Open Access (the book)

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  • This is the home page for my book, Open Access (MIT Press, 2012). I use it for posting updates and supplements, and linking to reviews, translations, and OA editions. — Peter Suber.
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About the book

  • The best edition for searching is the streaming edition from the Internet Archive. The search box is at the top of the page, and the hits show up as little flags on the bar at the bottom of the page, showing how many there are and roughly where they're located in the book. Clicking on a search result will jump you to the full text, in full context, including the page number for citation purposes.
    • When you search the book for a given topic or name, don't forget to search this wiki page of updates and supplements as well.
  • The best edition for cutting and pasting depends on what you need. If you don't know where to find the passage you want to want to cut/paste, then I recommend either the MIT PDF or the Internet Archive PDF. Each displays the full-text in one large file, for searching, but each leaves hard returns in your pasted text. The same is true of the IA plain text edition. If you already know where to find the passage you want to cut/paste, then I recommend the MIT HTML edition. It puts separate chapters into separate files, but will not leave hard returns in your pasted text.
  • The best edition for deep linking is also the streaming edition from the Internet Archive. Built on BookReader, it supports deep links to individual pages, and I use this edition below when I link directly to pages and chapters of the book.
    • Tech note: There are 12 unpaginated pages in the front of the book, and each one needs a distinct number for the purpose of deep linking. Hence, to deep link to page k of the print edition, use k+12 rather than k in the URL. For example, the deep link to page 5 is http://archive.org/stream/9780262517638OpenAccess/9780262517638_Open_Access#page/n17/mode/2up. Because 5 + 12 = 17, the URL uses /n17/ rather than /n5/. For other examples, see my deep links in the updates and supplements below.
  • In addition to deep linking to parts of the book, you can deep link to parts of this book home page.
    • To deep link to the updates and supplements for a given chapter of the book, for example chapter 5, the anchor is "ch5". Just add "#" and the anchor to the URL for this web page, for example, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/hoap/Open_Access_(the_book)#ch5. You could also use the short URL, http://bit.ly/oa-book#ch5.
    • To deep link to the updates and supplements for a given page of the book, for example page 5, the anchor is "p5". Just add "#" and the anchor to the URL for this web page, for example, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/hoap/Open_Access_(the_book)#p5. You could also use the short URL, http://bit.ly/oa-book#p5. When there's more than one top-level update for a given page, the anchors are "p5.1", "p5.2", "p5.3" and so on, in the order in which I added them. If you're unsure of the anchor for a given entry, just look at the page source code.
  • Request. If you cite the book and include a URL with your citation, please use the URL for this book home page (long URL or short URL). Then your readers will know about the print and OA editions, the reviews and translations, and the updates and supplements.
  • Some people looking for a history of OA come to this book. But I had other purposes in mind here and didn't include much history. I'm pulling together my contributions to the history of OA in another place.
Choice named Open Access an Outstanding Academic Title for 2013.

