in a price-blind fashion, and processing fees would hyperinflate just as the subscription fees."

It seems that this is not just a theoretical danger. In August 2007 unrest erupted over the institutional membership scheme operated by BMC, leading to the science and medical libraries at Yale University publicly announcing that they were discontinuing membership.

Explaining their decision Yale librarians pointed out that the university had been asked to pay BioMed Central less than $4,700 to publish articles in BMC journals in 2005, but that the figure had grown to $31,625 in 2006. "This experiment in open-access publishing has proved unsustainable," the librarians concluded.

A further fifteen universities also cancelled their BMC membership scheme.

BMC responded by saying that the price hike was a consequence of a rapid rise in the number of papers published in its journals. This is no doubt fair comment, but appears to confirm that OA publishing suffers from the same disconnect between principal and agent as is evident with TA publishing, and that this results in the same inflationary spiral.

In discussing this issue earlier this year I concluded that OA publishing funded with Gold OA funds, or institutional memberships, is likely to produce the same hyperinflationary effect that Shieber worries about. In other words, while Gold OA funds could eventually solve the access problem, it is far from clear that they can resolve the affordability problem.

OA advocate Peter Suber challenged my conclusion. "As soon as we shift costs from the reader side to the author side, then, we create market pressure to keep them low enough to attract rather than deter authors ... [and] ... precisely because high prices in an OA world would exclude authors, and not merely readers, there is a natural, market-based check on excessive prices."

Besides, he added, the majority of OA journals do not currently charge an APC. As he put it: "It's relevant to point out here that most OA journals charge no publication fees or institutional memberships at all. I've argued that even fee-based Gold OA is not the threat that Richard seems to think. But even if I'm entirely wrong about that: fee-based gold OA is a minority of Gold OA, and no-fee Gold OA doesn't pose any of the threats that Richard describes."

Shieber likewise cites evidence showing that the number of OA journals currently charging APCs is low. Writing in PLoS Biology he reported that fewer than 25% of the open-access journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) are listed as charging a publication fee, "the remainder relying on other sources of direct or in-kind support."

Can we assume that this will continue to be the case?

Shieber thinks not. For this reason he reaches a slightly different conclusion to Suber: "[P]rocessing fees are likely to be an important revenue model for open-access journals, as they scale beyond the tiny fraction of overall journals that they currently constitute; processing fees are the only revenue source that inherently scales directly with the publishing services provided by a journal. The importance of the processing-fee model can be seen in the fact that of the open-access journals of sufficient standing to have an Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) impact factor, the proportion charging processing fees rises above 50%."

Putting a cap on it

Shieber nonetheless suggests that Gold OA can avoid the hyperinflation that has plagued TA publishing — if research institutions impose a cap on the money made available to authors when reimbursing their publishing fees.

With a cap, he explains, authors "would have to trade off whether using a certain amount of their limited allocation of funds for a given journal was appropriate in relation to the services and imprimatur that the journal provides, thereby reintroducing exactly the economic trade off that is missing from the current system."

He concludes, "In essence, the caps would act as inverse deductibles still allowing the economic signal to pass through to authors. In this approach, decisions about what is a reasonable fee are delegated to authors who choose on the basis of a market mechanism; the institution needn't stipulate reasonableness a priori."

This invites us to wonder what constitutes a reasonable fee, and whether a researcher would know a reasonable fee when presented with the bill. But would a cap work? "On the plus side," says Suber, "a cap will give authors a reason to husband their resources, or their allocation, introducing a note of price competition into their decision about where to submit a new work."

On the other side, he adds, "[A]fter an author spends her allocation, she might just submit subsequent work from the same fiscal year to a no-fee journal (OA or TA). That's compatible with price competition for the first article; but it's also compatible with disregarding price competition even for the first article. It's compatible with OA for the subsequent articles; but it's also compatible with TA for the subsequent articles."

However, the more important point, perhaps, is that universities will inevitably struggle to provide sufficient money to allow a Gold OA fund to ameliorate the predicament the research community currently finds itself in. This point was graphically demonstrated by Cornell doctoral student Phil Davis in May, when reporting on the plan of COPE signatory Cornell to make $50,000 available for a Gold fund.

"Considering that the Cornell University Library spends nearly $18 million dollars on collections, $50K seems like pocket change," he said. "From an management standpoint, it may take much more than $50K in staff and faculty time to administrate and process author charges one article at a time."

With APCs costing up to $3,000 per article (and some, like Cell Press, charging as much as $5,000), pocket change like this can hardly be expected to make much impression on the serials crisis. And since most of a library's budget will inevitably remain locked up in traditional journal subscriptions — which can be expected to continue to increase in price each year — it is hard to see how COPE-like initiatives will have much impact on either the affordability or the access problem.

"The notion of a COPE cap on the amount that funders and/or universities commit to subsidising authors for Gold OA fees is predicated on the enthymeme (i.e. the unstated or unrealised premise) that publishers abandon subscriptions and convert to Gold OA publishing," says Harnad.

In a post on Liblicense Harnad adds: "There are 25,000 journals, most of them not Gold OA, let alone equitably priced Gold OA, publishing 2.5 million articles a year from 10,000 universities worldwide. The tacit hope of COPE is to persuade all journals to abandon subscriptions and convert to equitably priced Gold OA by offering to pay for equitably priced publication today."

In short, COPE could only prove efficacious if universities cancelled all or most of their journal subscriptions and reallocated the money to pay for Gold OA (which they cannot risk doing), or of publishers voluntarily converting their journals to Gold OA. But as Harnad points out, "publishers have no reason to stop charging successful subscriptions just because some universities and/or funders commit to offering authors a capped Gold-OA subsidy."

In response to a claim on the Liblicense mailing list that COPE is a key OA initiative, and will allow "a smooth and successful transition to Open Access, Harnad responded: "it is just a very expensive way of generating some OA for a small fraction of a university's research output."

Like Harnad, Executive Editor for Social Sciences at Penn University Press Sandy Thatcher is doubtful that Gold OA funds will achieve very much. Commenting on a press release that the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) posted on Liblicense extolling the creation of Gold OA funds at the University of Calgary and the University of California at Berkeley, Thatcher said: "I wonder how such initiatives really will change the economics of the system overall, especially in the short term. Universities will still be paying for subscriptions for many journals and [are] now adding fees in addition."

Primary objective

In short, for so long as universities have to continue paying constantly increasing subscription fees to traditional publishers they cannot hope to buy OA for more than a handful of their researcher's' papers.

This, of course, is the crux of the systemic disadvantage that Shieber bemoans: research institutions cannot force a transition to Gold OA if their library budgets are already committed to traditional journal subscriptions. But it is far from clear that COPE can do anything to resolve it. Once again, we have to conclude that not only will COPE fail to resolve the affordability problem, but it will have little impact on the access problem.

