Fwd: [ciresearchers] 'Open access', but increasingly restricted barriers to entry in academic publishing?
Locked
Fwd: [ciresearchers] 'Open access', but increasingly restricted barriers to entry in academic publishing?
 
|
Models of accessibility and the changing game of open access.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: davidicus <[hidden email]> Date: Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 12:34 AM Subject: [ciresearchers] 'Open access', but increasingly restricted barriers to entry in academic publishing? To: [hidden email] Cc: michael gurstein <[hidden email]> Dear CI colleagues, At first glance the embrace of 'open access' (OA) identified in the recent UK Finch proposal looks promising (Attached: Guardian article and Steven Harnad's / link below). However, in examining the trade-offs in this proposed transition to 'open access' academic publishing one wonders if firms won't simply continue to retain exclusive and lucrative benefits garnered though the hard work of publicly funded researchers and authors. Such benefits would appear to come from the creation of a new class of 'article processing charges' (APCs). As the Guardian story notes, these APC fees can average 2000 UK pounds per academic publication. For example, a colleague recently sent me a call for papers in my field by an esteemed author and the prospectus looked quite interesting. However, as soon as I saw the APC fee over 800 Swiss Francs (~800USD) I balked, knowing it would be time consuming seeking the funds (as a late-stage doctoral candidate). I also thought to myself: 'why should I put all that research and writing work into an article and then have to pay for myself to have it published as well?' It just did not seem fair. This has led me to wonder with these new 'open access' proposals in the UK if academia isn't simply substituting the 'old model' of restricted access and high institutionally priced journals, for a 'new model' of restrictive author self-paid (or institutionally paid) exorbitant APC fees. Despite the seemingly positive shift to 'open access' then, what will be the implications for academics in the Global South, poorly resourced departments / schools or for junior scholars who simply cannot afford to pay for the exorbitant APCs (especially in those journals which their departments or disciplines desire citations)? Of course the journals and some institutions will likely suggest they can make provisions such as fee waivers or sliding scale APCs (which I have not seen yet); but is this really solving the access and now newly created 'entry' problems? Do those who can pay deserve to publish more than those who cannot---is this really advancing scholarly knowledge? In my view an APC model that asks authors to pay fees for publishing their own work creates the wrong incentives. Shift to a different domain such as the fiction publishing or newspaper industry --- would an author be asked to pay for their book / article up front (and have it peer reviewed 'for free' by fellow authors) only to see the 'benefits' exclusively accrue to the book or newspaper publisher? Don't misunderstand, I think that open access is essential, however, a model where the key publications continue to be dominated by a handful (oligopoly) of private digital publishers who ask publicly-funded scholars to pay the publishing fees does not make sense. With the current UK proposal it seems then that the same utilitarian drivers that continue to prioritize the expenditures of public academic resources for the primary purposes of publishing for citations sake---and driven by institutional conformity to reductionist assessment and / or rankings exercises----appears to remain entrenched. Such a publishing 'path dependency' continues to raise serious questions of what is being forgone in the process of academia as 'accounting / audit culture' and whether there are better approaches for steering brainpower and public funds for actual grounded research, for teaching and for community work --- and ultimately for sharing, debating and advancing knowledge. ~david /attached Guardian link /attached Harnad (LSE) link --------------------------------- http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jul/15/free-access-british-scientific-research?commentpage=2#start-of-comments Free access to British scientific research to be available within two years Radical shakeup of academic publishing will allow papers to be put online and be accessed by universities, firms and individuals Ian Sample, science correspondent guardian.co.uk, Sunday 15 July 2012 19.53 BST The government is to unveil controversial plans to make publicly funded scientific research immediately available for anyone to read for free by 2014, in the most radical shakeup of academic publishing since the invention of the internet. Under the scheme, research papers that describe work paid for by the British taxpayer will be free online for universities, companies and individuals to use for any purpose, wherever they are in the world. In an interview with the Guardian before Monday's announcement David Willetts, the universities and science minister, said he expected a full transformation to the open approach over the next two years. The move reflects a groundswell of support for "open access" publishing among academics who have long protested that journal publishers make large profits by locking research behind online paywalls. "If the taxpayer has paid for this research to happen, that work shouldn't be put behind a paywall before a British citizen can read it," Willetts said. "This will take time to build up, but within a couple of years we should see this fully feeding through." He said he thought there would be "massive" economic benefits to making research open to everyone. Though many academics will welcome the announcement, some scientists contacted by the Guardian were dismayed that the cost of the transition, which could reach £50m a year, must be covered by the existing science budget and that no new money would be found to fund the process. That could lead to less research and fewer valuable papers being published. British universities now pay around £200m a year in subscription fees to journal publishers, but under the new scheme, authors will pay "article processing charges" (APCs) to have their papers peer reviewed, edited and made freely available online. The typical APC is around £2,000 per article. Tensions between academics and the larger publishing companies