Reviews

  • Stephen Curry, Open Access by Peter Suber, Reciprocal Space, July 5, 2012. "There has been a fairly torrid debate over open access over the last six months (even longer for aficionados). For people who look in only occasionally it must seem like a storm that swirls around the same arguments time and again....Cutting through this noisy argument is Peter Suber’s short book on the topic, which has just been published by MIT Press. In the ten brief chapters of Open Access he works his way through the definitions, the history, the economics and the implications of changes to the landscape of research publishing. The text is thorough, clear and measured....Suber does a wholly admirable job of unpicking the complexities of open access and we’ll get there sooner if more of us are able to engage properly with the matter."
  • Rob Harle, Open Access by Peter Suber (MIT Press 2012), Leonardo Reviews, August 2, 2012. "This is a very important book, which, I suggest, is a must read for all scholars and researchers who publish their own work or consult the peer-reviewed published work of others ––in other words, virtually all academics...."
  • Louis Kirby, Open Access: Peter Suber's new book, ZettaScience, September 6, 2012. "It comes down to this. I am a taxpayer and a physician. It makes me madder than Hell to have to pay $35.00 to read a single PDF of a journal article when my tax dollars already paid for the research....Peter Suber’s book is terrific. It is short and easily readable in a couple of sittings. That said, he is very thorough and clear at explaining what Open Access is, and why it benefits both the author, the research enterprise and society...."
  • John Dupuis, Reading Diary: Open Access by Peter Suber, Confessions of a Science Librarian, September 26, 2012. "Peter Suber’s... Open Access is an important book. You should read it, you should buy (or recommend) a copy for your library. You should buy a hundred boxes and give a copy to every faculty member at your institution. And not just because it’s a blazingly wonderful book — although it mostly is — but because it’s a book that sets the stage for an intelligent, rational, fact-based discussion on the future of scholarly publishing...."
  • Elliott Smith, Open Access, Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, Fall 2012. "Suber provides clear and concise explanations....Given the recent attempts in Congress to rescind the NIH Public Access Policy, Open Access should be of interest to a broad audience. It is particularly relevant to faculty and administrators at research institutions...."
  • Wm. Joseph Thomas, Review of Peter Suber, Open Access, Against the Grain, November 2012, p. 40. "Suber makes the point eloquently that all key players involved in vetting research — authors, editors, and peer reviewers — can consent to OA without losing revenue. Not only that, Suber makes the case that distributing research freely is a public gift with both direct and indirect benefits to all....If the readers of Suber's book will take action on providing access to knowledge as a 'public good,' we can indeed complete the 'peaceful revolution' that Suber envisions."
  • Aaron Tay, 5 things I learnt about Open Access after reading Crawford's & Suber's books, Musings about librarianship, January 19, 2013. "Before [reading Suber's book], I had heard about "mandates" that require all researchers at a certain institution to support open access by depositing their work in their institutional repository. But Suber's book in chapter 4, shows how simplistic this thinking is and includes material that is almost 100% new to me....There's also a great discussion on why the word "mandate" might not be the best word, and a very good section "digression on historical timing of Open Access policies" on when and why it might be the right time to try to adopt different mandate types....Suber's book is longer (but still short) and more technical....I loved it....I do wish he could have written a much longer book, as I got the sense that behind every sentence he wrote, lurks a bigger story...."
  • T.M. Owen, Open Access by Peter Suber, Choice, February 2013, vol. 50, No. 06, p. 216. "Drawing extensively on his previous online writings, world-renowned open access (OA) expert Suber...presents a well-written, concise explanation of OA. The book appeals to those with all levels of OA knowledge, from novice to expert, but it is especially beneficial for those unfamiliar with the subject....In ten well-organized chapters, the author defines OA, examines the motivation behind OA, presents options for institutional and funders' policies, confronts copyright issues, explains the economics of OA, and predicts what the future might hold. The extensive notes and references that accompany each chapter enhance the value of this important resource. Open Access should be required reading for everyone involved in the publishing cycle — from authors to publishers, including librarians and general readers. Everyone who reads this volume will gain a better understanding and appreciation of OA....Summing Up: Essential...."
  • Giridhar Madras, Open Access by Peter Suber, Current Science, February 10, 2013. "This book by Peter Suber builds on his excellent work and articles on open access (OA)....This book is clear in its recommendation....On 16 August 2012, Georgia State University distributed copies of Suber’s book to new faculty and administrators on campus....It is high time that Indian institutions follow the [George State] example."
  • Padmanabhan Balaram, Open Access: Tearing Down Barriers, Current Science, February 25, 2013. "Open Access by Peter Suber...is an excellent and easily readable primer on the movement to make the results of scholarly work freely available. The author's preface is engaging, urging readers to plunge on: 'I want busy people to read this book. OA benefits literally everyone, for the same reason that research benefits literally everyone.' Suber is clear 'that the largest obstacle to OA is misunderstanding....' His remedy for misunderstanding ‘is a clear statement of the basics for busy people’. I believe the book will serve this purpose admirably....This is a book that must be read by those busy scientists who publish a lot, read a lot and have had little time to grasp the nuances of the open access movement. It must also be read (and read carefully) by strident advocates, who have little time to allay the fears of those unfamiliar with the issue."
  • Brenda Chawner, Open Access, Online Information Review, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2013) pp. 150 - 151. "Suber has been writing about OA concepts and developments since 2001, making him one of the movement's most important champions. Now, in Open Access Suber provides a succinct, readable and well-reasoned discussion of OA concepts and practices....[T]his book is an excellent guide for anyone interested in learning more about open access publishing."
  • Kevin Michael Clair, Open Access by Peter Suber, Journal of Academic Librarianship, vol. 39, no. 1, January 2013. "In his latest book, Suber lays out in succinct and engaging fashion the primary reasons why the major players in the scholarly communications space should consider open access in their publishing, peer-reviewing, and library acquisitions work....For libraries just making inroads into the open access world, Open Access is an essential introduction to the topic. For academic librarians who have been working in the scholarly communications space and are familiar with its content, the value of Open Access lies in the concise way in which Suber outlines all of the reasons why the OA movement exists, and how researchers, librarians, and their reading audience can continue to work in order to advance its cause. Open Access is an essential addition to the libraries of anyone interested in the future of scholarly publishing in all of its forms."