Indeed, not only are budgets already seriously over-stretched, they face further cuts as a result of the current financial crisis. At least two of the COPE signatories — Cornell and MIT — are in the process of reducing their library budgets. There must therefore be doubts as to how long Gold OA funds can be supported. One of the first Gold OA funds to be created was introduced at the University of Amsterdam in 2007. Earlier this year, however, it was closed — "Due to a precarious financial situation."

Asks Harnad: "Would it not be more timely and useful (for OA) to encourage every university to provide OA for its own research output, by mandating Green OA self-archiving, rather than making formal or financial commitments before or instead of doing so?

Green OA, after all, is easy to implement, incurs no additional costs, and offers a much quicker route to OA.

As it is, he says, only two of the five signatories to COPE (Harvard and MIT) have introduced mandates, suggesting that COPE signatories may have lost sight of the primary objective — to make as much research OA, as quickly as possible.

COPE, says Harnad, is, "in effect simply encouraging universities to put up the cash today and then just sit and wait to see whether offering the capped subsidy will take the bait. Meanwhile, access continues to be lost, year after year."

Let a thousand flowers bloom?

One can of course argue that COPE does have the virtue of drawing attention to OA and the way in which the research community is being held hostage by scholarly publishers. Is that not a valuable thing to do? In any case, what's wrong with experimentation? Should we not let a thousand flowers bloom?

Sure, says Harnad, people are free to experiment, and they are free to speculate; but the first step of any institution serious about OA should be to do the most obvious and rational thing: introduce a self-archiving mandate. "With Green OA mandates safely seeing to access, we have nothing to lose in getting into speculative economics. But without Green OA mandates we lose our very raison d'être, OA, in favour of speculative economics."

Besides, he adds, taking a scattergun approach simply disperses the energies of the research community, and distracts them from the goal — to achieve OA as quickly as possible. And that, he says, is precisely what Green OA can do. "This is definitely not a case for 'let a thousand flowers bloom,' in parallel. It is much too late in the day for that, especially with the Green OA mandate option fully within every university's reach."

For Harnad, therefore, achieving OA should be treated as a serial process, with Green OA taking priority over Gold OA. Suber disagrees, arguing that there is no reason why Gold and Green OA initiatives should not be pursued simultaneously. "I do think the two can and should run in parallel."

Suber adds however: "[A]ny university willing to launch a fund to support Gold OA should also be willing to adopt a Green OA mandate. More: one of the primary arguments for a Gold OA fund (namely, to provide OA to a larger fraction of the university's research output) applies even more strongly to a Green OA mandate."

Consequently, he concludes, "I'd like to see universities support both Green and Gold OA with strong, effective policies. If they do, I don't care whether they adopt the Green policy first and then the Gold, or vice versa. But I do worry [that] when a university adopts a Gold OA policy without seeing that its reasons for doing so are even stronger reasons to adopt a Green policy as well."

All in all there are good reasons to be highly sceptical about the likely efficacy of COPE. For as long as library budgets are tied up with subscriptions it is hard to see how Gold OA funds can break the logjam, unless they are accompanied by Green self-archiving mandates.

The COPE signatories have perhaps mistaken intent for action.

Step back?

The good news is that it would take very little to turn COPE from a well-meaning but probably ineffectual initiative into one with real teeth. All that is needed is to require that, in addition to creating a Gold OA fund, COPE signatories commit to introduce a Green OA mandate. Not only would this have the merit of pleasing both Harnad and Suber, but it would be far more likely to help the research community achieve OA (as in access).

As it is, COPE gives the impression of being a step back from the historic moment last year when Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences became the first university department in the US to adopt a Green mandate — an initiative that was also masterminded by Shieber.

That said, although adding teeth to COPE could help solve the access problem it is not certain that it would do much to address the affordability problem — since there is no evidence that either Green or Gold OA are capable of reducing the costs of scholarly communication (as currently conceived).

Consequently affordability will doubtless remain a continuing concern for the research community, and for taxpayers — the people who ultimately fund scholarly communication.

It may be that if Green mandates multiplied they would eventually generate enough OA to induce subscription cancellations, releasing the subscription funds to pay for — and hence encouraging publishers to convert to — Gold OA. But that is speculation. It is also a discussion for another day!

Open Humanities Press to publish OA books

The Open Humanities Press (OHP) announced recently that it is entering the Open Access (OA) book publishing market, launching five new OA book series. The books will all be made freely available online as full-text electronic files, as well as being offered as print on demand (POD) paperbacks. To get a better idea of the significance of the news I contacted a few OA advocates, and emailed some questions to OHP co-founder Sigi Jottkandt. The latter questions were answered collectively by the OHP Steering Group.

Sigi Jottkandt

The Open Humanities Press was launched in May 2008 by a group of academics looking to, as they put it, "overcome the current crisis in scholarly publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigour worldwide."

OHP's first project consisted of launching a portfolio of seven independent OA journals in critical theory (there are now ten journals). Since humanities research tends to be published in book form it clearly makes sense for OHP to publish OA books too.

To that end, in August it was announced that, in conjunction with the University of Michigan Library's Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO), OHP is launching an OA monograph series in critical and cultural theory. This will consist of a new five book series edited by senior members of OHP's editorial board.

All the books will be freely available as full-text digital editions. In addition, they will be offered as "reasonably-priced paperbacks" — on a print on demand basis. And since they will be OA texts, the books will all be published under Creative Commons licences, with authors (who retain the copyright) able to choose the CC licence that best meets their needs.

How does the partnership work? After OHP has completed the peer review process the manuscripts will be passed to SPO, which will convert them to structured XML for electronic and print on demand publication. The paperback versions will be sold through "the usual online distributors."

SPO will also add metadata to the electronic books and catalogue them. They will then be archived in the University of Michigan Library for long-term preservation.

New directions

OHP is keen to stress that the new initiative is not just about making books OA. The aim is also to take advantage of the online medium to experiment with new methods for sharing and communicating research. As Gary Hall, OHP co-founder, and co-editor of one of the planned book series (Liquid Books), puts it: "As well as creating a prestigious open access venue for humanities monographs publishing, our collaboration with SPO will also enable OHP to explore new directions that the book-length argument might take once it's released from marketability concerns."

Authors will, for instance, be able to make their manuscripts available online in various pre- and post-publication versions so that others can comment on and annotate the text. The aim is to make the books more than static text, and create, "a gathering place for readers to engage the text publicly."

And by utilising the print on demand model OHP hopes to assist authors publish books that — while of inherent scholarly value — might be considered insufficiently cost-effective for traditional print publishing.

OHP has attracted some OA heavyweights to its editorial board, including the de facto leader of the OA movement Peter Suber.

