Open and Shut?

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Open Access and its Discontents: A British View from Outside the Sciences

This year marks the 15th anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), the meeting that led to the launch of the open access movement, and which defined open access thus:

“By ‘open access’ to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”

A great deal of water has passed under the bridge since 2002, but as 2017 draws to an end what should the stakeholders of scholarly communication be doing now to fully realise the vision outlined at the Budapest meeting?

That is a question I have been putting to a number of people, inviting them to say what they believe the priorities should be going forward for the following stakeholders: researchers, research institutions, research funders, politicians and governments, librarians, and publishers.

Today I am publishing the response I received from Richard Fisher. Richard has worked in University Press publishing for nearly thirty-five years. At the end of 2014 he stepped down as Managing Director of Academic Publishing at Cambridge University Press, and is currently Vice-Chair of Yale University Press, a Non-Executive Director of Edinburgh University Press, and Academic and Policy Correspondent of the Independent Publishers Guild.

Richard is also a Fellow and current Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society. He was on the Advisory Board of the Crossick Report on Open Access and Monograph Publishing, and was a Senior Adviser to the AHRC/BL project on The Academic Book of the Future.

Self-evidently what follows are (entirely) his personal views, although he is extremely grateful to a trio of good friends for their comments on an initial draft.

This is what Richard had to say:

Introduction

I would describe myself as neither an Open Access (hereafter OA) advocate, nor an OA sceptic: rather I am interested in establishing the widest possible range of effective and sustainable publication options for scholars around the world.

I am innately sceptical of attempts to establish the publishing equivalent of ‘Socialism in One Country’, and regard the impact of policy-makers in the domain of scholarly communication (an arena which until the present century they generally avoided) as at times misguided and on occasion downright hostile to their nominated objectives, no matter how benign.

In that context, I have always regarded ‘taxpayer pays’ arguments for Open Access as perhaps the weakest that supporters of OA tend to marshal, and especially weak in a massively research-exporting polity like the United Kingdom, where at least 80% of the consumers of British-originated research will not have contributed direct tax revenues towards its creation.

Paradoxically, it is the nation with far more fragmented infrastructures of higher education and far less prescriptive research protocols, the United States, where such a ‘public goods’ argument might be made with rather greater force – but the fundamental point is that in a highly unequal but globalised context of knowledge exchange, the relationship between fiscal provision and research production is not (remotely) state-specific.

My own editorial career was in history, politics and the social sciences, and in books (which remain, still, a very print-centric mode of communication) rather than journals. This obviously informs my perspective on debates about Open Access, inasmuch as most of the thousands of researchers with whom I have interacted in the past tend to come at issues in scholarly communication from a very different perspective from those often at the forefront of such discussions, whether in the library, scholarly or publishing sectors.

I regard the stereotypical binary of ‘science journals’ and ‘arts monographs’ as unhelpful, in the same way as the other stereotypical binary of ‘information’ or ‘stories’ is unhelpful, neglecting as it does the place, crucially, of ideas.

In what follows, I have very largely concentrated on the researcher response, especially in the arts, humanities and less quantitative social sciences (hereafter AHSS). It is there, I think, that far and away the biggest challenges for the enhanced adoption of Open Access publishing practice lie.

I am also very conscious that this is an extended blog essay, and not the sort of statistically-supported article that would be appropriate in a more formal context: there are plenty of statistics available (not least around REF submissions, funding allocations, disciplinary size, and other claims made) for those seeking more quantitative definition!

Researchers

The Budapest Initiative is an enlightened and universalist declaration worthy of Denis Diderot and the encyclopedistes. Wherein lies its greatest ideological strength, and its biggest pragmatic weakness.

Fundamentally, far more researchers than is currently the case need to believe the BOAI to be true, valid and legitimate, and one of the inherent problems of the BOAI is the presumption that all rational women and men must see the inherent ‘rightness’ of the claims made: I simply don’t think that that presumption has ever been justified.