  • Elizabeth Siler Open Access by Peter Suber, Library Resources & Technical Services, vol. 57, no. 2, 2013. "In Open Access, Peter Suber explains the ins and outs of the OA movement, in a quick and efficient way, to inform the busy researcher....Open Access provides a brief but complete overview of OA publishing...."
  • Gary F. Daught, Review: Peter Suber’s Open Access, Omega Alpha | Open Access, June 17, 2013. "This book is a high-quality, thoughtful, and well-written distillation of Suber’s decade-long full-time immersion in the developing open access environment....Suber accomplishes his purpose admirably. In addressing these topics, Suber writes succinctly and with clarity, applying the logic of a philosopher (which he is), the sharpness of a debater, and the cadence of a musician (speaking to his writing style). He anticipates the many sides and questions of his readers, even honest critiques, and he answers them with directness and without polemic. He clearly aims to persuade, but he also wants to bring his readers along with with him."
  • Colin Steele, Open access by Peter Suber, Australian Library Journal, September 29, 2013. "While many libraries and librarians will buy Suber’s book, it really needs to become essential reading for administrators and academics, since the system will not quickly change without their understanding of and involvement in the issues. Suber’s pithy comments may help, such as, ‘The deeper problem is that we donate time, labor, and public money to create new knowledge and then hand control over the results to businesses that believe, correctly or incorrectly, that their revenue and survival depend on limiting access to that knowledge’....Suber’s book is an excellent primer....In [the] future, the role of the library will include the facilitation of scholarly publishing to enable the widest dissemination of an institution’s intellectual output. To assist that process, Suber’s book is an essential OA vade mecum."
  • Benjamin Caraco, Peter Suber, Open Access, Lectures, Les comptes rendus, October 1, 2013. Also here. "[Suber's] écrits, activités et engagements font de lui l’un des spécialistes les plus respectés et écoutés sur la question du libre accès. Dans son dernier livre, Open Access,...il propose une introduction raisonnée au libre accès dans un langage clair, alliant la pédagogie au pragmatisme." In Google's English: "[Suber's] writings, activities and commitments made ​​him one of the most respected and listened to on the issue of open access experts. In his latest book, Open Access,...[he] offers a reasoned introduction to free access in clear language, combining pedagogy [with] pragmatism."
  • Brad Reid, Peter Suber, Open Access, Computing Reviews, October 29, 2013. "Anyone in the computing, publishing, archiving, and library worlds will find [this book] informative, interesting, and nontechnical....This is a compact presentation of the interesting and important topic of OA."
  • David R. Stewart, Peter Suber, Open Access, Theological Librarianship, 7, 1 (January 2014) pp. 72-74. "It is very easy to imagine a book on this urgent topic that is too complex, too long, too combative, and deathly boring. Happily, Suber’s Open Access is none of these things. He has an almost perfect instinct for what his readers are eager to know, and he frames his content in useful examples and in the context of the real-world challenges common to the academy. Likewise, he clearly has a great deal of respect for the issues libraries and librarians must contend with in these times of transition. Open Access is highly recommended for anyone who wants to understand better how academic publishing is changing, whether from a library acquisitions or a publishing perspective."
  • Paul Uhlir, "Peter Suber, Open Access" (review not online), Issues in Science and Technology, Spring 2014, pp. 92-94. "Peter Suber’s book Open Access provides an easy-to-read compendium of answers to many questions and blows up some of the canards that have been flying around the ether. Suber is one of the gurus of the open access (OA) movement....In summary, Suber dispels the arguments against open publishing of publicly funded research results and makes a cogent case for the new models."
  • Marian De Saxe, "Peter Suber, Open Access" (review not online), Media International Australia, February 2014. "Peter Suber...is...the ideal person to provide an insider's expert overview and summary of this form of publishing while mounting a persuasive argument in favour of the extensive advantages to be gained from adopting formal open access policies....The strength of this book lies in the clarity with which Suber highlights an extremely complex publishing and access environment....[T]his book provides a thorough grounding in the youthful history and practical state-of-play of open access publishing."
  • Hubertus Kohle, Peter Suber, Open Access, Kunstform, May 2014. "Zunächst gilt es, die knappe Einführung in ein Gebiet anzuzeigen, das zu den wichtigsten, umstrittensten und gleichzeitig scheinbar nebensächlichsten des aktuellen Wissenschaftsbetriebes gehört. Der Autor, Peter Suber, gilt als einer der besten Kenner des durchaus komplexen Gegenstandes. Er liefert eine konzise, leicht in einem knappen halben Tag zu lesende Darstellung, die ganz auf den Vergleich Online- gegen Druck-Publikation abstellt."
  • Gordana Ljubanović, Peter Suber, Open Access, National Library of Serbia Herald, n.d. but circa December 2014. [The review is long and positive. Unfortunately I can't pick a good excerpt to post here because the review is in Serbian, which I don't read, and because Google's English translation is weak.]
  • Jean Bernatchez, Peter Suber, Qu’est-ce que l’accès ouvert? Lectures, Les comptes rendus, March 15, 2017. Bref, le livre est un incontournable pour se familiariser avec l’accès ouvert. Il est heureux qu’il soit désormais disponible en français....Peter Suber propose une synthèse du phénomène accessible (sur tous les plans) et qui rend justice aux acteurs concernés, à leurs arguments favorables ou défavorables. Il est certes un militant de la cause, mais il ne verse pas dans l’exagération. Il ne souhaite pas la disparition du modèle traditionnel de l’édition scientifique, mais il insiste néanmoins sur la promotion du bien commun, avant tout, et sur sa traduction dans le monde de l’édition scientifique par l’accès ouvert.
  • Pablo Markin, The Continued Relevance of Peter Suber’s (2012) Book on Open Access, Open Science, June 18, 2017. Few formats fit better Marshall MacLuhan’s dictum that “the medium is the message” than Open Access does. Peter Suber’s book Open Access published in 2012 by the MIT Press intends to be an authoritative source of reference on the notion of open access, its historical roots, its variegated models, policies proffered in its support, its possible scope, its copyright implications, its economic foundations and consequent limitations....As this book has been translated into multiple other languages, such as Chinese Polish and French, it has become a standard source for arguments in favor and against Open Access....Despite the elapsed time from the date of its publication, the digital supplement for this book provides further materials in respect to the effect Open Access is likely to have....[I]n the intervening years this publication has hardly lost any of its relevance as a sustained and up-to-date compendium of thoroughly researched scholarship on Open Access and reasons for its emergence.