Suber believes that the new initiative is significant in a number of ways. "It shows that OHP is moving forward, not stalled. It shows that it can recruit a significant partner (SPO). And it shows that it's committing to ambitious new OA series, not just individual OA titles."

But the new initiative is most noteworthy perhaps because the plan is not only to make books OA, but to do so in the area of the humanities. Historically OA has been viewed as of relevance to the sciences alone, and only to journals — not books.

So where does the new OHP project fit with the current OA scene, and what implications might it have for the wider OA movement?

"I've long included books within the OA movement and my own OA efforts," responds Suber. "OHP isn't the first book publisher committed to OA, but it's now one of the most prominent and ambitious. It should help bring the very idea of OA books (or at least OA scholarly monographs) to the attention of humanities scholars — as well as the OA activists still focusing exclusively on journals."

Illogical

UK-based publishing consultant Alma Swan agrees, pointing out that it is illogical to think of OA as relevant to journals alone. "If we make the argument that publicly-funded research should be OA, why stop short of books? It's ridiculous that we do this. We just need a new economic model for books, that's all."

And that, of course, is the challenge OHP faces: demonstrating that there is an economic model, not just for OA books, but for OA books in the humanities. Suber, for one, is optimistic. Indeed, he anticipates that OHP could provide a viable new model for the wider scholarly publishing market. For instance, he says, "I think that OHP may help 'prove the concept' for university presses who are not already experimenting with OA books. University presses are often sympathetic to OA, under pressure to make more money (or lose money more slowly), and increasingly unable to justify the expense of a conventional printed book for an esoteric monograph with low sales potential. The combination of OA and POD has beautiful synergy and may soon become the dominant model for scholarly monographs."

Ideas about the relevance of OA books may in any case be changing. One of those who has in the past expressed scepticism about the idea is self-styled archivangelist Stevan Harnad. Commenting on the news from OHP Harnad says, "Yes, OA is first and foremost about journal articles. There it is immediately desirable and feasible, without exception. But it can be extended to other kinds of content too, where desired and feasible — for instance, esoteric monographs. So OHP is fine, and welcome: If they can publish good OA monographs (getting the quality authors and making ends meet), more power to them!"

He adds however, "It's just that — for the time being — for every other kind of content (including monographs), the authors that will want OA and the publishers that will want to provide it will be the exceptions, not the rule."

So is the concept of the OA book an idea whose time has come, or will OHP face an uphill struggle? Jottkandt is cautiously optimistic. "We've witnessed a tremendous growth in awareness about OA within the humanities community just in the last 3 years," she says. "It's hard to predict where things will go from here but we see lots of signs for hope.

Time, of course, will tell.

——

Q&A

The questions below were answered collectively by the OHP Steering Group: Paul Ashton, Marta Brunner, Barbara Cohen, Jean-Claude Guédon, Gary Hall, Sigi Jottkandt, Shana Kimball and David Ottina.

RP: How do you see OHP overcoming the current crisis in scholarly publishing?

OHP: We see OHP as part of a broad-based movement within the scholarly community to address the crisis. The beauty of it is that in this networked world, completely autonomous projects like ours can and do arise to tackle the specific challenges and needs of their disciplines and contexts. We need not necessarily coordinate in order to work towards a common goal, the free and open exchange of knowledge.

RP: OHP maintains that the crisis in scholarly publishing is threatening intellectual freedom and academic rigour. How is it doing that?

OHP: Traditional publishing venues, for a variety of reasons (often beyond their control) are no longer able to make publication decisions based solely on scholarly criteria. This undermines intellectual freedom in that young scholars increasingly must take the publishing industry's marketing considerations into account when choosing an area of research.

It also arguably undermines academic rigour when the most profitable formats today tend to be course readers, text books and introductions.

The traditional book-length argument, which has been the dominant form for much of humanities research, is increasingly being pushed out of the equation, although such books are typically required for tenure, and increasingly even for junior hiring.

Journals & books

RP: OHP has announced that it plans to publish five new OA book series. This is not the first OHP initiative is it?

OHP: No. OHP launched just over a year ago as a collective of independent OA journals in critical theory. Our feeling was that there were quite a few excellent open access peer-reviewed journals, but they weren't getting recognition because they were a bit isolated. By collecting the journals under a single banner we hoped to show both humanities and open access communities that there is actually quite a bit of significant OA activity in the humanities.

RP: You started with seven journals, but have grown to ten I believe.

OHP: Yes. The journals project is ongoing. We are always on the look-out for good peer-reviewed OA humanities journals. Once proposed, journals are vetted by OHP's editorial oversight group and, if they meet our scholarly and access criteria, become part of the collective. More details about the journal process and criteria are here.

RP: In the press release announcing the new OA book series OHP states that authors will, "have the option of making their manuscripts available online in various pre- and post-publication versions for reader commenting and annotation if they so wish." What does this imply?

OHP: To clarify: all of OHPs books will be available full text OA online and nearly all of them PDF too (and we're also looking at ePUB). These will be traditional publications in the sense that they will be 'set' texts in the way paper publications are.

However, some of the books (in particular the Liquid Books Series) will also be published through websites that allow for more direct participation so that the online artefact can become a gathering place for readers to engage the text publicly.

RP: The press release quotes Gary Hall as saying: "Our collaboration with SPO will also enable OHP to explore new directions that the book-length argument might take once it’s released from marketability concerns." Can you expand on that?

OHP: One of OHP's goals is to explore the new forms of scholarly communication that might emerge once humanities scholarship is freely opened to the world. Along with the traditional book form, which we expect to be a staple of OHP's offerings, we're also interested in offering a more exploratory space for scholars to try out ideas and forms that traditional publishers cannot afford to take chances on.

RP: Ok, this goes to the point about marketability then. When will the first OHP books be available?

OHP: We hope to have the first books out within a year.

Ways to publish OA books

RP: What would you say to those who argue that OA is only about journal articles, not books?

OHP: Are you referring to the way many of the problems associated with copyright or licensing restrictions can be eluded with regard to journal articles — not least through the self-archiving of the pre-refereed pre-print — in a manner that is not so easy when it comes to book publishing?

If so, then even though the exclusive copyright in a 'work for hire' associated with book publishing may mean that the exclusive right to sell or give away copies of it now belongs to the publisher, there are still ways in which authors can publish their books OA.

RP: Can you expand on that?

OHP: For one thing, book authors could decide to publish only with an open access publisher — such as Open Humanities Press. But there's also Australian National University’s ANU E Press, Bloomsbury Academic, re.press, Rice University Press, University of Tennessee’s Newfound Press, Athabasca University’s AU Press, Open Book Publishers, National Academies Press, California University Press's Flashpoints series, or the 'digitalculturebooks' project of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of Michigan’s University Library to choose from.