When I see statements by British public bodies claiming that ‘there is now universal acceptance of the principles behind Open Access’, I do sometimes wonder which planet these agencies are inhabiting.

Maybe I am being unfair, as many of the principles of Open Access would and do secure widespread support. But declarations like the BOAI, of course, go beyond access to research per se, and whilst some of the BOAI claims and principles may well be valid all of the time, and all of its claims and principles some of the time, absolutely not all of the BOAI claims and principles are valid, I would respectfully suggest, all of the time. And in this universalism continues to lie (I think) one of the biggest obstacles of all to wider voluntary OA adoption.

Achieving the BOAI Vision: Possible Actions for Realization

This year marks the 15th anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), the meeting that led to the launch of the open access movement, and which defined open access thus:

Today I am publishing the response I received from Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, Professor/ Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction in the University Library and affiliate faculty in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Lisa’s voice is interesting to have in this discussion not least because, as she says below, she has not followed all the details of the open access debate as it has played out over the past 15 years. Nor was she familiar with the wording of the BOAI, and indeed she was surprised to see the recommendation it makes on copyright. So Lisa approaches the BOAI with fresh eyes.

This is what Lisa had to say:

Prelude

When Richard invited me to contribute to this series, I had to pause for a moment and ask myself “just what was the Budapest Open Access Initiative vision?” I’m glad I stopped to check because, like many others have discovered, my impression of what it says is not exactly what it does say.

The paragraph Richard quotes above is what I am taking as the essence of the vision and thus the focus of my reflections, which runs the risk of ignoring 15 years of discussions and resulting statements. But, I think there is value in being anchored in this vision, which is necessarily reflective of the circumstances within which it was created, but is also audacious – as a vision should be – and timelessly compelling in many ways.

I think it is also important to recognize what the vision does not include – most specifically, regardless of what some might wish, the BOAI does not call for the removal of for-profit actors from the system.

For each group that Richard presented to me, I am going to identify one or two specific strategies that could be deployed to move the system closer to the BOAI vision. In my thinking, I’m suggesting widespread deployment – in most cases there are examples for the strategy I’m recommending that are underway.

Also, there are many more tactical activities that I am not mentioning in the interests of challenging myself to think about catalytic or accelerative impact and not only incremental change.

All of my recommended strategies likely come at a cost, in many cases potentially significant and I suspect in some cases unbearable. In many ways that is the challenge in achieving the BOAI vision – not whether the vision is desirable but what we are willing to sacrifice in order to achieve it.

Recommendations to Realize the BOAI Vision

One other note before I begin. I do not take as a given that all of the groups, or individuals within the groups, mentioned below want to realize the BOAI vision, particularly with respect to the last sentence about copyright.

My recommendations should be read under the rubric of “if this group wishes/individuals within the group wish to realize the BOAI vision, then …”

Researchers

Given current copyright regimes, researchers are by and large uniquely positioned as the initial decision makers around how to steward the intellectual property that comprises the scholarly literature.

As the owners, they decide. They decide within a system of constraints, reward systems, etc. (many of which could be more hospitable to open access but I will get to that in a moment). But, they decide.

Now, in fairness, it is true that funding agencies do constrain researcher choice in many cases as a condition of the funding. To my knowledge, though, none of them are demanding closed publication so acknowledging that fact does not counter the recommendation that authors faced with the option of choosing closed should choose open if they want to further open access.

Having not followed all of the details of the BOAI over the years, I was surprised to see the recommendation that researchers apply the CC-BY license to their work. (Note: This recommendation is in a follow-on and not the original statement. CC licenses had not yet been released at the time of the original statement.)

Perhaps this was seen as a more palatable recommendation than the alternatives. Nonetheless, if researchers would instead apply a CC-BY-SA license to their work, they could leverage their decisions to open their own work into pressure on others to do so as well. Given the BOAI goal of eliminating financial barriers to access, a CC-BY-NC-SA license would create further pressure within the system by preventing enclosure inside systems that create financial barriers.

