The Open Access Interviews: Professor Jack Meadows

Jack Meadows

Photo provided by Dr Ramaiah

Any movement dedicated to changing long-established ways of doing things is likely to engender a heated debate, and a debate that inevitably produces polarised views. Thus it is with the Open Access (OA) movement.

But what is distinctive about the OA debate is that it has produced not a simple juxtaposition of those who support the old and those who support the new. It is more complex than that.

On one side of the OA rift, of course, are the traditional subscription publishers. They are determined to protect their business interests, and fearful that OA might threaten the high levels of profitability to which they have become accustomed.

On the other side, however, is to be observed not a single movement (or even a single OA organisation), but rather a disparate collection of factions — all of whom want change, all of whom are passionate in their advocacy for OA, but most of whom end up constantly disagreeing with one another — about objectives, about strategy, and even about definitions.

In fact, the more passionate OA advocates tend to disagree with one another even more violently than they do with their publisher opponents. And the resulting internecine warfare has only intensified as publishers have begun reluctantly to provide OA — because in doing so publishers are invariably providing it in ways, and at a cost, that pleases some OA advocates while displeasing others.

The debate is further complicated by the fact that much of the discussion about OA tends to lack historical perspective. It is also frequently based on unfounded claims and unfulfillable expectations, on all sides. 

Potential quagmire

One consequence of all this is that politicians and bureaucrats are frequently confused when trying to work out what to do about OA. This can lead to badly-thought-through and controversial policies, which appears to be what happened with the Finch Report — now official UK government policy — and the subsequent OA policy announced by Research Council’s UK (RCUK) last July. RCUK’s new policy was immediately attacked from all directions.

The upshot is that OA must be viewed as a potential quagmire for universities, for research funders and for politicians. The problem they face is that it is no longer possible not to respond to the clamour for OA. Yet the wrong response can end up making matters worse. It does not help that the abundance of advisers and consultants willing to offer advice on OA invariably have their own agenda, and often a vested interest in a particular outcome.

All in all, one is left wondering if there is anyone in the world able to provide an objective assessment of the current state of play of scholarly communication and its likely future development, including OA’s role in that development.

But perhaps there is someone. What about Jack Meadows, Emeritus Professor of Library and Information Studies at Loughborough University?

Before retiring in 2001 Meadows was, at different times in his academic career, a physicist, an astronomer, an information scientist, and a historian of science. During that time he also ran a number of different academic departments, and was both a Dean and a Pro-Vice Chancellor. In addition, he is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, and Permanent Vice-President of the Library Association. And we could mention in passing that he has an asteroid named after him too — asteroid 4600 Meadows to be precise.

Vitally, Meadows has devoted a great deal of time during his life to thinking about and researching the history of scholarly communication.

“Jack Meadows’ contributions to the study of the history of science, and of scholarly publishing trends are outstanding,” says Charles Oppenheim, who took over as head of the Library and Information Statistics Unit at Loughborough University when Meadows retired. “He was involved in the very earliest experiments with ejournals, and his book Communication in Science is a model of how to write a well-researched but fascinating history. He also edited The Origins of Information Science, which is also a model history.”

In total, Meadows has published some 250 articles and 24 books, including (as noted by Oppenheim) Communication in Science and Communicating Research. And he continues to research and write on such matters in retirement.

No particular dream to sell

Who better then to offer an objective assessment of the revolution sweeping through the world of scholarly communication, and to do so with an informed historical perspective? Importantly, although he has observed the development of OA over the years, Meadows is not an advocate for any specific form of OA. As such, he has no particular dream to sell, and no horse in the OA race.

Moreover, Meadows is no dry academic without any understanding of the beatings of the human heart, or the need for moderation in the pursuit of one’s goals. And he is able and willing to dispense sound advice. Meadows, says Oppenheim, is “a very wise and supportive man who has time for everyone.”

Former Loughborough student  Chennupati Ramaiah — who now heads up the Department of Library and Information Science in Pondicherry University, India — can testify to the soundness of Meadows’ advice.

“Professor Meadows is a true human being, and an excellent teacher, researcher and administrator. He is the only person who told me not to work too much, and advised me to go on holiday so that I could recharge my batteries. This helped me work more effectively, and allowed me to get my PhD degree in on time.”

