Open Access News

T. Scott Plutchak, A Heretic in Charleston, T. Scott, November 13, 2006.  Excerpt:

I was trying to figure out a theme to use for my comments at the panel discussion in Charleston on Friday.  Anthony Watkinson had done a superb job of framing a series of questions for us to respond to during the session "Open Access - Beyond Declarations"....Among other things, Anthony asked, Is the achievement of Open Access to (all) scholarly communication a moral imperative, or is it one where advantages and disadvantages have to be weighed and evidence adduced?

The open access moralism on the part of some of the partisans has been extremely damaging to the entire discussion, so I ended up characterizing myself as perhaps an Open Access Heretic, pointing out that, "Martin Luther continued to believe in Jesus.  He just quit believing in the Pope."  That's a fair metaphor for the evolution of my views.

When one takes the strong moralistic approach, the open access all or nothing approach, and treats it as if it is the most important issue in scholarly publishing, then one is essentially absolved from the difficult consideration of social costs.  If one feels that the social benefits of open access are clearly and completely overwhelming, then one is compelled to push for whatever solutions might point in that direction and let the chips fall where they may.   But to righteously ignore the fact that some of those chips may fall very heavily indeed is irresponsible....

I tried to illustrate this with the "taxpayer rights" argument.  In a mom and apple pie kind of way, the statement that taxpayers should have immediate access to the results of federally funded research is trivially true.  But this could easily be met by having scientists write up the results of their work and post it to publicly available websites.   This, however, is clearly not what those who are making the argument would be satisfied with -- they still want the benefits of the peer review and editing processes that are part of the publication system and that are not, under the traditional system, paid for by the taxpayers.... 

Open access moralism has poisoned the debate, generated tremendous distrust, pushed people (most of whom I believe are essentially well meaning) into making tendentious and unsupportable arguments (on both sides), and made it far more difficult to build the kinds of alliances that might actually enable us to develop a social benefit calculus that could lead to positive changes that don't carry the burden of unintended negative consequences....

I hope that we've reached a point where we can do some bridge building among the various stakeholders and do the hard work of seriously analyzing the social costs & benefits of various open or enhanced access approaches....

Comment.  There are both moral and prudential (cost-benefit) arguments for OA, just as there both moral and prudential arguments against it. The moral arguments for OA don't absolve us of the need to make the prudential arguments, and to be scrupulous, and civil, in collecting and using the empirical evidence needed to support them.  But likewise, the prudential arguments don't moot or invalidate the moral arguments.  This shouldn't be surprising or controversial, since we're talking about justifications for policy change, not explanations for natural phenomena.  Arguments for and against every policy change have both moral and prudential components --pick your favorite example, from ending the war in Iraq to reducing greenhouse gas emissions or helping senior citizens pay for subscription drugs. 

In the taxpayer argument for OA, I agree with Scott that funding agencies pay for research, not for the value added by publishers (and I said so back in September 2003).  But I've also argued that there is a both a fairness argument here and an argument for spending public money in the public interest.  Those two additional layers to the taxpayer argument have irreducible moral components, even if they require patient analysis to show that fairness to taxpayers and the public interest support OA more than they support the subscription model. 

I can't tell whether Scott is saying that moral issues don't even arise in this debate or merely that arguments built on them have sometimes been abused or overstated.  If the latter, I certainly agree.  Both sides, in fact, have gotten a lot of mileage from self-righteous moral arguments and from dismissing self-righteous zealots on the other side.  I'd like to see the rhetoric on both sides disregard the worst arguments on the other side and address only the strongest --which is hard to do when the worst ones are prominently published.  But even if we could succeed at that, part of the refocused discussion would, or should, be on moral questions, like fairness to taxpayers, and part on prudential questions, like costs and benefits. 

Finally, it's incorrect to leave the impression that OA proponents haven't done serious empirical analysis of the costs and benefits of OA.  We see this in the many studies of the connection between OA and citation impact and in the growing number of studies (most recently by Houghton, Steele, and Sheehan for Australia's DEST) on the net economic benefits to a nation in providing OA to its research output.