Translations

Unless noted otherwise, all these translations are OA or have OA editions.

  • Arabic, QScience division of the Qatar Foundation, October 2015. Thanks to Tahseen Al-Khateeb for doing the translation, and to Christopher Leonard, Alwaleed Alkhaja, Fakhri Saleh, Jameela Jassim for their editorial help. There is both a print and OA edition.
  • Chinese, China Ocean Press, January 2015. Thanks to Li Wu for doing the translation. Unfortunately China Ocean Press does not plan to issue an OA edition.
  • French, OpenEdition Press, October 2016. Thanks to Marie Lebert for doing the translation, and to Helen Tomlinson and Solenne Louis for revising it. There is both a print and OA edition.
  • Greek (in process, starting February 11, 2014). Thanks to Nancy Pontika for doing the translation.
  • Spanish, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, August 17, 2015. Thanks to Remedios Melero for doing the translation, and to Indrajit Banerjee, Dominique Babini, and Eduardo Aguado for their lengthy new introduction. There is both a print and OA edition.
  • Forthcoming. Translations are under way into Czech, German, Greek, Japanese, Romanian, and Russian. I'll link to them here as they become available. I welcome other translations.

About the updates and supplements

  • I add updates and supplements in real time, as I find relevant new studies and evidence. Consider these supplements to be continuously updated "public footnotes" for the assertions they annotate. For more on this concept, see my 2012 article, The Idea of an Open-Access Evidence Rack (perma.cc link).
  • To find corrections, as opposed to other kinds of updates, search this page for the word "correction". All the hits except for this entry will be corrections.
  • I use perma.cc links and Wayback Machine (WM) links to prevent link rot.
    • In October 2019 I started doing this for the sources in every new update or supplement. As I find time, I add these links retroactively to earlier entries.
    • When the original link is dead, and I can find a copy in the WM, then I use a WM link. I don't double-down by preserving WM links with perma.cc links. When the original link is still alive, I protect it with a perma.cc link and include both the original and the perma.cc link.
  • If you notice any dead links, please let me know. I'll do my best to find live links, and keep them alive through perma.cc or WM.
  • After 10 years of adding updates and supplements, I decided to slow down — without stopping (June 2022).
  • Most of the updates are minor, for example, new studies and examples relevant to points I made in the book. For my take on the major updates, and why I haven't (yet) included them here, see the short handout I wrote for a March 2023 talk.

Text, updates, and supplements

  • Some of these notes didn't fit into the book. The book is deliberately short and I was already over my wordcount. Others were too late to put in the book. They cite publications or developments that hadn't occurred by the time my text was final in the spring of 2011.

Copyright page

  • The first print edition used an "all rights reserved" statement and a CC-BY license icon, which caused confusion. The digital editions clarified the book's copyright status, and the clarification appeared in future print editions. Basically, the book incorporates some material that I previously published in the SPARC Open Access Newsletter under a CC-BY license and a copyright owned by SPARC. That material remains CC-BY. The all-rights-reserved copyright on the first print edition applied only to new parts of the book, and even those parts shifted to a CC-BY-NC license on June 17, 2013, one year after the book was published.
  • In April 2019, MIT Press shifted the CC-BY-NC parts of the book to CC-BY. The whole book has been CC-BY ever since.
  • Note that all the updates and supplements are CC-BY, and have been from the start.

Preface

Read the OA text:

Updates and supplements for the Preface:

  • At p. ix, I say, "OA benefits nonresearchers by accelerating research and all the goods that depend on research, such as new medicines, useful technologies, solved problems, informed decisions, improved policies, and beautiful understanding." Add these notes.
    • On OA for improved policies:
      • See Michael Gough and Steven Milloy, The Case for Public Access to Federally Funded Research Data, Cato Institute, February 2, 2000 (perma.cc link): "The government and its scientists appear to be as prone to mistakes as anyone else. Requiring the government 'to show its work' [by opening open access to data arising from publicly-funded research] opens up the regulatory process. Moreover, it ensures that federal regulations are based on sound science and reduces doubts about the need for federal intervention. Whether one supports or opposes regulatory action, we should all acknowledge that independent review of scientific data and methodology can serve only to strengthen the scientific foundations of public policy."
      • See Brian Head and co-authors, Are policy-makers interested in social research? Exploring the sources and uses of valued information among public servants in Australia, Policy and Society, June 2014 (perma.cc link). Australian policy-makers agreed that academic research was useful for policy-making. For example, 39% agreed that "Academic research alters or transforms how policy makers think about issues and choices" and 42% agreed that "Academic research is used to shape and inform the design and implementation of policies and programs." Interestingly, surveyed academics thought these propositions were true more often than policy-makers themselves. Most relevant here, however, is the result cited by the authors in a blog post summarizing the study (June 13, 2014) (perma.cc link): "The main reasons provided by policy-makers for the [relatively] low uptake of academic research were the perception that academic research is not available when needed, is difficult to access, or is not being translated in a user-friendly form for policy-makers." It's hard to avoid the conclusion that academic research would be even more useful for policy-making if it were OA.
      • See Samantha Vilkins and Will Grant, Types of evidence cited in Australian Government publications, October 10, 2017 (perma.cc link): "The study also found a possible increased chance for academic research to be cited [in policy documents] if it was open access."
      • See Fernando Hoces de la Guardia, Sean Grant, and Edward Miguel, A Framework for Open Policy Analysis, a preprint from he Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS), April 5, 2018 (perma.cc link): "In this paper we have argued that policy analysis can address the threat of its own credibility crisis by adopting solutions from the open science movement."
      • See Marialuisa Taddia, Good Citations, The Law Society Gazette, April 16, 2018 (perma.cc link). Law professors have always influenced law and policy, and today open access amplifies their influence. "More academic journals are making their content freely available online through ‘open access’, making the dissemination of scholarly articles quicker and wider. [Jon Yorke, law professor at Birmingham City University] points to an academic paper he co-authored in 2013 on the EU and the abolition of the death penalty as ‘the most downloaded article in the Pace International Law Review’, with over 2,000 downloads by governments, institutions and non-governmental organisations. ‘With open access of journals globally, policy-makers can have at their fingertips instant access to the quality of material which they are required to [use to] form intricate arguments. It definitely helps them and they do listen to legal academics in that way,’ Yorke adds...."
      • See David Rose and Chris Tyler, Seven insights for communicating research to busy policymakers, LSE Blog, April 7, 2020 (perma.cc link): "MPs and Peers tended not to search for evidence in academic papers, but their staff and House Library staff do. Staff talked about their frustration at finding paywalls that restricted them from accessing information. Open access is crucial." Or as I paraphrased this conclusion in a tweet: "Legislators are more likely to draft evidence-based policies if they and their staffers have #openaccess to the evidence."
      • See Michael Taylor, An altmetric attention advantage for open access books in the humanities and social sciences, Scientometrics, October 10, 2020 (perma.cc link): "Both OA books and chapters have...higher rates of social impact in policy documents."
      • See Stefan Reichmann et al., ON-MERRIT D5.1 Scoping Report: Open Science Outputs in Policy-Making and Public Participation, May 31, 2021. Cutting against some of the studies above, the authors conclude that "policymakers prefer receiving information through personal networks rather than academic publications. The reviewed literature suggests that the availability of information in the form of academic publications and other research outputs is of secondary concern." But they also conclude that "improved infrastructure for sharing scientific outputs could have a positive impact on the use of evidence in policy making."
      • See Sean Grant et al., Open Science Standards at Journals that Inform Evidence-Based Policy, Prevention Science, May 13, 2023 (perma.cc link). "We evaluated TOP [transparency and openness promotion] implementation at 339 peer-reviewed journals that have been used to identify evidence-based interventions for policymaking and programmatic decisions. Each of ten open science standards in TOP was not implemented in most journals’ policies (instructions to authors), procedures (manuscript submission systems), or practices (published articles). Journals implementing at least one standard typically encouraged, but did not require, an open science practice. We discuss why and how journals could improve implementation of open science standards to safeguard evidence-based policy."
      • See Qianjin Zong et al., Can open access increase LIS research’s policy impact? Scientometrics, May 31, 2023 (perma.cc link). "This study revealed that open access had significant and positive effects on the policy impact."
      • See Hashem Atapour et al., Policy citations of scientometric articles: an altmetric study, Scientometrics, June 27, 2024 (perma.cc link). "Open Access articles were cited more frequently than non-open access articles in policy documents."

Chapter 1: What Is Open Access?

Read the OA text:

Updates and supplements for Chapter 1:

  • At p. 4, I offer my definition of OA: "Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions." Add this note.
    • I can't remember when I first offered this definition. But it was at least by June 21, 2004, when I put it in my Open Access Overview. In some later publications I said "needless" instead of "most".

  • At p. 5, I say, "Copyright can...be a significant access barrier." Add this note.
    • See Lea Shaver, Copyright and Inequality, preprint, December 22, 2014. "The majority of the world’s people experience copyright law not as a boon to consumer choice, but as a barrier to acquiring knowledge and taking part in cultural life."

  • At p. 5, I say, "Even...authors [who don't sell their work and want to share it as widely as possible]...tend to transfer their copyrights to intermediaries —publishers— who want to sell their work. As a result, users may be hampered in their research by barriers erected to serve intermediaries rather than authors." Add this note.
    • See my July 2011 interview with Richard Poynder: "OA doesn’t merely share knowledge. It accelerates research by helping authors and readers find one another. It’s compatible with intermediaries but not with intermediaries who erect access barriers to keep authors and readers apart."

  • At p. 6, I introduce the term "toll access (TA)" for "work that is not open access, or that is available only for a price." Add this note:
    • That was the most common term for non-OA work in 2012. But if I were writing the book today (say, 2018 or later), I'd use "paywalled" instead. It's more common now, and (slightly) more self-explanatory. This update also applies to p. 176, where "toll access" appears in the glossary.

  • At p. 7, I quote from the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of OA: "...without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparatable from gaining access to the internet itself." Add this note.
    • On the exception for "gaining access to the internet itself", see the 1992 manual to Public Access Online System (perma.cc link) from the US Environmental Protection Agency, p. 1: "The only charges that will be incurred through use of the system are telecommunications charges."

  • At pp. 8-9, I say, "[T]he major obstacles are not technical, legal, or economic, but cultural." Add this note.
    • For more on this claim, see the updates to p. 167 below.