Doubtless a few overheated OA advocates could benefit from such wise counsel. And those participating in some of the more fervid online exchanges about OA could surely profit from a dose of Meadows’ humour. “He has a dry wit (his corny jokes are famous),” explains Oppenheim. Readers will perhaps spot this trait in some of the answers Meadows gives in the interview below.

One is also inclined to suggest that some of the more confused politicians and funders could do worse than give Meadows a call and ask for some advice.

But let’s give Ramaiah the last word on Jack Meadows. “Professor Meadows thinks deeply and explains simply”, he says, “Three people have had a lasting influence on my life: My Guruji, Bhagavan Sri Viswayogi Viswamjee Maharaj — who has assisted me in my spiritual life — Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, who has provided me with a role model in my daily life, and Professor Meadows, who has been a true mentor for me in my research and teaching activities.”

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If you wish to read the interview with Jack Meadows, please click on the link below. 

 

I am publishing the interview under a Creative Commons licence, so you are free to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you credit me as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use it for any commercial purpose. 

 

To read the interview (as a PDF file) click HERE.

Open Access: A Tale of Two Tables

In an article published recently by the American Institute of Biological Sciences, Colin Macilwain concludes “If the open-access story started as a battle between open-access advocates and publishers, it seems to have morphed into a feud between gold and green open access, which cuts out the publishers.”

There is something in what Macilwain says, although in truth there has always been disagreement within the OA movement, and sometimes bitter wrangling between those who espouse Green OA and those who espouse Gold OA.

But there is no doubt that the publication last year of the Finch Report has brought a new intensity to this inter-movement discord, particularly after the UK Minister of State for Universities and Science David Willetts accepted all bar one of the Finch recommendations — making the Finch view official UK government policy on OA. This saw Research Councils UK (RCUK) immediately introduce a new OA policy in order to comply with Finch, a policy that will come into effect on 1^st April.

RCUK’s new policy has had the effect of rekindling and intensifying a number of disagreements within the OA movement, including a disagreement over the relative merits of so-called libre and gratis OA (the RCUK Policy requires that where authors pay for Gold OA their paper must be published under a CC-BY licence to allow reuse), and a disagreement over what constitutes an appropriate embargo length when researchers opt for Green OA (the RCUK Policy specifies either 6 or 12 months, depending on the research field). 

But above all, as Macilwain noted, the new policy has reignited a long-standing disagreement between advocates of Green and Gold OA, especially over whether one form of OA should ever be prioritised over another (The RCUK policy controversially prefers Gold over Green, either pure Gold or Hybrid OA).

Historically, there was a consensus within the OA movement that it was not realistic to try and strong-arm researchers into publishing in OA journals, although you could mandate them to self-archive (Green OA).

Unfortunately, ambiguity over the precise requirements of the new policy has also led to considerable confusion and concern, not just over what the policy requires, but whether in its preference for Gold OA the UK is moving in step with other countries, or taking a risky new direction that could cost the country dear.

This confusion is graphically represented by two different tables that were drawn up to show how the UK policy compares with other OA policies around the world — one published by the RCUK (here) and one published by OA advocacy group SPARC Europe (here).

Strikingly, although both tables were intended to show the same thing, they offer a very different picture of the RCUK policy vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

The OA Interviews: Ashry Aly of Ashdin Publishing

When in 2008 Jeffrey Beall — a metadata librarian at the University of Colorado Denver — began to receive spam email solicitations from unknown Open Access (OA) publishers he became concerned.

Ashry Aly

Issues of spam aside, Beall suspected that some of the companies that were bombarding him with invitations to pay them to publish a scholarly paper were little more than vanity publishers, intent not on publishing high-quality peer-reviewed journals, but on ensnaring unwary researchers into paying for a shoddy service.

The suspicion was that in some cases these publishers were effectively doing little more than dumping papers on the web with little or no peer review. Yet they were charging authors hundreds of dollars to do this. (And in some cases $1,000+).

Conscious that the number of these publishers was growing, and convinced that researchers needed some guidance to help them distinguish between good and bad OA journals, Beall began to compile a list of what he termed “predatory publishers”.