Given applying a CC license does not preclude others exercising fair use rights (e.g., to cite a direct quotation in a future text) and does not prevent a rights holder from granting uses of their work that fall outside of the CC license, applying a CC-BY-SA or CC-BY-SA-NC enables a researcher to set a default of the strongest possible encouragement of open access while also protecting their own interests in enabling other uses if they chose.

It is worth noting here that researchers have the opportunity to exert influence collectively through their scholarly societies as well. Creating a culture of open access within a discipline can be leveraged for institutional change as well as serve as justification for individual choices and actions.

Research Institutions

Research institutions establish the reward systems in which researchers work. This one is pretty simple. If institutions want researchers to publish their work open access, reward them for doing so. This means in annual review, tenure, and promotion processes of course but not exclusively. It also means with respect to internal grants, access to support resources for applying for external funding, etc.

More radical would be to also “punish” those who do not publish their work open access. I’m less clear the best approach for how this might be operationalized. One could imagine a system that at least demands a justification for closed publications that are reported in an annual performance review process as well as detailed documentation on what steps were pursued in an attempt to make them open. Switching the default from closed to open, meaning that closed must be justified rather than open, would be a significant cultural shift in many settings.

Across Europe one sees an emphasis on repository deposit in performance and promotion reviews, with the most fully developed example being the UK’s HEFCE [Higher Education Funding Council for England]. HEFCE requires deposit in an institutional or subject repository for considering in the REF and REF engagement is tied to both individual employment and university support for departments.

It is worth noting though that this HEFCE requirement only extends to read, download, and search and not the full BOAI definition of open access.

The challenge for many research institutions will be executing this strategy without damaging their institutional initiatives to pursue ranking, stature, prestige, etc. One potential approach would be to align rewards and support for open access with those activities that also support institutional excellence initiatives. For example, rather than providing funding for APC fees for publications in any open access journals a researcher might publish in, an institution could direct such funding to the top ranked open access journals.

My focus here is on research intensive universities because they have the clout and influence necessary to shift the system. This is not to ignore that research occurs at other kinds of institutions but to recognize that systemic change requires strategic consideration of which groups are the actors with power.

Research Funders

Research funders make the rules for the funding they award. If they want researchers to publish the work that results from the funding as open access, they should require it, reward it, and monitor for compliance.

That is the simple answer. Research funders, however, are positioned to have a much greater impact by also attending to ensuring that open infrastructures are developed and sustainable. While some attention has been paid to open repositories for text materials, open infrastructure, particularly with respect to preservation and long-term access, for data, media, etc. is still nascent.

Politicians and Governments

In some ways, government information has been an exemplar of a kind of open access. I am of course most familiar with the government information policies in the United States. While I do have concerns about some of the privatization of government information that seems to be occurring, the government documents depositories of print materials and now Internet-based access to e-documents reflect the BOAI vision of open access – free to read, use, etc. all without copyright limitations or additional financial barriers.

Extending these practices to all publications that result from federal funding would expand open access and the framework for conceptualizing government information and the public domain.

Politicians and governments should take pride in openness to government information and allocate funding and other resources necessary to ensure that government information collections are leading the way as models for open access, including long-term preservation.

Librarians

Librarians need to start doing all of the things that they want researchers to do. Full stop.

Librarian credibility as advocates for open access is undermined when a quick review reveals that there are too many cases where the situation is “do as I say not as I do.” This applies at the individual level (e.g., depositing author manuscripts in an institutional repository) as well as at the collective (e.g., tenure and promotion guidelines within the library, an open access deposit mandate for librarians if a campus does not have one or if the campus one does not cover librarians because the librarians are staff and not faculty, or internal grants to cover APCs for librarians).

Second, librarians need to consolidate and focus their efforts. Pilot projects, experiments, etc. can bring many benefits but I’m worried that librarians are wearing themselves out with all of the activities they have going on. We are very busy, but the strategic impact isn’t commensurate to the effort.