For another, they could contact their publisher to ask if they can publish their book online. Ted Striphas, James Boyle and Lawrence Lessig are examples of authors who have recently published books in this fashion. Other publishers will now allow authors to deposit preliminary or representative book chapters in the repositories of the institutions where they work.

For yet another, authors could decline any offer to sign a contract that awards copyright or an exclusive license to a publisher, and decide to publish only with those who will bring their book out on a non-exclusive basis.

The other variation of the argument that OA is only relevant to journals that we've heard is not so much that OA is inherently about journals as that books are just expensive to produce OA. We partnered with the University of Michigan's Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO) specifically to challenge that notion.

SPO has deep expertise in the electronic publishing workflow and OHP has expertise in manuscript selection and editorial development. By working together, we are confident we can produce books cost effectively.

We also hope to demonstrate a compelling model of a direct Library-Scholar partnership that other OA scholars can appropriate for their specific disciplinary needs.

RP: One of those who has historically expressed scepticism about OA books is Stevan Harnad. While he welcomes news of the OHP book project, and wishes it well, he suggested to me that — aside from scholarly papers — the number of authors that will want to make their research OA, and the number of publishers that will want to assist them make it OA "will be the exceptions, not the rule". Do you think that is fair comment?

OHP: It's a little tricky to say, since the context is a bit unclear, but if Stevan was commenting that presently only a minority of humanities faculty actively seek out OA options, that's our perception as well. It does suggest a strong need for educational outreach to faculty through a variety of means (grassroots peer advocacy, leadership by senior scholars, scholarly communications offices, etc.).

In addition to these kinds of efforts (that many of us on the Steering Group are also involved in), we're aiming to create an editorial identity for OHP that is sufficiently well-regarded that the OA form we publish in will not necessarily be the first and main attraction for all authors, although it will no doubt be welcomed by the growing number of humanities and social sciences scholars who recognise that OA is the best way to get their work read.

But if Stevan's comment is a prediction about the permanent marginality of OA publishing, we're certainly working hard to make sure that doesn't happen. In the humanities, primary research is published in book form; so rather than being a supplement or nice-to-have, OA for books is completely fundamental for humanities disciplines, and analogous to the call for opening data in the sciences.

RP: Thanks for your time, and good luck with the new project.

——

The five new OA book series will consist of:

· New Metaphysics (ed. Graham Harman and Bruno Latour)

· Critical Climate Change (ed. Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook)

· Global Conversations (ed. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o)

· Unidentified Theoretical Objects (ed. Wlad Godzich)

· Liquid Books (ed. Claire Birchall and Gary Hall)

E-Biomed 2.0?

Last week the Open Access publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS) launched a new initiative called PLoS Currents (Beta).

Announcing the new development on the publisher's blog, PLoS chairman and co-founder Harold Varmus described PLoS Currents as "a new and experimental website for the rapid communication of research results and ideas".

Essentially, researchers are being invited to submit raw preprints — along with datasets and preliminary analyses — to PLoS Currents. These will then be made freely available online without first being subjected to "in-depth peer review".

In response to the recent worldwide H1N1 influenza outbreak, Varmus added, the first PLoS Currents research theme is influenza. This will encompass all aspects of influenza, influenza virology, genetics, immunity, structural biology, genomics, epidemiology, modelling, evolution, policy and control.

It is fitting (and surely no accident) that the launch of PLoS Currents should have been announced by Varmus: For it was as director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) that in 1999 Varmus proposed E-Biomed — "a community-based effort to establish an electronic publishing site" that would provide "more effective use of electronic methods for disseminating the results of biomedical research".

E-Biomed was to be a fully searchable, online open-access database that would contain full-text versions of both post-publication biomedical research and preprints.

In the event, as Rob Kling, Joanna Fortuna and Adam King pointed out a few years later, "in less than a year, the E-Biomed proposal was radically transformed, eliminating the preprint section, instituting delays between article publication and posting to the archive, and changing the name to 'PubMed Central'."

The radical defanging of E-Biomed, they added, was a consequence of "highly visible and highly influential statements made by publishers and scientific societies against the proposal."

Widely criticised

In short, E-Biomed was seen as a direct challenge to the vested interests of scholarly publishers, who were sufficiently powerful that they were able to successfully eviscerate E-biomed, and turn it into a pale shadow of Varmus' original intention.

What was particularly controversial about E-Biomed was the plan to make research available on the service without first subjecting it to a process of in-depth peer review. It was this above all, points out Jocelyn Kaiser on the Science blog, that led to the E-Biomed proposal being "shot down."

Critically, opponents argued that the director of the NIH was planning to dispense with scholarly journals, and with traditional peer review, and Varmus was widely criticised as a result.

"I must have known that I was not going to be at NIH for much longer," Varmus joked to New Scientist in 2003, "because this caused a tremendous political argument: what the hell was I trying to do to destroy the publication industry."

But it was not just publishers who criticised E-Biomed. One of the fiercest critics of the proposal was fellow open-access advocate Stevan Harnad, who characterised some of the ideas outlined by Varmus as "needless armchair fantasising".

And responding to Varmus' suggestion that readers of papers in E-biomed should be free to add comments to them, Harnad complained: "There is an echo here of a naive proposal we hear over and over again, that open commentary might somehow substitute for peer review."

For that reason Harnad advised Varmus: "don't associate the proposal any more closely with the quackish idea that spontaneous opinion polls could serve as a basis for calibrating one's reading."

PLoS Currents, we should note, will be making use of Google Knol — where research will be gathered together in collections and "community interaction, comment and discussion will enable commentary and conversations around these findings."

Varmus' status as a former NIH director has clearly helped too: PLoS Currents will also include a new independent database called Rapid Research Notes, which will be housed at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) — a division of the National Library of Medicine at NIH.

So radical?

Looking back one is bound to ask: Was the E-Biomed proposal really so radical and, as some at the time argued, dangerous? As Varmus explained in his proposal, papers posted on E-Biomed would get there by one of two routes: "(i) Many reports would be submitted to editorial boards. These boards could be identical to those that represent current print journals or they might be composed of members of scientific societies or other groups approved by the E-biomed Governing Board. (ii) Other reports would be posted immediately in the E-biomed repository, prior to any conventional peer review, after passing a simple screen for appropriateness."

In other words, only a part of the database would have housed papers that had not gone through traditional publication channels.

As Varmus says in his recently published book The Art and Politics of Science, "Many of these articles would simply be online versions of existing journals, accepted for publication after traditional peer review by established editorial boards. Some would be articles submitted to and reviewed by the editorial boards of new online journals formed to publish within the E-Biomed system."

And those articles that had not been peer-reviewed, he adds, "would be clearly delineated from articles that were reviewed by traditional methods."

As to the proposal that people should be able to comment on papers in E-Biomed, this feature is now a standard component of open-access publishing.

Ten years on, it seems, the concept of E-Biomed is far less shocking than when Varmus first proposed it.

