Open Access News

To Sally Morris's post on the SOAF list saying that she has "difficulty envisaging how the 'no-fee' OA model, dependent on (conscious or not) institutional or other subsidy, could possibly scale", Matt Cockerill responded:

"I think a reasonable analogy here would be to ask: can a road system scale without charging tolls? I think it is clear that road systems can scale without tolls. But on the other hand, tolls can certainly play a role, and play a bigger role in some countries than others. Non-toll roads can't be written off simply as 'unsustainable'...." End of quote.

We could take this road analogy further. Roads are not paid for by tolls at every turn, as that would disrupt the flow of traffic (though the technology to introduce just that via satellite tracking is advancing fast). So tolls are only used for 'premium' roads (and tunnels, bridges, et cetera). Instead, the vast majority of the road infrastructure is usually paid for by state subsidies, which in turn, we must assume, are funded by road taxes and fuel excise taxes. These excise taxes are interesting, because it means that there is already an element of 'user pays', as more road usage means more fuel consumption means more excise tax paid. But that user-related charge is just part of the road payment structure. Every potential road user also pays via road tax, levied on the owners of cars whether they use them or not. They pay for access.

Would something like that work in science publishing? And would it be desirable?  To a degree, and in a way, the road tax simile is already there. Institutions pay for subscriptions for potential users. It's a 'just-in-case' provision. They pay for access, not usage. It is often said that payment for usage would be fairer. But we have to be very clear as to what usage and who the user actually is. It's certainly not just the reader. It's definitely also the author, who uses publication in a journal to give his article the formal status he needs for career advancement and impact. And it's also the institution itself, depending for recognition and reputation on the formal publication record of its research population.

So it would be fair were they all to pay their share....Could the reader-side charge and the author-side charge perhaps be rolled up into a single charge, on an institutional level?...Would it be possible to come up with a charge that reflects the total usage of a journal, by its readers as well as its authors, in a given institute? A way to sustain the formal peer-reviewed journal literature that balances the need to publish (publish or perish) with the need to have access (read or rot)? Or would it be a road to nowhere?

Comment. I like Jan's question and don't have an answer. But I do have my own road analogy to throw in. One objection to OA mandates for publicly-funded research is that it's wrong to spend public money on goods used by only a subset of the population. My response: On this argument, it would be wrong to spend public money on roads, since most citizens never drive on a given mile of any road. (Likewise, most citizens never visit any given post office, public library, national park, or Senatorial bathroom. Most never check out a given book from any public library.) The fact that most citizens will never drive on a given mile of a given road is not a reason to withhold public funding from the road or to stop mandating "open access" to every mile of it. If a road will be useful at all --ruling out the pork-barrell roads to nowhere--, then every citizen is a potential user of every mile and it's good policy to serve all who find that they need service. When this argument prevails and the road is publicly-funded, then every citizen has prepaid the tolls and deserves access rights, whether or not they exercise these rights. Moreover, I benefit when people across the country from me can get where they need to go, just as I benefit when my doctor has access to literature that I don't read or wouldn't understand. Finally, open access for everyone is even less expensive to provide than the tollbooths and authentication machinery needed to provide open access to some and toll access to others.