Open Access News

There's been some chatter among my colleagues in the past week about a letter opposing FRPAA that is being circulated among the senior leadership of some of the research institutions in search of signatories.   This is clearly in response to the supporting letters signed by provosts from around the country urging passage of the act.   (The DC Principles coalition is behind the letter...).

The most recent draft that I've seen has seven signatures (including the dean of my own school of medicine), but I'm sure it will have more by the time it is sent to Senator Cornyn and made public.  Some of my colleagues have expressed surprise that senior academic officers would take the side of the publishers in this debate. 

I'm not the least bit surprised.   There's no neat divide between academia on one side and publishing on the other, particularly when you're dealing with the society publishers.  At my institution, for example, at least sixteen individuals in the medical school alone (including the dean and several department chairs) hold senior editorial positions for major scientific periodicals....

The terrain [of scholarly publishing] is being transformed and that's not going to stop.  Some journals are, indeed, going to fold, and it is disingenuous of open access partisans to argue that FRPAA and related efforts don't represent a serious threat.  The signatories of the DC Principles letter are right to be worried.  But they can't turn back the tide.  Whether FRPAA or something like it passes or not, traditional subscription-based publishing is on the wane, and societies whose economy is based on it are going to have to make radical changes in how they operate in order to survive....

I disagree with the signatories of the DC Principles letter in their opposition to FRPAA.  I have urged my Provost to sign the letter supporting it (not likely, but I gave it my best shot).  But in their concern over the well-being of the societies that they lead and participate in, I am firmly on their side and in their camp.  Yes, we need open access; but we need strong, vibrant and effective scholarly societies, playing a critical and key role in managing the scholarly communication enterprise.   

Comments.

1. I appreciate T. Scott's effort to get his provost to endorse FRPAA.  To date, 60 provosts have done so.
2. There may be OA advocates who simply assert that journals have nothing to fear from FRPAA, but I believe the currents and cross-currents are more complex.  My own position has always been (1) that high-volume OA archiving --the intended consequence of FRPAA-- might well threaten subscription journals; (2) that if we want to look at existing evidence, rather than fears or predictions, then we have to look at physics, the only field where high-volume OA archiving currently exists; (3) that in physics both the APS and the IOP admit that arXiv has caused no subscription cancellations, and in fact both publishers host arXiv mirrors; and finally (4) that if mandated OA to publicly-funded research does undermine subscriptions, then the public interest in research should take priority over the private interest in publisher revenue.
3. I fully agree with T. Scott that "traditional subscription-based publishing is on the wane, and societies whose economy is based on it are going to have to make radical changes in how they operate in order to survive...."  From this point of view, the most significant difference among publishers today is not that some are for-profit and some non-profit, or some large and some small, but that that some are focused on adaptation and some are focused on retrenchment.