The 2.5% Commitment proposal and resulting initiative are examples of the kind of focused effort I mean; however, investments will have to be far more radical than such a minimal amount to be powerful enough to create the paradigm shift that is envisioned in BOAI.

Publishers

For-profit publishers with Gold open access offerings funded through APC fees have in many ways been the greatest contributors to the increased number of peer-reviewed scholarly articles available for open reading, copying, etc.

There are also interesting experiments and emerging models in the non-profit sector; however, capital remains a challenge for investing in necessarily platform developments and workflow technologies.

Interestingly, I think publishers are more hopeful for – or at least resigned to – a kind of open access than librarians and researchers are. Many publishers freely observe in more casual moments that a world of openly available copies of all texts is inevitable and that the only question is whether the copies are licit or illicit (e.g., see Sci-Hub and ResearchGate). Their focus is on limiting the illicit and finding sustainable – and profitable – business models for licit.

As such, I think the greatest contribution that publishers can make to the BOAI vision is to solidify funding models that will accelerate the transformation they see as already underway and inevitable.

Moving out of the current situation of libraries paying for subscriptions to journals that include open access content (though publishers are quick to assert that the payment is only for closed content and that they do not double dip) would achieve the BOAI vision and create a more competitive market for setting APCs.

A Final Thought

As I conclude, I want to reflect on a one of reactions/critiques that I received repeatedly as I shared draft versions of this essay. I’ll summarize the reaction as “the problem is the for-profit publishers” and the critique as “why aren’t you recommending that for-profit publishers forgo profit and decrease their APC fees, etc.?”

Let me answer that question very directly. First, I would be rightly accused of being fanciful if I suggested that a for-profit should act as if it is not a for-profit. Second, and very directly relevant to this essay, the BOAI vision includes a role for for-profit publishers and what I agreed to write about was realizing the BOAI vision. As such, I constrained myself to focus on how the vision could be achieved rather than critiquing it.

Admittedly, however, the BOAI did assert that “the significantly lower overall cost of dissemination is a reason to be confident that the goal is attainable and not merely preferable or utopian.” It appears now that that confidence may have been misplaced. Cost was not equal to price in the subscription model and even non-profit publishers need revenues beyond costs in order to invest in continued platform development and business growth.

So, let me step outside the boundaries of the task put before me by Richard for a moment and offer a comment of critique. I concur with Leslie Chan that there is a great deal of evidence that “the movement appears to have been co-opted by the same publishers that have held a monopoly over global scholarly outputs, further entrenching their power and control.”

Within that reality, open access, at least with respect to reading and downloading, has made great strides since the BOAI vision was articulated. But, as visionary as the BOAI was, it appears to have been too hopeful with respect to how pricing and profit would play out.

This text is licenced CC BY-NC-SA

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The response I received to these questions from Danny Kingsley, Deputy Director of Scholarly Communication, and Head of the Office of Scholarly Communication, at Cambridge University, is available here.

A list of some of the more interesting OA developments during 2017 is available here.

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Open Access: What should the priorities be today?

This year marks the 15^thanniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), the meeting that led to the launch of the open access movement, and which defined open access thus:

Today I am publishing the response I received from Danny Kingsley, Deputy Director of Scholarly Communication & Research Services, and Head of the Office of Scholarly Communication, at Cambridge University. This is what Danny had to say:

Researchers

Researchers are under extraordinary pressure to be highly productive whilst managing large teaching loads and a considerable administrative burden. They are only rewarded for the publication of novel results in high impact journals – the remainder of their work is not systematically recognised in promotion and funding applications. Researchers are working within a reward system that is counter to the wide-scale uptake of open access. It is not necessarily up to an individual researcher to become an open access activist (although I applaud those who have). However, having a meta understanding of how the wider system works, or even that processes and norms differ by discipline would be helpful.

Research institutions

A recent article described the need for academic leaders in research institutions to ‘step up’. Traditionally research institutions have been slow to react to issues related to open access and this is understandable. Research is a global and highly competitive endeavour. It is not in the interest of a single institution to introduce operational processes that could put its own reputation or that of its research community at risk.