Nevertheless, given the reception E-Biomed received, says Kaiser, Varmus has been careful to stress that papers published in PLoS Currents should be regarded as preliminary, and to point out that it is expected that they will subsequently be published in peer-reviewed journals.

Ten years to see the light of day

Finally, it might help to point out that the E-Biomed concept was heavily influenced by the development of the physics preprint server arXiv, which had been founded by theoretical physicist Paul Ginsparg in 1991. And PLoS Currents has undoubtedly been influenced by arXiv as well.

Today arXiv hosts over half a million papers, and around 5,000 new papers are added each month. And the database is no longer confined to physics alone: it now accepts papers in mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics as well.

Like PLoS Currents (and as was envisaged with one section of E-Biomed) none of the papers submitted to arXiv undergo in-depth peer review. Many are, however, subsequently published in a traditional manner. (As Kling et al. put it, "the vast majority" of papers posted in arXiv, "are eventually published in peer-reviewed journals or peer-reviewed conference proceedings").

Importantly, arXiv has not caused the sky to fall in. Indeed, it appears to have had very little impact on traditional scholarly journals.

Although it does not peer review papers submitted to it, however, arXiv does have a moderation process, and some articles are subsequently removed or reclassified (a process, incidentally, that has its own critics).

PLoS Currents will have something similar. As Varmus explains on the PLoS blog, "unsuitable submissions [to PLoS Currents] will be screened out by a board of expert moderators led by Eddie Holmes (Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, Pennsylvania State University, USA) and Peter Palese (Department of Microbiology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, USA)."

All in all, some may be tempted to conclude that it is a great shame it has taken ten years for Varmus' original idea for E-biomed to see the light of day; and a great shame that it has taken eighteen years for the biomedical research community to catch up with physicists when it comes to the rapid dissemination of their research results.

On the other hand, the ten-year delay has at least allowed PLoS to make use of cutting-edge technologies like Google Knol (which only became available last year).

Perhaps we should think of PLoS Currents as E-Biomed 2.0?

Open Access given Papal Blessing?

In his latest encyclical letter Pope Benedict XVI argues that rich countries are asserting their intellectual property with "excessive zeal", especially in the field of health care — a statement that has led some to conclude that the Pope has been converted to the Open Access (OA) cause. Whether or not this is the case, is it not perhaps time for the Vatican to reassess the way in which it asserts its own intellectual property (IP)?

Could the Open Access movement have a new convert? On 7^th July, in his third encyclical letter since taking office in 2005, Pope Benedict XVI says that over-enthusiastic exploitation of intellectual property by rich countries is posing problems for developing countries.

Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth) is the first of the current Pope's letters to focus on social issues, rather than spiritual matters. And significantly, it was released on the eve of the recent G8 meeting of world leaders at L'Aquila, Italy.

Reminding us that blind pursuit of profit and economic mismanagement has "wreaked havoc" on the global economy, the letter also calls for a reform of the United Nations — with the aim of arriving "at a political, juridical and economic order which can increase and give direction to international cooperation for the development of all peoples in solidarity."

The reference to intellectual property comes in Chapter 2, Paragraph 22, where the Pope says that one of the current impediments to development is the tendency for rich countries to show, "excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property, especially in the field of health care."

Doubtless uppermost in the Pope's mind is an awareness that large Western-based pharmaceutical companies have shown themselves quite prepared to assert their patents aggressively, even when doing so deprives poor people of drugs and treatments that those in the West are able to take for granted.

Knowledge economy

But his point was surely broader than that, and undoubtedly reflects the now widespread concern that in the so-called "knowledge economy" more and more of the raw material driving economic development — information and know-how — tends to be appropriated by the West, which then imposes legal and financial restrictions on its use by means of such things as patents, copyright, trademarks etc.

This appropriation is possible, argue critics, because of the determined way in which the West has set about creating an increasingly maximalist global intellectual property system, which it then forces on the rest of the world through international trade agreements like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). In particular, The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) — an international agreement administered by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and negotiated at the end of the Uruguay Round of GATT in 1994 — sets minimum standards for many forms of IP regulation.

Importantly, TRIPS ties copyright and patent policy to a country's other trade. So, as cyber activist Cory Doctorow pointed out to me in 2006, "Failure to accede to the terms of TRIPS, for instance, could mean that a member state's Soya bean and steel exports are limited."

The consequences of this process have become increasingly apparent: Western companies are able to maximise their profits, regardless of the impact on poorer countries, which themselves generally have little or no IP but have to sign up to agreements like TRIPS if they want to be part of the global economy.

Western corporations that own intellectual property argue (with some justification) that if we want to ensure that new knowledge and know-how is created innovators must be incentivised. And the best way of doing this, they add, is for society to provide them with a time-limited monopoly in the exploitation of any newly-created know-how (e.g. by means of a patent).

Locked out

Critics respond by pointing out that most IP ends up in the hands of a few multinational companies, who then use the monopoly it provides to generate disproportionately high profits for private shareholders — by, for instance, significantly overpricing patented products. Since developing countries are unable to afford these prices their citizens are locked out of the benefits.

The Pope has therefore highlighted the social and financial consequences of the current intellectual property system, which unfairly excludes poorer nations from new knowledge and techniques. This not only leaves those countries at a continuing economic disadvantage but, when they are priced out of the latest medical treatments and drugs, deprives them of the ability to improve, or even preserve, the lives of their citizens.

Likewise, poorer nations are frequently denied the benefits of biotechnology, and new methods and techniques to improve agricultural productivity, and thus the ability to provide their people with food security (i.e. the wherewithal to feed them adequately) — a point made to me in 2006 by Biological Open Source advocate Richard Jefferson.

Moreover, the effects of today's IP system are more insidious than they at first appear. Consider, for instance, that while most research is funded by governments, who expect no direct financial return on their investment, this publicly-funded research is nevertheless appropriated by for-profit publishers — who sell it back to the research community in the form of journal subscriptions.

This is an issue that the Open Access movement has been trying to draw the world's attention to for fifteen years now, and is a direct consequence of the fact that when scientists publish their papers in scholarly journals they are told that — as a condition of publication — they must assign copyright to the publisher.

As a result, large Western-based companies like Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell and Springer acquire this publicly-funded information, and then make huge profits out of it by charging very high subscriptions for scholarly journals — even though in today's online environment most access now takes place electronically, so distribution costs are minimal.

Indeed, journal subscriptions are so high that even the world's richest universities are now struggling to afford all the journals they need to undertake new research. (Bear in mind that most breakthrough research in the sciences comes at the end point of a prolonged iterative process. This means that scientific progress depends upon researchers knowing what research has already been done, and thus having access to all relevant published papers).