“Predatory publishers,” he explained to me last year, “are those that unprofessionally exploit the gold open-access model for their own profit.”

Beall’s list was controversial from the start, not least because it was often not clear on what basis he had concluded that a publisher was predatory. Moreover, when last year he finally published the selection criteria he uses to make his decisions he met with some angry criticism, with researchers questioning both their validity and usefulness.

It also became apparent that Beall’s list included publishers who appeared to be entirely ethical, and to all intents and purposes keen to publish high-quality OA journals. To add to critics’ distrust, publishers’ names would sometimes disappear from Beall’s list without explanation.

Nevertheless, as it became increasingly evident that researchers were indeed being targeted by unscrupulous OA publishers, Beall and his list began to attract the attention of the scholarly press.

Last year, for instance, his activities were featured twice in The Chronicle of Higher Education (here and here), as well as in The Times Higher, The Scientist, and most recently in Nature.

The OA Interviews: Harvard’s Stuart Shieber

Stuart Shieber is the Welch Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, Faculty Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Director of Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC),  and chief architect of the Harvard Open Access (OA) Policy — a 2008 initiative that has seen Harvard become a major force in the OA movement.

When in 1989 Stuart Shieber became a Harvard faculty member he was, for reasons he never fully understood, appointed to a series of library committees. Whatever the reason for his appointment, it was to prove an educational experience: As he sat through the various committee meetings, Shieber began to see the world through the lens of the library, a perspective that led him to the inevitable conclusion that there was something amiss in the world of scholarly communication.

Stuart Shieber

As he puts it, “[I]t became increasingly clear to me that some of the problems that libraries faced in dealing with providing access to the scholarly literature were not library problems per se, but rather, problems in how the scholarly communication systems are set up.”

This is worth noting because when researchers face difficulties accessing scholarly journals they tend to assume that something has gone awry in the library, not that there is a fundamental flaw in the way research is communicated.

It was only in sitting through all those library committee meetings that Shieber came to realise the research community had a serious problem on its hands, a problem moreover that could only be expected to get worse unless action was taken. And it was clear to Shieber that researchers themselves would need to play their part in resolving the problem.

Stated simply, the problem is this: When researchers publish their papers, they routinely sign over the commercial exploitation rights in them to the publisher. The publisher then packages a bunch of papers together and sells them back to the research community in the form of a journal subscription. While publishers undoubtedly add some value to the end product, researchers do most of the work — not just in authoring the papers in the first place, but also in peer reviewing their colleagues’ papers (without charge). Yet, as any librarian will tell you, subscription charges are inexcusably high, and getting higher each year.

In short, publishers are overcharging for scholarly journals. And since it is they who pay the bills, it was librarians who first sounded the alarm. However, since the costs do not come from their budgets, and journals are made available in institutions on a free-at-the-point-of-use basis, most researchers have been unaware of the seriousness of the problem. For their part, publishers have consistently denied that they are overcharging.

Why are journals so expensive? They are expensive for a number of reasons, but mainly because there is a disconnect in the scholarly journal market: that is, the people who pay the journal subscriptions are not the people who use the journals. As we shall see, this means that there is no effective market mechanism to control prices.

And as the number of papers published continues to grow, and libraries face ever greater pressure on their budgets, so the struggle to provide faculty with access to all the papers they need has become ever more serious. This phenomenon is now generally referred to as the “serials crisis”.

As I hope will become apparent, it helps to see the serials crisis as a double-headed problem. As libraries are forced to cancel more and more journals each year, researchers face a growing accessibility problem. However, this accessibility problem is merely a symptom of the deeper problem — what one might call the affordability problem. The key challenge, of course, is to find a solution.

Open Access

Over the years various solutions to the serials crisis have been proposed. However, the one that has gained the greatest mindshare is Open Access (OA). And it is no surprise that librarians played a key role in the development of the OA movement — not least by co-founding the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) in 1998, and constantly promoting the merits of OA.

Essentially, advocates for OA argue that all published research can and should be made freely available on the Web, either by means of green OA, in which researchers continue to publish in subscription journals but then self-archive their papers in their institutional repository (usually after an embargo period so that publishers can recover their costs), or by means of gold OA, in which researchers (or more usually their funders) pay publishers an article-processing charge (APC) to ensure that their paper is made freely available on the Web at the time of publication. The latter can be achieved either by publishing in an OA journal (the entire contents of which are made freely available), or in a hybrid journal (a subscription journal in which individual papers can be made OA if the author pays an APC).