  • At p. 10, I refer to the first two scholarly journals, both launched in 1665. Add this note.
    • How quickly did journals multiply after 1665? See Derek de Solla Price, Science Since Babylon, enlarged edition, Yale University Press, 1975, all of Chapter 8 ("Diseases of Science"), especially pp. 163-164: The first journals were "followed rapidly by some three or four similar journals published by other national academies in Europe. Thereafter, as the need increased, so did the number of journals, reaching a total of about one hundred by the beginning of the nineteenth century, one thousand by the middle, and some ten thousand by 1900. According to the World List of Scientific Periodicals, a tome larger than any family Bible, we are now well on the way to the next milestone of a hundred thousand such journals." Also see p. 169: "The most remarkable conclusion obtained from the data just considered is that the number of journals has grown exponentially rather than linearly. Instead of there being just so many new periodicals per year, the number has doubled every so many years. The constant involved is actually about fifteen years for a doubling, corresponding to a power of ten in fifty years and a factor of one thousand in a century and a half. In the three hundred years which separate us from the mid-seventeenth century, this represents a factor of one million."

  • At p. 12, I say that the custom for scholars to write articles for impact rather than money "is a payment structure we need for good research itself, not just for good access to that research." Add these notes.
    • See David William Hedding, Payouts push professors towards predatory journals, Nature News, January 15, 2019. "[S]ubsidies corrode the quality of scholarship in South Africa. China went through the same cycle — paying researchers per paper and seeing poor-quality publications soar. Its leading academies and universities are now rowing back from the practice."
    • See Gayathri Vaidyanathanm, Indian payment-for-papers proposal rattles scientists, Nature News, February 15, 2019. "Indian scientists are criticizing a government proposal to pay graduate students who publish in select journals. They fear that it could degrade the quality of research and lead to an increase in scientific misconduct, by incentivizing publishing rather than good science....A pay-to-publish scheme will exacerbate [the] problems [of retracted articles], says [Mukund] Thattai. Incentives for publishing could push some scientists to engage in fraud and plagiarism, says he says. 'This is an absolute incentive to game the system.' "

  • At p. 13, I refer to researcher productivity. If I were writing the book again, I'd add a section (here or hereabouts) on how OA increases researcher productivity.
    • See Ronald Larsen and Howard Wactlar, Lost in Information, National Science Foundation, June 17, 2003. "Substantial improvements in scholarly productivity are already apparent [from the rises of digital libraries]. Digital resources have demonstrated the potential to advance scholarly productivity, easily doubling research output in many fields within the next decade....This report details the nature of the federal investment required to sustain the pace of progress....[T]he next phase of digital library research should focus on...[i]mproving availability, accessibility and, thereby, productivity."
    • Stevan Harnad, On Maximizing Journal Article Access, Usage and Impact, Haworth Press, April 21, 2005. "Researchers are employed and salaried, and their research is funded, so as to maximize the usage and impact of their research output, thereby maximizing the progress and productivity of research itself....And of course the progress and productivity of researchers and research itself are enhanced [by open-access self-archiving]."
    • Stevan Harnad, Promoting open access to research, The Hindu, November 1, 2006. "And now we can see both why researchers give away their articles and why it is so important that all their potential users should be able to access and use them. Because all access-barriers are barriers to research progress and its benefits (as well as to the advancement of researchers' careers and productivity)....There is no need, however, for developing countries to wait for the developed countries to mandate self-archiving. Developing countries have even more to gain...because currently both their access and their impact is disproportionately low, relative to their actual and potential research productivity."
    • See Ian Rowlands and Rene Olivieri, Overcoming the barriers to research productivity: A case study in immunology and microbiology, Publishing Research Consortium, 2006, p. 28: "By a very large majority (90%) and by general agreement (no differences are evident between the four sub-populations), researchers agree that desktop access to journal full text has enabled them to become more effective researchers (Fig 15)." Note that "this report was commissioned by the publishing industry" (p. 7) and is generally critical of open access.
    • See Beverly Brown, Cynthia Found, and Merle McConnell, Federal Science eLibrary Pilot: Seamless, equitable desktop access for Canadian government researchers, The Electronic Library, 2007. "[R]esearchers...provided with seamless, equitable access to an expanded core of electronic journals in science, technology and medicine (STM)...reported significantly reduced time finding and verifying information. Time saved was redirected into critical activities such as research, laboratory activities, manuscript preparation, peer review activities and professional reading. Participants found that increased desktop access had a very positive impact on their ability to do their work."
    • Richard K. Johnson and Judy Luther, The E-only Tipping Point for Journals: What’s Ahead in the Print-to-Electronic Transition Zone, Association of Research Libraries, December 5, 2007. Quoting an unnamed librarian from their interviews: "For many if not most campus users of journals, electronic access is a productivity enhancer."
    • Peter Binfield, New Academic Editor Interview - Niyaz Ahmed, Public Library of Science blog, November 18, 2008. "Developing countries are in great need of Open Access. The fruits of the scientific and technological revolution are not reaching them because they have to pay to receive the content. In an Indian case scenario, while the library budgets are dwindling, internet access has become affordable for masses, thanks to our technology driven economy. And that is where OA comes to enhance research productivity as well as the pace of discovery."
    • See Alessandro Iaria, Carlo Schwarz, and Fabian Waldinger, Frontier Knowledge and Scientific Production: Evidence from the Collapse of International Science, Quarterly Journal of Economics, July 1, 2017 (perma.cc link). Here's my paraphrase of their fascinating argument: WWI reduced the flow of new scientific knowledge into Germany, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria. This was not just from violent disruption, which also affected Allied countries, but also from a deliberate scientific boycott of the Central Powers by the Allies. Compared to pre-War years, researchers in the Central Powers had less access to research from other countries, and roughly unchanged access to research from their own countries. This resulted in a decline in their productivity, as reflected in several measures including a drop in international prizes, a drop in patent applications, and a drop in the similarity of journal-article titles (measured by algorithm), suggesting a drop in cooperation. This is a new kind of evidence that science is international. It's also indirect support for one of the common arguments for OA, otherwise difficult to document empirically, namely, that enhancing access to research enhances researcher productivity.