But if one considers that an annual subscription to a single journal (e.g. Elsevier's Brain Research) can cost as much as $22,000, and there are today some 24,000 scholarly journals, it is not surprising that scholarly communication is in the grip of a debilitating serials crisis.

For developing nations this means being locked out of much current medical research, leaving local scientists struggling to undertake effective research themselves, and local doctors unable to provide adequate medical treatment for their patients.

Explaining the problem to me last year, OA advocate Leslie Chan pointed out that while researchers at his institution — the University of Toronto — have access to between 2,000 and 3,000 medical journals, an African research institutions like the University of Nairobi School of Medicine will likely have access "to perhaps 30 to 40 medical journals."

In short, today's IP system means that private companies are able to use copyright to capture publicly-funded research, and then restrict access to it in order to maximise their profits. This has led to increasing financial difficulties for research institutions in the West, and near total exclusion from global research efforts for poorer nations.

It was growing awareness of the access problems this gives rise to that led to the creation of the OA movement — which advocates for all publicly-funded research to be made freely available on the Web.

Cycle of deprivation

Was the Pope calling for Open Access in his encyclical letter? Since he didn't mention it specifically we cannot say. Indeed, we don't know that he is even aware of the OA movement.

But the problem that the OA movement seeks to address is one component of the larger problem created by today's IP system, and which the Pope highlighted in his encyclical letter as being an obstacle to, "a political, juridical and economic order" focused on "international cooperation for the development of all peoples in solidarity."

"The point is clear," says Oldenburg-based OA advocate Eberhard Hilf. "OA helps researchers in poorer countries access vital medical information, and provides them with the dignity of being able to undertake their own research, and on an equal footing with scientists in developed countries. And that is both morally and economically good for everyone."

But the cycle of deprivation that today's IP system creates for developing nations does not end there. As Chan pointed out to me, today only 10% of R&D money is spent on diseases that mainly affect the 90% of people who live in the developing world, whereas 90% of the world's R&D money is spent on the 10% of diseases that primarily affect people in the West — a phenomenon Chan calls the 90/10 gap.

This means, for instance, that diseases like malaria and African trypanosomiasis, which primarily affect the developing world, remain neglected diseases. And the reason for this is quite simple: there is little incentive for multinational pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs for patient groups who are unable to pay the high prices these companies expect to be able to charge for patented drugs.

And if they nevertheless do develop drugs for a neglected disease, pharmaceutical companies know that governments in developing nations are now so desperate that they will likely sanction the production of cheap generic versions locally, by means of compulsory licensing — as happened in 2001 when Indian pharmaceutical company Cipla began to produce generic antiretrovirals (AVRs) to treat HIV AIDS.

In short, developing-world diseases offer too little financial return for pharmaceutical companies to attract the attention they deserve. And it is the intellectual property system that provides the framework from which the consequent inequity arises. After all, intellectual property treats non-rival resources (e.g. information and knowledge) as if they were depletable. This creates artificial scarcity — scarcity where it need not exist. What this means in practice is that potential profits for Western companies are prioritised over the basic human needs of people living in poorer nations — e.g. health, food security, and life itself.

For similar reasons, Western journals tend to have little interest in publishing research undertaken in poorer nations (which are likely to be focused on neglected diseases and other developing world concerns), preferring instead to publish research into diseases that affect rich nations — e.g. obesity and cancer; research that will invariably have been done in the West.

Since they cannot afford access to research published in Western journals, and so struggle to do cutting-edge research themselves, researchers in poorer nations are unlikely to have their papers published in prestigious Western journals. This makes it difficult for them to advance their careers, so many talented scientists end up migrating to the West. This in turn creates a brain drain that further exacerbates the problems faced by developing nations.

Indeed, so discriminatory are the effects of today's global intellectual property system that Western companies are even able to capture, and profit from, cultural products and knowledge originating in the developing world — so-called indigenous knowledge. So, for instance, they can appropriate traditional symbols and designs, create derivative arts and crafts, copyright and distribute traditional songs and stories, and patent traditional uses of medicinal plants — a practice known as biopiracy.

As a consequence, cultural products, traditional know-how, and even scientific talent tends to flow to the wealthier parts of the world, draining the developing world of unique locally-developed knowledge and resources, while simultaneously depriving it of life-preserving treatments, drugs and scientific techniques developed in the West.

In response to the larger problem created by the intellectual property system a growing number of other "open" and "free" movements have developed, including the Biological Open Source movement, the Open Source and Free software movements, the Free Culture movement, the Open Data movement, and Creative Commons — to name just few.

Leading by example?

Needless to say, many OA advocates welcomed the Pope's intervention in the debate about intellectual property. But is it enough simply to name the problem? Should the Vatican not also be leading by example? Should it not, for instance, give up some of its accumulated wealth to help tackle the poverty gap? And should it not re-think its own attitude to intellectual property?

After all, the Vatican has substantial wealth: Its revenues in 2007, for instance, were $371.97 million. It also owns a great deal of property, and considerable treasure — as Italian writer Avro Manhattan pointed out in his 1983 book The Vatican Billions.

Unsurprisingly, over the years the Vatican has been exhorted to sell its treasurers to help feed the poor on a number of occasions, most recently this March when Spain's Alberto Juesas Escudero persuaded 40,000 people to sign a Facebook petition calling for exactly that.

As with previous such calls, however, the proposal was rejected by the Vatican. Specifically, President of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes replied that the Church has a duty to conserve the works of art in its possession. In any case, he added, it would be illegal for the Vatican to sell them.

Perhaps the Cardinal's response is fair enough. After all, selling the Vatican's treasures could hardly provide a long-term solution to the problems confronting the developing world.

Nevertheless, if one puts Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes' insistence that the Vatican has a duty to conserve its treasures alongside the Pope's call for rich nations to be less zealous in asserting their intellectual property one is driven to a certain conclusion.

The Vatican owns one of the oldest libraries in the world, the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV), which contains one of the most significant collections of historical texts in the world. BAV's holdings include 1.6 million antique and modern printed volumes specialising in the fields of palaeography, history, art history, classical literature, and philology, as well as 8,300 incunabula (books printed before 1501, of which 65 are printed on vellum), 150,000 manuscript and records volumes, 300,000 coins and medals, and more than 100,000 prints.

This is treasure indeed. And yet BAV is still a private library, and access to it is severely restricted (even undergraduates are not entitled to readers' tickets). Does not a duty to conserve this treasure also imply a duty share it with the world? Certainly BAV's current access policy could hardly be said to be in the spirit of open access.

As it happens, no one has access to the library at the moment, following a decision in 2007 to close it for three years for a programme of renovation and re-building. This is the first time in its 500-year history that the library has been closed, and the decision attracted some criticism from scholars around the world, not least because of the very short notice they were given before closure.

Moreover, while the library is expected to re-open next year, there is no indication that access will be liberalised in any way. This seems a great shame.