Having a university-wide discussion about the changing nature of scholarly communication, including open access, to determine the university’s position on various aspects of openness and reproducibility would provide a policy framework to assist the research community and their administrative support. For instance, research institutions have control over how they promote and hire researchers. Rewarding openness in these processes - by, for example, only considering articles that have been deposited in the institutional repository in a promotion round – will increase academic engagement with open access.

In addition, research institutions have a responsibility to ensure their students and early career researchers have the knowledge about, and tools to navigate, the fast-changing scholarly communication landscape. This means systematically putting in place support and training in this area rather than relying on individual supervisors. Recognition by research institutions that the people working in the area of scholarly communication are domain experts and offering professional respect would be hugely helpful in the progression of the scholarly communication discussion. Funding these roles as a central part of the institutional infrastructure is essential.

Research Funders

Funders hold the purse strings. Their policies have largely shaped open access uptake over the past 13 years (starting with the Wellcome Trust and NIH in 2004). However, simply pushing more money into the system is not a long-term solution because it allows the status quo to remain, where the power is held by the publishers of the prestigious journals that researchers need to publish in for promotion and grant success. Opening up what is ‘counted’ as a research output begins to address this – a recent push to accept preprints as research outputs by NIH and Wellcome Trust is a good step in this direction. However the reluctance of funders to be seen to be ‘telling researchers where to publish’ by, for example, refusing to officially state that Blood is a non-compliant journal for the RCUK policy is a real impediment to progress (see here)

Funders have the ability to create a new reward system. Movements to become publishers themselves, such as Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation both recently launching journals based on the F1000 platform have shown progression towards this goal. However, some in the sector have concerns that this places too much power in the hands of one stakeholder, as the decision makers of not just what research is funded, but what is published.

Something that is sorely lacking in the open space is strong support for infrastructure that underpins it. The Open Science Framework, Directory of Open Access Journals, arXiv.org and Sherpa/RoMEO are just a few examples of critical open infrastructure which is reliant on grant and sector support. This leaves these initiatives very vulnerable to being bought up and absorbed into the for-profit sector, as has been seen with several organisations and initiatives over the past couple of years. Funder support on an ongoing basis for infrastructure would be very welcome, and there has been some discussion about this approach recently, particularly in the life sciences.

Politicians and governments

Ultimately policy on public spending comes from the government. It is important that the need for openness is recognised at the highest level. It has been interesting to see how much can be achieved if the government takes a positive approach to openness such as in the Netherlands, where the open agenda, particularly in relation to research data management is exemplary.

The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Research integrity enquiry is a positive step in the UK and the findings should help inform discussion about the need for transparency in research including openness. There is also potential for more alignment of government funder policy with the imminent launch of UK Research and Innovation in April 2018.

Librarians

Libraries are currently undertaking the vast bulk of open access work, particularly in the UK. They are hosting repositories, managing the ingest of material including navigating complex and conflicting funder policies and complex and confusing publisher embargo rules. They are, in most cases in the UK, responsible for managing the grants provided by funders to meet open access policies. This includes making decisions on engagement with offsetting deals and balancing financial requirements for subscriptions. The difficulty is that much of this work is ‘hidden’ from the research community who generally remain unaware of the amount of manpower and money that is being sunk into this endeavour.

It would be hugely helpful for the debate if libraries were to collect information about how the sector interacts with the literature. A holistic view - including where the research community publishes, peer reviews and edits, plus how much is being spent on subscriptions and article processing charges balanced against the number of downloads and citations – would assist discussion about the value different publishers offer the sector.

Publishers

There have been some good examples of publisher practice in this area recently. The Springer Compact, where a fee is paid for both subscriptions and to make all research outputs from a given institution openly accessible, has considerably brought down the per-article cost to make research open for Cambridge University. In the last couple of months both Emerald and the Royal Society have made the decision to abandon embargoes for Author’s Accepted Manuscripts deposited in institutional repositories.

