Open Access News

The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) has released its November 20 letter commenting on the draft open access policy from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Excerpt:

STM wishes to register our concerns with two aspects of your proposed draft policies in respect of access to research articles: [1] An embargo period of six months, [2] The absence of any provision for financial support of those authors who wish to publish in journals offering immediate open access.

For our member publishers, making access to research articles free at any point after – or even upon – publication presupposes a means of recovering revenues that allow the journal to exist. To make articles free to read upon publication means that funds equal to 100% of the “pay to read” revenues have to be found from another source: be it government subsidy, charitable donations or publication charges. Of these three options, only one is potentially sustainable and scalable for the estimated 23,000 active learned journals published worldwide and involves publication charges (equal to potential lost revenues) paid either directly by the author or indirectly by the funder of the piece of research. This model has been adopted by a number of funding agencies, especially the Wellcome Trust in the UK, who are prepared to pay a fee for immediate free access. CIHR does not propose to do this.

An alternative route to open access involves making the article freely available online following publication after some embargo period, typically six, twelve or more months in duration. This approach assumes that an article has little value after its embargo period. This is a dangerous and fallacious assumption....

Many commentators have argued that all these arguments are invalidated if the deposited item is the peer-reviewed author manuscript version. They base this assessment upon the assumption that to date no journals have been cancelled because such author manuscript versions were made freely available on the internet. Leaving aside the potential human harm that might result (through injudicious use of non-final, non-copy-edited drafts of medical papers with potentially fatal errors in drug dosages and the like), there is now hard evidence that for many libraries availability of the peer-reviewed author manuscript is good enough and will lead to cancellations and that a 6-month embargo will have very little impact on such cancellations.

STM is sure that the consequences of this scenario will be immediately apparent to CIHR: deposit of “good enough” copies in repositories will lead to cancellations and the eventual demise of the journal upon which their peer-reviewed status depended. Such parasitism puts all peer-reviewed journals at risk, which we are sure was never the intention of the authors of the CIHR policy....

Comments.

1. I've answered all of these objections before, for example, in my 10-point rebuttal to the AAP's objections to FRPAA.  Here I'll only add a few points.
2. I actually agree that the CIHR should let grantees who publish in OA journals use grant funds to pay publication fees (if any) at those journals.  However, funders needn't offer what the publishers demand and it could be disastrous to use the proposed STM criterion of replacing a publisher's "lost revenue" without regard to the publisher's efficiency or profit margin.
3. A six month embargo is already a compromise with the public interest in immediate access to publicly-funded research.  The STM wants the embargo to last as long as the long tail of diminishing downloads continues --essentially forever.  If we're playing this game, namely, give me everything without compromise, how about giving the public interest everything instead?  If not, then six months is a good compromise.  The CIHR's mission is to serve the public by advancing research, not to serve publisher revenue first and the public second.
4. If you follow the footnote I omitted in the excerpt above, the "hard evidence" that OA archiving will lead to journal cancellations is the new (November 8, 2006) study by Chris Beckett and Simon Inger for the Publishing Research Consortium.  This is a study of librarians' hypothetical preferences, not actual cancellation decisions or even librarian preferences as modulated by consultation with faculty.  In short, it's not hard evidence that the CIHR draft policy will increase cancellations.  Less hypothetical studies, like Mark Ware's March 2006 study for ALPSP, show that high journal prices far surpass OA archiving as a cause of journal cancellations, and hence that publishers have to get their own house in order before they object to actions by researchers, libraries, and funding agencies to solve the problem that publishers are aggravating.  (My usual disclaimer applies:  high-volume OA archiving might really increase cancellations, but there's no hard evidence yet that it will, and abundant evidence to the contrary in physics; and even if OA archiving does increase cancellations, it is still justified.) 
5. Did you notice how threats to subscription journals became threats to "all peer-reviewed journals"?  Here are two tiresome canards at work:  first, the assumption that harm to existing subscription journals or publishers is harm to peer review, and second, the assumption that open-access journals don't perform peer review.