  • At p. 15, I say that "OA benefits authors as well as readers." Add these notes.
    • See the supplements below (also for p. 15) on the OA citation advantage.
    • See Sarah Werning: "The second best part of science is knowing, just for a little while, something nobody else knows. The best part is sharing it with someone." Quoted by Mike Taylor in December 2012 (perma.cc link).
    • See Richard Sever, co-founder of bioRxiv and medRxiv, quoted in SPARC's celebration of the 30th anniversary of arXiv (perma.cc link): "Altruism is great, especially when there's something in it for you as well. And authors realize that if they put their work out there [make it OA], it's really good for the community as a whole, it's also really good for them."

  • At p. 15, I refer to "the well-documented phenomenon that OA articles are cited more often than non-OA articles...and that journals converting to OA see a rise in their submissions and citation impact." See the documentation in note 6 at pp. 178-179. Add these notes.
    • For a comprehensive annotated bibliography of studies up to 2013, including studies that do and do not support the OA citation advantage, see Steve Hitchcock, The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies, OpCit Project (perma.cc link).
    • See Stefan Busch's summary of the experience of BioMed Central, March 26 2011: "Typically...2 or 3 years after a journal converts from TA to OA, i.e. when the impact factor...is based on two years' worth of OA, the IF tends to go up significantly."
    • For evidence that the OA advantage also applies to open data, or to articles whose underlying data is open, see Heather Piwowar​ and Todd Vision, Data reuse and the open data citation advantage, PeerJ, October 1, 2013 (perma.cc link): "After accounting for other factors affecting citation rate, we find a robust citation benefit from open data, although a smaller one than previously reported. We conclude there is a direct effect of third-party data reuse that persists for years beyond the time when researchers have published most of the papers reusing their own data."
      • Also see Giovanni Colavizza et al., The citation advantage of linking publications to research data, arXiv, October 3, 2019 (perma.cc link): "We find that, following mandated publisher policies, data availability statements have become common by now, yet statements containing a link to a repository are still just a fraction of the total. We also find that articles with these statements, in particular, can have up to 25.36% higher citation impact on average." This article was later published in PLOS ONE, April 22, 2020 (perma.cc link).
      • Also see Garret Christensen et al., A study of the impact of data sharing on article citations using journal policies as a natural experiment, PLOS ONE, December 18, 2019 (perma.cc link): "The two main results, taken together, indicate that it is not sufficient for scientific journals merely to announce a data sharing requirement....Without diligent enforcement, a toothless journal data policy appears to produce the same result as no policy at all; few authors post their data. But even if de jure journal policy does not guarantee data sharing, our results indicate that public data sharing can eventually yield private benefits for scholars, in the form of enhanced citations, which provide meaningful de facto incentives to share scientific data."
      • Also see Giovanni Colavizza et al., The citation advantage of linking publications to research data, PLOS ONE, April 22, 2020 (perma.cc link): "We [found] an association between articles that include statements that link to data in a repository and up to 25.36% (± 1.07%) higher citation impact on average, using a citation prediction model."
      • Also see Liwei Zhang and Liang Ma, Does open data boost journal impact: evidence from Chinese economics, Scientometrics, February 14, 2021 (perma.cc link): "Our results show that open data has significantly increased the citations of journal articles....Our findings suggest that journals can leverage [journal-level policies requiring open data] to develop reputation and amplify academic impacts."
    • For evidence that the OA advantage also applies to OA books, see the November 2017 white paper from Springer Nature, The OA Effect: How Does Open Access Affect the Usage of Scholarly Books? "We found that Springer Nature OA books perform better than non-OA books published by Springer Nature in all three categories that we assessed: Downloads...Citations...[and] Online mentions."
      • The OA citation advantage for books also applies when non-OA but more affordable reprints emerge, even when the reprints infringe copyright. See Barbara Biasi and Petra Moser, Effects of Copyrights on Science, SSRN, December 26, 2018 (perma.cc link): "The Book Republication Program (BRP) allowed US publishers to violate German-owned copyrights....[W]e find that this change led to a substantial increase in citations to affected books. Intensity regressions show that this increase was driven by reductions in the price of books. A geographic analysis of library holdings and citations suggests that lower prices for BRP books allowed a new group of researchers at less affluent institutions to use these books in their own research."
      • Also see Michael Taylor, An altmetric attention advantage for open access books in the humanities and social sciences, Scientometrics, October 10, 2020 (perma.cc link): "Both OA books and chapters have significantly higher use on social networks, higher coverage in the mass media and blogs, and evidence of higher rates of social impact in policy documents. OA chapters have higher rates of coverage on Wikipedia than their non-OA equivalents, and are more likely to be shared on Mendeley."
    • For evidence that the OA advantage also applies to articles whose preprints were OA, see Stylianos Serghiou and John Ioannidis, Altmetric Scores, Citations, and Publication of Studies Posted as Preprints, Journal of the American Medical Association, January 23, 2018 (perma.cc link): "The sample of 776 published articles with preprints was matched to 3647 published articles without preprints. Published articles with preprints had significantly higher Altmetric scores than published articles without preprints (median, 9.5 [IQR, 3.1 to 35.3] vs 3.5 [IQR, 0.8 to 12.2], respectively; between-group difference, 4 [IQR, 0 to 15]; P < .001) and received more citations (median, 4 [IQR, 1 to 10] vs 3 [IQR, 1 to 7]; between-group difference, 1 [IQR, −1 to 5]; P < .001)."