We need to move towards standardised infrastructure. Increasingly there is publisher uptake of the CRediT taxonomy which can assist the identification and reward of different contributions to the research paper. There has also been a strong response to the Initiative for Open Citations project although some significant publishers have yet to join. Mandating ORCIDs across all titles would assist in the identification of authors of papers.

However, overall we have not seen a shift in publisher practice towards open access. While considerably more UK research is now open access than there was even three years ago, this has come at a huge cost, both in payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs) for open access in hybrid journals and through the manpower needed to manage complicated embargo rules. If publishers genuinely do wish to engage with and support a transition to open access there needs to be:

· A reduction of APCs for hybrid to match the APCs generally charged for fully open access journals (for whom this is their only source of income)

· Raising the visibility of open access articles through hybrid which remain less discoverable than articles in fully open access journals

· Recognition that offsetting needs to occur – despite some claims that double dipping is not happening

· Improvement of the offsetting deals on offer to make them simpler and more standardised in terms of administrative management and the discount offered – potentially signing up to a sector agreed offsetting “standard”

· A standardisation of embargo periods, preferably to a 6-month STEM and 12-month HASS upper limit, and ideally no embargo at all

· Engagement with the UK Scholarly Communications License to reduce the time spent processing embargoes and the cost spent on hybrid APCs to ensure compliance with the RCUK policy

· The ‘flipping’ of journals that have a higher percentage of open access via hybrid, at which point the APC charge needs to reflect the running cost of the journal, and allow enough to provide waivers for researchers from developing countries

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A list of some of the more interesting OA developments during 2017 is available here.

Friday, October 27, 2017

The OA Interviews: Judy Ruttenberg, ARL Program Director for Strategic Initiatives/Co-Director of SHARE

When the open access movement began it was focused on solving two problems – the affordability problem (i.e. journal subscriptions are way too high, so research institutions cannot afford to buy access to all the research their faculty need), and the accessibility problem that this gives rise to.

Today, however, there is a growing sense that what really needs addressing is an ownership problem. Thus where in 2000 The Public Library of Science petition readily acknowledged publishers’ “right to a fair financial return for their role in scientific communication” (but sought to “encourage” them to make the papers they published freely available “within 6 months of their initial publication date”), today we are seeing calls for research communication to become “a community supported and owned enterprise” outside the control of publishers (see also here).

The key issue today, therefore, concerns the question of who should “own” and control scholarly communication, and more and more OA advocates are concluding that it should no longer be traditional publishers.

This change of emphasis is not surprising: as legacy publishers have sought to co-opt open access and bend it to their own needs, it has become clear that, since it is leaving legacy publishers in control, OA is insufficient on its own – because for so long as publishers remain in control the affordability problem that drove the calls for open access will not be solved. (More on this theme here).

What gives this issue greater urgency is a new awareness that legacy publishers are looking to leverage the control they have acquired over scholarly content to dominate and control the data analytics and workflow processes/tools that are emerging in the digital space – a development that could usher in a new generation of paywalls, and lock the research community into expensive proprietary services.

Issues

This then is the ownership problem facing the research community. How is it playing out in practice? The linked interview with Judy Ruttenberg, Co-Director of SHARE, surfaces the issues well I think.

SHARE (the SHared Access Research Ecosystem) was launched in response to a 2013 memorandum issued by the US Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) directing Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to “develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication and [require] researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research.”

SHARE was an expression not just of librarians’ conviction that publicly-funded research should be freely available, but an assertion that it should be universities that provide access to it. As Ruttenberg puts it below, SHARE was founded in the belief that “university-administered digital repositories should be the mechanism by which federal agencies provide public access to funded research, most of which is conducted in universities.”

To read the Q&A please click here.

As is my custom, I have prefaced the interview with a long introduction. However, those who only wish to read the Q&A need simply click on the link at the head of the file and go directly to it.