have risen steeply in recent months as researchers have baulked at journal subscription charges their libraries were asked to pay. More than 12,000 academics have boycotted the Dutch publisher Elsevier, in part of a broader campaign against the industry that has been called the "academic spring". The government's decision is outlined in a formal response to recommendations made in a major report into open access publishing led by Professor Dame Janet Finch, a sociologist at Manchester University. Willetts said the government accepted all the proposals, except for a specific point on VAT that was under consideration at the Treasury. Further impetus to open access is expected in coming days or weeks when the Higher Education Funding Council for England emphasises the need for research articles to be freely available when they are submitted for the Research Excellence Framework, which is used to determine how much research funding universities receive. The Finch report strongly recommended so-called "gold" open access, which ensures the financial security of the journal publishers by essentially swapping their revenue from library budgets to science budgets. One alternative favoured by many academics, called "green" open access, allows researchers to make their papers freely available online after they have been accepted by journals. It is likely this would be fatal for publishers and also Britain's learned societies, which survive through selling journal subscriptions. "There is a genuine value in academic publishing which has to be reflected and we think that is the case for gold open access, which includes APCs," Willetts told the Guardian. "There is a transitional cost to go through, but it's overall of benefit to our research community and there's general acceptance it's the right thing to do. "We accept that some of this cost will fall on the ring-fenced science budget, which is £4.6bn. In Finch's highest estimation that will be 1% of the science budget going to pay for gold open access, at least before we get to a new steady state, when we hope competition will bring down author charges and universities will make savings as they don't have to pay so much in journal subscriptions," he added. "The real economic impact is we are throwing open, to academics, researchers, businesses and lay people, all the high quality research that is publicly funded. I think there's a massive net economic benefit here way beyond any £50m from the science budget," Willetts said. In making such a concerted move towards open access before other countries, Britain will be giving its research away free while still paying for access to articles from other countries. Willetts said he hoped the EU would soon take the same path when it announced the next tranche of Horizon 2020 grants, which are available for projects that run from 2014. The US already makes research funded by its National Institutes of Health open access, and is expected to make more of its publicly funded research freely available online. Professor Adam Tickell, pro-vice chancellor of research and knowledge transfer at Birmingham University, and a member of the Finch working group, said he was glad the government had endorsed the recommendations, but warned there was a danger of Britain losing research projects in the uncertain transition to open access publishing. "If the EU and the US go in for open access in a big way, then we'll move into this open access world with no doubt at all, and I strongly believe that in a decade that's where we'll be. But it's the period of transition that's the worry. The UK publishes only 6% of global research, and the rest will remain behind a paywall, so we'll still have to pay for a subscription," Tickell said. "I am very concerned that there are not any additional funds to pay for the transition, because the costs will fall disproportionately on the research intensive universities. There isn't the fat in the system that we can easily pay for that." The costs would lead to "a reduction in research grants, or an effective charge on our income" he said. Another consequence of the shift could be a "rationing" of research papers from universities as competition for funds to publish papers intensifies. This could be harmful, Tickell said. For example, a study that finds no beneficial effect of a drug might be seen as negative results and go unpublished, he said. Stevan Harnad, professor of electronics and computer science at Southampton University, said the government was facing an expensive bill in supporting gold open access over the green open access model. He said UK universities and research funders had been leading the world in the movement towards "green" open access that requires researchers to self-archive their journal articles on the web, and make them free for all. "The Finch committee's recommendations look superficially as if they are supporting open access, but in reality they are strongly biased in favour of the interests of the publishing industry over the interests of UK research," he said. "Instead of recommending that the UK build on its historic lead in providing cost-free green open access, the committee has recommended spending a great deal of extra money — scarce research money — to pay publishers for "gold open access publishing. If the Finch committee recommendations are heeded, as David Willetts now proposes, the UK will lose both its global lead in open access and a great deal of public money — and worldwide open access will be set back at least a decade," he said. -------- For another perspective see Steven Harnad's blog (@LSE): http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/07/04/why-the-uk-should-not-heed-the-finch-report/ ====================================== ================================ D a v i d S a d o w a y BES, MRM PhD Candidate Department of Urban Planning & Design The University of Hong Kong Email: [hidden email] (852)2859.2721 -------------------------------------------------------- Visiting Associate Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies Academia Sinica (Taipei, Taiwan) Email: [hidden email] (886)2929.2948 ================================ To unsubscribe (subscribe) send an email to: [hidden email] with the message unsub (sub) ciresearchers Tracey P. Lauriault 613-234-2805 |
message-footer.txt (141 bytes)
Re: Fwd: [ciresearchers] 'Open access', but increasingly restricted barriers to entry in academic publishing?
|
|
| Free forum by Nabble | Edit this page |