Intervention on cost of open access:
arXiv, SSRN and RePEc estimate their 'first copy costs' at
$1-5.
They provide services that are free to authors and readers,
including sophisticated literature awareness tools and
statistics. They do not organise peer review, editing and
copy-editing. But consider the difference to the average
first
copy costs estimated by stm/ALPSP of $3500 or charged by
Springer
Open Choice ($3000) or PLoS and BioMed Central (from $515 to
$2750). Surely several hundred dollars per article will on
average be enough to provide sophisticated certification and
editing services currently not available from repositories.
On
that basis, it would be possible to save libraries millions
of
dollars if open access publishing reform were done right. I
have
argued as much in a recent article in Learned Publishing:
<http:/
/dx.doi.org/10.1087/095315107X239627> (OA embargo 12
months, pre-print as *Society Publishing, the Internet and
Open
Access: Shifting Mission-Orientation from Content Holding to
Certification and Navigation Services?* available at
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_i
d=3D997819>
Intervention on open access strategy:
Many proponents of the green and the gold road have lost
sight of
what open access was meant to strategically accomplish:
enhance
access, inclusion and impact. The big disciplinary
repositories
like arXiv, SSRN and RePEc, but also Citeseer and others are
models of enhancing access, inclusion and impact in ways
that:
- Green OA by means of institutional repositories (expensive
digital doubling of research articles that aren't even
originals
but only 'dirty' copies); and
- Gold OA by means of hybrid publishing (interspersion of OA
in
otherwise closed journals for which publishers continue to
hoard
content) will never be.
Intervention on mandating:
Mandates may be legitimate as collective action if they
secure
the further progress of science (and this includes
establishing a
more efficient publishing system). Mandates may also be in
the
best interest of the author (consider as analogy mandatory
car/driver insurance). Moreover, in the present
circumstances,
transfer of copyright agreements for research articles are
not
'negotiated' individually between the author and the
publisher
but simply sent out as default by publishers in the
reasonnable
expectation that they may thus lock away the content and
maximise
their rents.
In these circumstances, research funding councils,
universities
and research libraries have an understandable and justified
collective interest in altering the standard copyright
contract
to ensure that the research literature becomes available
more
cheaply and with extensive use and re-use permissions (e.g.
for
text and data mining). I have argued as much in a piece that
won
the Yale A2K2 writing competition in 2007. The article will
shortly be forthcoming in the International Journal of
Communication Law and Policy, but in the meantime the
pre-print
*Cyberscience and the Knowledge-Based Economy, Open Access
and
Trade Publishing: from Contradiction to Compatibility with
Nonexclusive Copyright Licensing* may be found here:
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_i
d=3D938119>
Chris Armbruster
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