Thursday, October 12, 2017

Q&A with PLOS co-founder Michael Eisen

Last month I suggested on Twitter that the open access movement has delayed the revolution in scholarly communication that the internet made possible. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my tweet attracted some pushback from OA advocates, not least from Michael Eisen, co-founder of open access publisher Public Library of Science (PLOS).

Photo: CC BY 4.0; Source here

Eisen objected strongly to my assertion and later complained that I was not willing to engage with him to defend what I had said. For my part, I did not feel it was possible to debate the issue adequately on Twitter, so we agreed to do a follow-up to our 2012 Q&A.

Last week, therefore, I emailed Eisen a Word document explaining why I had made the assertion I had, and posing 14 questions for him. I published the explanation here yesterday.

The first question in the list I sent to Eisen was: “How would you describe the way the OA movement has developed, and the impact it has had on scholarly communication? Why do you disagree that the movement has delayed open access? What is the movement’s current status and potential? What needs to be done to ensure the revolution takes place sooner rather than later?”

Eisen did not respond to this first question, I assume because he felt that his answers to the other questions addressed the points. He did, however, answer all the other questions, which I publish below.

For anyone who might not be aware, PLOS started out as an OA advocacy group, and in 2000 launched an online petition calling on scientists to pledge that they would discontinue submitting papers to journals that did not make the full text of their papers freely available (either immediately or after a delay of no more than 6 months). The petition attracted tens of thousands of signatures, but few of the signatories changed their behaviour.

In 2003, therefore, PLOS reinvented itself as an OA publisher and began to launch its own journals. Since then it has become a significant presence in the scholarly communication world.

Eisen, an evolutionary biologist who studies flies at the University of California, Berkeley, co-founded PLOS with former director of the US National Institutes of Health Harold Varmus and biochemist Pat Brown. Eisen is still on the PLOS Board.

Earlier this year Eisen announced his intention to run for the United States Senate.

The interview begins …

RP: OA advocates have long maintained that pay-to-publish gold OA will create a “true” market for scholarly communication, something the subscription model never has. As a result, they argue, the price of scholarly communication will start to fall with OA, thereby solving the affordability problem. I believe this was your view too. In 2012, for instance, you pointed out on my blog that the subscription model creates a “disconnect between the people making the decision about where to publish and the people who pay the subscription bills. This means that there is very little effect on author demand if prices go up.” You added that this inefficiency is “absent from gold OA.” Have your views on this changed in any way in the past 5 years? Do you expect pay-to-publish gold OA to eventually exert downward pressure on prices? (Contrary to Elsevier’s view that “average APCs would need to rise to fund the infrastructure currently paid for via the 80 percent of articles [still] published under the subscription model”).

ME: I still believe a service model for publishing creates a better market than the subscription model for the reasons outlined above. But it’s clearly not working as well as I would like it to. Prices have not dropped, nor seem likely to in the near future. You can point to several reasons.

· people aren’t really paying for a service, they’re paying for a brand, and the brand value of something like “Nature” swamps the actual cost of the service so it’s not really a sane market

· costs haven’t really dropped – publishing software still sucks and is expensive and the whole process requires far too much human intervention

· costs have been externalized again through deals to pay for pay charges

Even with all this being true everything’s still better if we have a world with universal APCs than one with universal subscriptions since material is no longer paywalled. But the market advantages of APCs have yet to be realized.

Has the open access movement delayed the revolution?

Last month I posted a couple of tweets that attracted some pushback from OA advocates. In the process I was accused of being a species of “Russian troll bot”, of having an unspecified “other agenda”, and then told that unless I was willing to engage in “constructive discussion” I should pipe down.

Amongst those to object to my tweets was PLOS co-founder, and feisty OA advocate, Michael Eisen (see below).

Evidently dissatisfied with my responses, Eisen declared that it was silly to make inflammatory statements on Twitter and then say that the platform is a bad place for discussions. However, after a few rounds of back and forth with my critics, I had concluded that it was not going to be possible to debate the matter in short bursts without ending up simply swapping insults. So, I proposed to Eisen that we do a follow up to the Q&A we had done in 2012.

