Now that publications are increasingly being enriched with databases and audio-visual elements, the need for non-proprietary review systems – that is, peer review systems that do not require the assignment of copyright to the organiser of the peer review i.e. the publisher - is becoming ever-more pressing. Although there is a steadily growing number of peer-reviewed Open Access journals and an active Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, the supply fails to keep pace with the demand. More and more research funders require open access to the publications that result from research they have financed. Recently the European Commission conducted a pilot initiative on open access to peer-reviewed articles in FP7, its Seventh Research Framework Programme, that may result in 100,000 reviewed articles. In so far as authors cannot all publish in Open Access journals, the EC and, for that matter, other Open Access-mandating funders impose unfair conditions on authors.
With a shift from proprietary to non-proprietary systems of peer review, initial experience has now been garnered from SCOAP and the Springer experiments at UKB, MPG, Göttingen University and, lately, California University). This conversion can be speeded up if disciplinary communities, universities, and research funders actively enter the market of the peer review organisers by calling for tenders and inviting publishers to submit proposals for a non-proprietary design of the peer review process. Given the current situation – with the American legislature and the European Commission having clearly taken a stand in favour of Open Access – one can expect that such tenders will certainly produce interesting proposals. The time is ripe!
This article examines the idea of the European Commission putting out such a tender....
Comments
I support the call for what Waaijers terms "non-proprietary review systems" (and which I have called free-floating editorial boards). I'm also glad to see the detailed calculations in the body of the article on how a conversion to OA would save money at two Dutch universities.
But in the opening paragraph Waaijers writes, "In so far as authors cannot all publish in Open Access journals, the EC and, for that matter, other Open Access-mandating funders impose unfair conditions on authors." This claim leaves the false impression that funder OA mandates require submission to OA journals, when not a single OA mandate in the world takes that form. Instead, and for good reason, all OA mandates require deposit in OA repositories. Funder mandates, like university mandates, require green OA, not gold OA.
Waaijers knows this and is clear about it later in the paper. His point is that when when grantees can't satisfy an OA mandate by publishing in an OA journal, then they must deposit in an OA repository and negotiate permission with their TA journal. When he speaks about the imposition of "unfair conditions on authors", he's referring to the difficulty of that negotiation. However, the deeply misleading statement remains in the opening paragraph. And even his less-misleading point still leaves a false impression. It assumes that all funder mandates require negotiation when only the most ill-drafted ones do so. This is true even apart from the fact that most TA publishers already allow OA archiving.
When a funder, like the EC, asks grantees to "make their best efforts to negotiate copyright and licensing conditions that comply with the open access", they create the difficulties that Waaijers highlights. But the NIH, Wellcome Trust, and half a dozen other funders have long-since figured out how to avoid that problem. They require grantees to retain a key right and use it to authorize OA. Grantees may transfer all their remaining rights to their publishers and typically do. But because grantees authorize OA before they transfer copyright, the funder's OA is authorized by the copyright holder, and the publisher never acquires the key right which would allow it to deny permission for OA or claim infringement. If a given publisher is not willing to provide OA on the funder's terms, the author must look for another publisher. But at the NIH, for example, virtually all publishers have accommodated the policy. I strongly recommend that funders use the NIH-Wellcome model (and on the university side, the equivalent Harvard model). But in any case, we must not leave the impression the model doesn't exist or even that it is rare. The idea that all scholars subject to OA mandates must publish in OA journals or undertake difficult negotiations is simply untrue.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/09/2009 11:21:00 AM.
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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