In the age of the Internet, of course, access to a library's holdings can be greatly enhanced by providing online access. And today many libraries around the world are busy digitising their holdings with this aim in mind.

Indeed, thanks to the generosity of the Social Investment division of Hewlett Packard (HP), in 2002 the Vatican Library was also able to announce plans to digitise some of its holdings too. The stated aim was "to give millions of people online access to the vast artistic and cultural heritage of the Vatican's Apostolic Library."

The HP press release announcing the project added: "The new part of the Holy See Web site will include images of manuscripts which, until now, have only been accessible to professional scholars and professors."

Seven years later what has been achieved? Browsing the library's web site this is not clear. I was unable to find a single image, although presumably there are some available as there is a reference to them. Perhaps users need to know of their existence and precise whereabouts before they can view them?

Unfortunately my several email enquiries to the library asking for details went unanswered, and some three weeks after contacting HP's PR Company, Edelman, I have yet to be put me in touch with anyone at HP who can enlighten me.

Chilling note

For those who do know what they want, and its exact location within the library, it is at least possible to order images (plus photocopies and CD-ROMs) of holdings remotely, and have them sent to you — assuming that the online ordering system is operating during the library's closure: this too is not clear.

However, in light of the Pope's call for less zealous assertion of intellectual property, BAV's approach to copyright appears somewhat over-proprietary. In addition to having to pay a fee users must sign a copyright form that suggests the library is as zealous as any Western corporation when it comes to asserting its own intellectual property.

Those requesting images, for instance, are told in no uncertain terms, that they must "treat the material as copyrighted by the BAV, and with respect thereto will respect, observe and comply with all national and international laws, rules and regulations with respect to the rights of authors and publishers, with respect to copyright or other intellectual property."

But it is the final sentence of the terms and conditions that strikes a particularly chilling note. Having agreed to use the material exclusively for private study, and keep it "in my personal custody and control at all times" the user is required to agree that, "BAV may, at its discretion, submit any dispute with me arising in relation to this application to any court of competent jurisdiction, including, but not limited to the appropriate judicial authority in the State of Vatican City."

Clearly there is a difference in both scale and scope between providing access to images of ancient manuscripts held in the Vatican library and ensuring that people in developing countries have access to the latest AVRs. Nor does it appear that BAV is any more more vigorous in asserting its IP than other libraries and museums.

But given the Pope's recently stated views on the topic of intellectual property is it not time for the Vatican library to take a more enlightened approach to its own IP. Why not, for instance, make its images available under a Creative Commons licence?

It is of course possible that such plans are already afoot. However, nothing on BAV's web site even hints at this.

Perplexed and alarmed

Back to the question of whether the Pope supports OA: If he were asked the question (and knew what OA was) he would doubtless say he does support it. But if he is genuinely concerned at the way in which rich countries are asserting their intellectual property should the Vatican not be leading from the front?

Unfortunately the possibility of this looks somewhat remote at present. A month after Pope Benedict was elected a decree was issued by the Vatican asserting that copyright in all his works belongs "in perpetuity and worldwide" to the Vatican's publishing house, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, known as LEV.

While the claim outlined in the decree seems a little less eternal today, it nevertheless clearly states that LEV has been assigned "exercise and custody, permanently and throughout the world, of every moral copyright and of all the exclusive financial rights — without any exception — over all the deeds and documents through which the Supreme Pontiff exercises his own Magisterium."

As such, it continues, LEV has full authority, "to initiate legal and judicial proceedings, to propose any action in order to ensure the full protection and realisation of these rights and to resist any claim or request from third parties."

An associated Communiqué also claims retrospective rights in the Pope's writings.

And it seems that LEV has every intention of exercising these rights vigourously. Shortly after the copyright decree, for instance, Italian publishers began to receive letters from the Vatican's legal department demanding copyright fees.

According to CBCNews, for instance, Marco Tosatti, a Vatican correspondent for Turin daily La Stampa, and his Italian publisher, were in 2006 sent an $18,500 bill for publishing Pope Ratzinger's Dictionary, a slim volume of the Pope's thoughts on abortion, freedom, conscience and other issues.

Vittorio Messori, who has co-authored works with both Pope Benedict and John Paul II, was quoted by the London Times as saying that he was, "perplexed and alarmed" at this turn of events. It was, he said, "wholly negative and absolutely disastrous for the Vatican's image."

A pope's words, Messori added, should be available to all free of charge, and to "cash in in this way surrounds the clergy with the odour of money".

A Vatican spokesman told the Times that the Holy See had to defend itself against "pirated editions". He added that the move was also aimed at preventing "premature publication", as the Vatican often released text to journalists under embargo, and did not want that text published before the embargo period ended.

Perhaps the Vatican is asserting its copyright less aggressively today. There is, however, no evidence to suggest that it is.

Certainly its actions of three years ago were not in the spirit of open access. As OA advocate Peter Suber commented at the time: "Not only is the Vatican abandoning free access and distribution for papal documents. It's abandoning any equivalent of 'fair use' and it's doing all this retroactively as well as prospectively. It's hard to believe that the Vatican will gain more than it loses from this. I predict not only ridicule and dissent, which have already started, but litigation and a huge increase in pirated editions — roughly in the way that a prohibition on flag burning would stimulate flag burning. And does the Vatican really need money more than impact?"

The problem the Vatican faces, of course, is that (as Suber implied) in the age of the Internet it is very hard to prevent copyright infringement. The BAV's 2002-2003 annual report acknowledged as much (in a section entitled Copyright and Property Rights): "No news on this front, the problems are still the same, and have to deal with individuals who still seem not accept the property rights of the images and most of all with Institutions: publishers, universities, libraries, etc. not always respecting the law in force."

The fact is that unless a copyright owner is prepared to be as ruthless as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in suing people there appears to be little that can be done to prevent copyright infringement in a digital environment. And the Vatican would surely not want to go down that road.

All in all, perhaps it is time for the Vatican to embrace the more liberal access approaches advocated by the OA and Creative Commons movements.

Open Access: Rethinking Harvard

Last week the architect of Harvard’s Open Access (OA) policy, Stuart Shieber stated: “the Harvard open-access policy could not be, should not be, and is not a mandate.” What are the implications of this for the OA movement in the US?

When in February 2008 it was announced that Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) had voted unanimously for a resolution to introduce an OA policy Library Journal called it “a shot heard ‘round the academic world.”

Viewed by nearly everyone as the resolution that saw the first Open Access mandate introduced in a US university, the FAS proposal called for all researchers to provide Harvard with “permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles”, and to “provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge [in order that] the Provost’s Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository.”

Since its aim was to ensure that all faculty papers were made freely available on the Internet, the policy was widely hailed as an “historic measure”.  Importantly, it seemed to be exactly the kind of policy that the OA movement had long been calling on universities to introduce.