Concluding that Open Access offered a viable solution to the double-headed problem facing the research community, Shieber began to advocate for OA at Harvard ...

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If you wish to read the interview with Stuart Shieber, please click on the link below.

I am publishing the interview under a Creative Commons licence, so you are free to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you credit me as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use it for any commercial purpose. 

To read the interview (as a PDF file) click HERE.

Interview with the Scholarly Kitchen’s Kent Anderson

From the moment it was conceived, PubMed Central was controversial, and it has remained controversial ever since. The brainchild of Harold Varmus — the then director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) — the idea for PubMed Central was first mooted in 1999, but originally called E-BIOMED.

Kent Anderson

When Varmus published his initial proposal, publishers quickly concluded that it posed a serious threat to their livelihoods. Specifically, they were convinced that, if E-BIOMED went ahead, the US government would become a publisher, and they would be disintermediated as a result. So they launched a firestorm of protest.

Their protest delivered results. When the service was launched eight months later it had been re-branded as PubMed Central, and was a pale shadow of the revolutionary new “electronic publications” system that Varmus had envisioned. Significantly, Varmus had had to concede that publishers would have final say on whether the papers they published were put into PubMed Central — and most publishers chose not to participate.

Varmus later conceded that he had been naïve not to have anticipated the furore. “I must have known that I was not going to be at NIH for much longer,” he 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.”

Nevertheless, it was soon apparent that NIH did not intend to give up on its dream of having a large free full-text archive of biomedical and life science papers, along the lines of the physics preprint server arXiv. This resolve was only strengthened when, two years later, the Open Access (OA) movement came into being. The tide of history, it seemed, was flowing in NIH’s direction.

Socialized science

In 2004, therefore, Varmus’ successor at the NIH Elias Zerhouni published a draft policy entitled “Enhanced Public Access to NIH Research Information. The aim was to persuade researchers to post their papers in PubMed Central.

One again, publishers objected. In a 2004 editorial penned in the Chemical & Engineering News, for instance, C&N Editor-in-Chief Rudy Baum complained, “Zerhouni’s action is the opening salvo in the open-access movement's unstated, but clearly evident, goal of placing responsibility for the entire scientific enterprise in the federal government's hand. Open access, in fact, equates with socialized science.”

For publishers the nightmare scenario was that research funders would gradually squeeze them out of the process of disseminating research. After all, the papers published in scholarly journals are written by researchers, and the peer review process is conducted by researchers — at no charge to publishers. In the age of the Internet, some were beginning to conclude, the need for publishers was beginning to look moot. At the very least, they reasoned, the role that publishers play could be reduced in an online world. This would help ease the burden on the public purse, which many believed was being gouged by publishers charging excessive journal prices.

But this time publisher opposition did not succeed. In May 2005 the NIH introduced its Public Access Policy. While this was initially only a request that researchers post NIH-funded papers in PubMed Central, it was later upgraded to a demand, and today researchers are required “to submit all final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication.”

Publishers continued to mutter about the Public Access Policy, but they had to learn to live with it. And faced with growing calls for research papers to be made freely available, many also began to experiment with OA.

But last year their fears of being disintermediated were reignited, when three large research funders — the Wellcome Trust, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and the Max-Planck Society — announced plans to launch their own OA journal, eLife.

Since the funders indicated that they would not initially be charging a publication fee, publishers complained that it was anti-competitive. Writing on the Nature newsblog on the day of the announcement, for instance, Nature’s Declan Butler commented, “[F]rom what we know so far from today’s press conference, this new journal appears to offer few tangible novel innovations and may indeed disrupt the thriving open access environment. Its decision not to charge author fees, at least in the journal’s short and medium term, in fact could risk setting back the cause of open-access publishing by undermining — through what might be considered unfair competition — economically successful open access publishers”.

And when at the end of October, eLife announced that it had published its first few articles, critics were angered to see that the papers had been hosted not on the journal’s own website, but on PubMed Central.