In the Winter 2002 issue of the PSP Bulletin (from the Professional Scholarly Publishing division of the AAP), Pieter Bolman of Elsevier has a brief editorial argument against open access and specifically against the Public Library of Science. This issue has already mailed in hardcopy but is not yet online. (When the online version is ready, it should be available here.)
Bolman has three specific arguments. (1) Asking the author or author's sponsor to pay the costs of dissemination might corrupt the peer-review system. (2) Open-access literature is not assured of long-term preservation. (3) If publishers didn't hold the copyrights on articles, then they couldn't afford to digitize their back runs; the cost of seeking all the separate permissions would be prohibitive.
Here are three quick replies. (1') We don't know how PLoS will do this, but BMC doesn't ask authors or their sponsors to pay the dissemination fee until after an article is accepted. (2') Commercial publishers of priced electronic journals do not provide for their long-term preservation unless they see future market potential in it. Libraries, who traditionally perform this function by more inclusive criteria, are generally prohibited from doing it by the licensing terms imposed by publishers, for example, terms that prohibit libraries from migrating content to new formats and media to keep it readable as technologies change. By contrast, open access gives all the permissions needed for long-term preservation in advance, without charge. See my recent article on the permission crisis for more detail. (3') It's true but irrelevant that digitization would be prohibitively expensive if we had to ask permission of all the authors of all the articles in all the back issues. If Bolman is suggesting that publishers or digitizers would face this expense if we'd had open access all these years, then he's clearly mistaken, even if we disregard the fact that open-access literature is digital from birth. Open access means never having to hunt down the copyright holder to ask permission. Copyright holders who consent to open access consent in advance to all uses of their work other than distributing mangled or misattributed versions. Transferring copyright and permitting toll-access aggravates the digitization problem for everyone but the publisher and aggravates all other permission problems as well. Open access removes permission barriers just as it removes the barrier of price.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/27/2003 02:23:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