And while it was not the first such university-level policy in the world, OA advocate Peter Suber pointed out, it was nevertheless “the first in the US, the first to be adopted by faculty rather than administrators, the first adopted policy to focus on permissions rather than deposits, and the first to catch the worldwide attention of the press and blogosphere.”

Certainly the fact that a faculty in a university as prestigious as Harvard had taken such a step was viewed as highly significant, and the news was immediately held to be a major breakthrough for the OA movement. It was also assumed that the policy would be widely emulated by others.

And indeed FAS’ OA policy has proved highly influential. Not only have three further such resolutions emerged from Harvard itself (and a fifth appears to be in the works), but similar resolutions have been successfully passed at Stanford School of Education, at MIT, and at a growing number of other US universities, as well as at universities around the world, including University College in London.

As evidence of its significance, OA advocate Stevan Harnad pointed out to Nature recently that the number of OA policies introduced since the Harvard resolution was passed has “almost doubled globally.” 

Not what it appears?

But what has generally been glossed over, or entirely ignored, is the fact that the Harvard policy is non-binding: So far as giving Harvard permission to distribute their papers is concerned, for instance, any FAS researcher can request a waiver, and be confident that the request will be granted automatically. Moreover, there is no requirement on faculty to deposit papers in the repository, although they are encouraged to do so.

In short, the Harvard policy is not what it appears, or at least it is not what it is represented as. Despite frequent claims to the contrary, for instance, Harvard does not have an OA mandate. After all, if any FAS researcher can obtain an automatic waiver, and there is no requirement to deposit, there is no sense in which the policy could be described as compulsory, and thus mandatory.

This truth was conceded last week by the architect of the Harvard policy, Stuart Shieber. As he put it on his blog The Occasional Pamphlet, “the Harvard open-access policy could not be, should not be, and is not a mandate. I’ve tried to be very careful never to refer to it as a mandate (though I can’t promise I’ve never slipped up).”

Others have surely slipped up: A  press release put out by Harvard last May announcing that the Law Faculty had subsequently also voted for an OA policy, for instance, described it unequivocally as a mandate.

Why is the Harvard policy not mandatory? Because, explains Shieber on his blog, when push comes to shove no one can compel faculty to do anything they don’t want to. “As any dean will tell you, there is no such thing as a mandate on faculty. One could stipulate a policy that all faculty must wear crimson at monthly faculty meetings; the only result would be benign neglect of the requirement by most faculty and assiduous wearing of blue by a small group interested in tweaking the administration. Trust me.”

Does it matter whether an OA policy is technically a mandate? Harnad suggests not: The word mandate, he says, “means both to ‘legislate’ and to ‘legitimize’.”

Presumably Harnad would therefore argue that the Harvard policy is indeed a mandate.

Even if it does include a waiver, Harnad suggests, by legitimising self-archiving the Harvard policy will encourage faculty to do something that until now they have assiduously chosen not to do.

In other words, it doesn’t matter whether it’s called an OA policy or a mandate – so long as it persuades researchers to make their work freely available.

Fudging

But is there not a danger of fudging the issue here? While I make no claims to be a lexicographer, no definition of the word mandate I can find suggests that it also means to legitimise. Rather, the consensus seems to be that, in the words of the Merriam–Webster dictionary, a mandate is, “an authoritative command; especially: a formal order from a superior court or official to an inferior one.”

And if one goes back to the Latin root of the word (courtesy of Perseus’ digital version of the canonical Latin Dictionary at Tufts University), one finds that the verb mando means “to commit to one's charge, to enjoin, commission, order, command.”

Of course one can always argue about the meaning of words, and I don’t meant to be overly pedantic. But this isn’t only a question of semantics. In calling for mandates OA advocates have always assumed (or certainly implied) that self-archiving would need to be made compulsory, not simply legitimised.

And they did so for a good reason: mandates are necessary, they rightly argued, because researchers won’t self-archive voluntarily, however legitimate they believe it might be to do so.

As Harnad frequently puts it, “surveys show that only 15% of authors will self-archive unless it is mandated. Just requesting or recommending deposit does not work. Deposit analyses comparing mandated and unmandated self-archiving rates have shown that mandates (and only mandates) work, with self-archiving approaching 100% of annual institutional research output within a few years. Without a mandate, IR content just hovers for years at the spontaneous 15% self-archiving rate.”

Carrots and sticks

This is not just supposition, as Harnad points out. There is hard evidence to support the claim that non-mandatory policies are invariably unsuccessful. We know, for instance, that for so long as the NIH Public Access Policy remained a request compliance levels were derisory.

When the policy was upgraded to a requirement, however, deposits immediately began to grow rapidly. As an NIH spokesperson put it to me recently, since the policy became mandatory, “Compliance has increased almost 250% ... It has jumped from 19% of our target estimate 80,000 papers per year arising from NIH funds during the voluntary policy to almost half (49%) of the target estimate of papers arising from NIH funds at the end of 2008.”

That said, while Harvard’s policy is not a mandate it has at least shifted the emphasis from opt-in to opt-out. The question is, will this be sufficient to ensure greater compliance than a voluntary policy? If so, how much greater?

Of course, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, so perhaps we shouldn’t prejudge the matter. For now we don’t know what level of compliance the Harvard policy might achieve. And since – nearly eighteen months after Harvard’s OA policy was agreed – its repository has yet to be made publicly available we have no idea how many papers are currently being deposited.

So far as Shieber is concerned, however, Harvard’s policy is the best that can be hoped for at the university level. “I am not claiming that there can be no true open-access mandates on faculty,” he says. “Rather, such mandates must come from outside academia. Funders and governments can mandate open access because they can, in the end, refuse to fund noncompliers. They have a stick. All a university, school, or dean has, in the end, is a carrot.”

The trouble is that if it is not possible to impose mandates at university level in the US the OA movement faces a worrying obstacle. It is also confronted with an awkward question: As Harvard-style policies propagate across North America might the movement discover that its boat has developed a leak under the waterline?

All in all, for the moment OA advocates in the US might be better to focus their energies on persuading research funders and the US government to impose mandates, and not allow themselves to be distracted by the string of announcements coming out of universities, some of which are undoubtedly more hot air than substance.

For this reason initiatives like the recently re-introduced Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) are doubtless of much greater potential significance.

If successful, the FRPAA would require all US agencies with research budgets of $100 million or more to ensure that the output of any research they fund is made freely available within six months of publication. And we can be confident that the FRPAA will arm these agencies with a stick, not a carrot.

Certainly anyone who believes that university-level OA policies are on the verge of sparking a revolution in the US might need to rethink the matter. And in the process, they may have to conclude that the current poster child of the OA movement is not all it claims to be.

On the other hand, Harvard might yet surprise us all!