Eisen agreed, and last week I emailed him the text below by way of explanation as to why I had made the comments I had, along with a number of questions for him to answer. I plan to publish Eisen’s answers in the next couple of days. (Now available here).

What sparked the disagreement? It began when I tweeted a link to a confessional interview that Leslie Chan had given on the OCSDnet website. Amongst other things, Chan conceded that he had, over the years, given a lot of bad advice about open access.

In posting a link to the interview I commented, “I wish all OA advocates could be this honest, rather than repeating out-dated mantras & promoting failed approaches.”

By way of background, Chan was (with Eisen) one of the small group of people who attended the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) meeting in 2002. It was from that meeting that the term open access emerged, and BOAI is viewed as the moment the OA movement came into being. As such, Chan’s confession seemed to me to be a significant moment, not least because it was made with more candour than I have come to expect from OA advocates.

OA advocate Stephen Curry responded to my initial tweet by saying, “Also true that OA has stimulated many to think seriously about & challenge current practices around research evaluation. Myself included.” To this I replied, “To some extent, I agree. But I would phrase it this way: the internet made a revolution possible, open access has delayed that revolution.”

Eisen denounced my comment as “one of the most ridiculous, misguided, and frankly ignorant statements about scholarly publishing ever.”

Anyway, below is why I said what I did in those tweets.

The Open Access Interviews: Justin Flatt on the Self-Citation Index

In a recently published paper, Justin Flatt and his two co-authors proposed the creation of the Self-Citation Index, or s-index. The purpose of the s-index would be to measure how often a scientist cites their own work. This is desirable the authors believe because current incentive systems tend to encourage researchers to cite their own works excessively.

In other words, since the number of citations a researcher’s works receive enhances his/her reputation there is a temptation to add superfluous self-citations to articles. This boosts the author’s h-index – the author-level metric now widely used as a measure of researcher productivity.

Amongst other things, excessive self-citation gives those who engage in it an unfair advantage over more principled researchers, an advantage moreover that grows over time: a 2007 paper estimated that every self-citation increases the number of citations from others by about one after one year, and by about three after five years. This creates unjustified differences in researcher profiles.

Since women self-cite less frequently than men, they are put at a particular disadvantage. A 2006 paper found that men are between 50 and 70 per cent more likely than women to cite their own work.

In addition to unfairly enhancing less principled researchers’ reputation, say the paper’s authors, excessive self-citation is likely to have an impact on the scholarly record, since it has the effect of “diminishing the connectivity and usefulness of scientific communications, especially in the face of publication overload”?

None of this should surprise us. In an academic environment now saturated with what Lisa Mckenzie has called “metrics, scores and a false prestige”, Campbell’s Law inevitably comes into play. This states that “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

Or as Goodhart’s Law more succinctly puts it, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

However, academia’s obsession with metrics, measures, and monitoring is not going to go away anytime soon. Consequently, the challenge is to try and prevent or mitigate the inevitable gaming that takes place – which is what the s-index would attempt to do. In fact, there have been previous suggestions of ways to detect possible manipulation of the h-index – a 2011 paper, for instance, mooted a “q-index”.

It is also known that journals will try and game the Impact Factor. Editors may insist, for instance, that authors include superfluous citations to other papers in the same journal. This is a different type of self-citation and sometimes leads to journals being suspended from the Journal Citation Reports (JCR).

But we need to note that while the s-index is an interesting idea it would not be able to prevent self-citation. Nor would it distinguish between legitimate and non-legitimate self-citations. Rather, says Flatt, it would make excessive self-citation more transparent (some self-citing is, of course, both appropriate and necessary). This, he believes, would shame researchers into restraining inappropriate self-citing urges, and help the research community to develop norms of acceptable behaviour.

Openness and transparency

However, any plans to create and manage a researcher-led s-index face a practical challenge: much of the data that would be needed to do so are currently imprisoned behind paywalls – notably behind the paywalls of the Web of Science and Scopus.