Open Access (the book)

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  • On this page I'll post updates, supplements, and other notes on my book, Open Access, MIT Press, 2012.   —Peter Suber.
File:MIT-OA-book.jpg

About the book

  • The paperback and Kindle editions are available now. Digital editions in a dozen other formats will roll out over the summer of 2012.
  • The whole book will become OA in June 2013, one year from the date of publication. If you can't wait that long, everything I've said in the book I've said in some form or another in an OA article, probably more than once.
  • Sorry, I don't control review copies. To get a review copy, contact MIT Press.
  • I plan to launch some kind of site, other than this page, where I can gather and respond to reader comments. I welcome suggestions about the best way to do that. Meantime, I welcome comments on the book itself.

Updates and supplements

  • Some of these notes couldn't be included in the book because they didn't appear until after my text was final in the spring of 2011. Some didn't fit into the book because the book is deliberately short and I was already over my wordcount.
  • I have many supplements to add and will add them as I find time. If you want to nudge me on a certain point, please do.
  • I'm still trying to decide whether to link from words and phrases, which I normally do in wikis, or to spell out URLs, which I normally do in endnotes. Any thoughts?

Preface

Chapter 1: What is Open Access?

Chapter 2: Motivation

  • Note 5 (note call on p. 30, note text on p. 182). Here I'm documenting the claim that "cumulative price increases...forced the Harvard Library to undertake 'serious cancellation efforts' for budgetary reasons." In the current note, I cite two sources. Here are seven, including the original two, in chronological order.
    • Robin Peek, "Harvard Faculty Mandates OA," Information Today, April 1, 2008. This is an interview with Stuart Shieber after the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted unanimously for a green OA policy on February 12, 2008. Quoting Shieber: "At Harvard, serials duplication has been all but eliminated and serious cancellation efforts have been initiated. Monograph collecting has been substantially affected as well. In total, our faculty have seen qualitative reductions in access to the literature." (I link to a copy of the original article because the original URL is now dead.)
    • The Report of the Task Force on University Libraries, Harvard University, November 2009. "Even during the recent years of endowment growth, the libraries struggled to collect the books, journals, and other research materials desired by current faculty and students....The reasons for these difficulties are multiple, but include the steadily rising prices of monographs and journal subscriptions....The economic downturn has made this issue even more critical than in years prior. Because library budgets have been cut, journals will need to be cancelled, with attendant cancellation fees feeding a downward spiral....Harvard must become a more forceful participant in this negotiation, leverage its combined rather than distributed weight, and not be beholden to the prices and packages determined by the major publishing houses."
    • "Libraries on the Edge," The Harvard Gazette, January 2010. "Through centuries, Harvard's libraries have amassed rich collections and unique holdings. But now budgetary pressures that have been building during the past decade, and intensified in the past year, threaten the ability of the world's largest private library to collect works as broadly as it has in the past. In an interview, University Library director and Pforzheimer University Professor Robert Darnton called the situation 'a crisis in acquisitions.' "
    • Harvard's response to the first White House RFI on OA, January 22, 2010. "Harvard University...is not immune to the access crisis that motivates much of the campaign for public-access policies. In fact, the Harvard library system has gone through a series of serials reviews with substantial cancellations, and further cancellations will undoubtedly occur in the future."
    • Harvard's response to the second White House RFI on OA, January 14, 2012. "Even Harvard University, whose library is the largest academic library in the world, is not immune to the access crisis motivating much of the campaign for public-access policies. In fact, the Harvard library system has had to make a painful series of budget-driven journal cancellations, and we are deciding on a set of further cancellations at this very moment."
    • Testimony of Stuart Shieber, Professor of Computer Science and Director of Harvard's Office for Scholarly Communication, before the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, March 29, 2012. "The Harvard library system is the largest academic library in the world, and the fifth largest library of any sort. In attempting to provide access to research results to our faculty and students, the university subscribes to tens of thousands of serials at a cost of about 9 million dollars per year. Nonetheless, we too have been buffeted by the tremendous growth in journal costs over the last decades, with Harvard's serials expenditures growing by a factor of 3 between 1986 and 2004. Such geometric increases in expenditures could not be sustained indefinitely. Over the years since 2004 our journal expenditure increases have been curtailed through an aggressive effort at deduplication, elimination of print subscriptions, and a painful series of journal cancellations. As a researcher, I know that Harvard does not subscribe to all of the journals that I would like access to for my own research, and if Harvard, with its scale, cannot provide optimal subscription access, other universities without our resources are in an even more restricted position."
    • Faculty Advisory Council Memorandum on Journal Pricing, Harvard University, April 17, 2012. "Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive....Prices for online content from two providers have increased by about 145% over the past six years, which far exceeds not only the consumer price index, but also the higher education and the library price indices. These journals therefore claim an ever-increasing share of our overall collection budget. Even though scholarly output continues to grow and publishing can be expensive, profit margins of 35% and more suggest that the prices we must pay do not solely result from an increasing supply of new articles....The Faculty Advisory Council to the Library, representing university faculty in all schools and in consultation with the Harvard Library leadership, reached this conclusion: major periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable. Doing so would seriously erode collection efforts in many other areas, already compromised....Costs are now prohibitive...."

Chapter 3: Varieties

  • Note 20 (note call on p. 73, note text on p. 197-198). Here I list some examples of libre green OA. I list and discuss many more in "The rise of libre open access," SPARC Open Access Newsletter, June 2, 2012.

Chapter 4: Policies

  • At p. 78, I say that about one-quarter of peer-reviewed journals are OA. Today the fraction is more like one-third. In the book and here I'm using the common industry estimate that there are 25,000 peer-reviewed journals in all fields. As of July 27, 2012, there are 7,999 peer-reviewed OA journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals.

Chapter 5: Scope

Chapter 6: Copyright

Chapter 7: Economics

Chapter 8: Casualties

  • Note 4 (note call on p. 152, note text on pp. 215-216). Here I'm documenting the assertion that, "At Congressional hearings in 2008 and 2010, legislators asked publishers directly whether green OA was triggering cancellations. In both cases publishers pointed to decreased downloads but not to increased cancellations."
    • The pattern continued in a third Congressional hearing on OA on March 29, 2012. The hearing was titled, "Federally Funded Research: Examining Public Access and Scholarly Publication Interests," and was held by the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight. From the SPARC summary of one part of the Q&A: "Rep. Zoe Lofgren, (D-CA), noting that the NIH Public Access has now been in place for nearly four years, challenged the publishers assertions that they would be financially harmed by FPRAA, and asked if any data demonstrating financial harm to publishers could be presented by any of the panelists. None was provided."
  • At p. 157, I start a subsection called "Some studies bear on the question of whether increased OA archiving [green OA] will increase journal cancellations." Here's a new study for that section.
    • The large-scale PEER study released its final report on June 18, 2012. The study was coordinated by the International Association of Science, Technical and Medical Publishers. From the final report: "PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research), supported by the EC eContentplus programme, has been investigating the potential effects of the large-scale, systematic depositing of authors' final peer-reviewed manuscripts (so called Green Open Access or stage-two research output) on reader access, author visibility, and journal viability, as well as on the broader ecology of European research. The project ran from 1 September 2008 – 31 May 2012...." As summarized by Norbert Lossau, Scientific Coordinator of OpenAIRE and member of the PEER Executive Committee, "the economic research of the PEER project could not find any evidence for the hypothesis that self-archiving affects journal viability."

Chapter 9: Future

Chapter 10: Self-Help

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