      • Also see Darwin Y. Fu and Jacob J. Hughey, Meta-Research: Releasing a preprint is associated with more attention and citations for the peer-reviewed article, eLife, December 6, 2019 (perma.cc link): "[W]e found that articles with a preprint had, on average, a 49% higher Altmetric Attention Score and 36% more citations than articles without a preprint. These associations were independent of several other article- and author-level variables (such as scientific subfield and number of authors), and were unrelated to journal-level variables such as access model and Impact Factor."
      • Also see Nicholas Fraser et al., The relationship between bioRxiv preprints, citations and altmetrics, Quantitative Science Studies, June 25, 2020: "bioRxiv-deposited journal articles had sizably higher citation and altmetric counts compared to nondeposited articles."
      • Also see Boya Xie et al., Is preprint the future of science? A thirty year journey of online preprint services, arXiv, February 20, 2021 (perma.cc link): "[We find] that papers with preprints have more citations in any year regardless whether they have a published version. On average of all years, a journal or conference paper with a preprint version (P-JC) has median citation of 14.8, while a non-preprint counterpart (JC-only) receives 2.6 citations, which results in 12.2 citation difference (five times more). All preprints (P-all), regardless whether they have been published in journal/conference, have 0.7 more citations than papers without a preprint version (JC-only)."
    • For evidence that the OA advantage shows up in altmetrics, not just in citation counts, see Daniel Torres-Salinas et al., Open Access and Altmetrics in the pandemic age: Forescast analysis on COVID-19 literature, bioRxiv, April 26, 2020 (perma.cc link): "OA publications tend to receive the largest share of social media attention as measured by the Altmetric Attention Score." Also see the 2018 Serghiou and Ionnadis study cited above.
    • See Éric Archambault et al., Research Impact of Paywalled versus Open Access Papers, n.d. but captured by the Wayback Machine on August 7, 2016: "Publishing in paywalled journals without green archiving is never an effective impact maximization strategy....In total, and for all these fields, publishing in paywalled journals with no additional green archiving always yields below average citedness....Publishing in paywalled journals is the least impactful strategy overall, and the least impactful in 16 out of 22 fields....On average, open access papers produce a 50% higher research impact than strictly paywalled papers....In all these fields, fostering open access (without distinguishing between gold and green) is always a better research impact maximization strategy than relying on strictly paywalled papers....Having a green copy of a paper is the most impactful research communication strategy overall and the best strategy in 19 fields out of 22....Green is nearly always more effective than relying strictly on gold (20 out of 22 fields)....Gold is the best strategy in biology and biomedical research and very close to green in clinical medicine (likely a reflection of the NIH and Wellcome Trust OA mandates)....Gold has the least impact in six fields."
    • See Heather Piwowar et al., The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles, PeerJ, February 13, 2018 (perma.cc link): "Comparing the average relative citation impact of different access categories, the OACA [Open Access Citation Advantage] is corroborated: Papers hidden behind a paywall were cited 10% below world average (ARC [Average Relative Citation] = 0.90), while those that are freely available obtain, on average, 18% more citations than what is expected (ARC = 1.18). However, citation impact differs between the different manners in which papers are made available for free: those that are only available as Green OA (ARC = 1.33) and Hybrid OA papers (ARC = 1.31) are cited the most with an impact of more than 30% above expectations, those available as Bronze are cited 22% above world average, while papers published as Gold OA obtain an ARC of 0.83. This constitutes an average relative citation impact of 17% below world average and 9% below that of articles hidden behind a paywall. Figure 5 below describes these findings."
    • See Mirjam Curno and Stephanie Oeben, Scientific Excellence at Scale: Open Access journals have a clear citation advantage over subscription journals, Frontiers, July 11, 2018 (perma.cc link): "In general and across the last three years, Open Access journals receive on average 7% more citations than subscription journals (Figure 3). Interestingly, Open Access journals published by traditional subscription publishers are generally achieving more impact within the same publisher."
    • See Dan Pollock and Ann Michael, Evaluating Quality in Open Access Journals, DeltaThink, August 2018 (perma.cc link): "While the proportion of fully OA journals is growing over time, the proportion of higher-performing fully OA journals [measured by journal impact factor] is growing faster than the average performers....The data show that an increasing number of fully OA publications are attaining higher impact factors at faster rates than their subscription and hybrid counterparts....There is nothing preventing an OA journal from being 'high quality', and based on this data, a fully OA journal’s Impact Factor now appears more likely to be above average for its field." Also see the later article by the same authors, Open access mythbusting: Testing two prevailing assumptions about the effects of open access adoption, Learned Publishing, January 24, 2019. "An increasing number of fully OA publications are attaining higher Journal Impact Factors at faster rates than their subscription and hybrid counterparts."
    • See Yang Li et al., Will open access increase journal CiteScores? An empirical investigation over multiple disciplines, PLoS ONE, August 30, 2018 (perma.cc link): "This paper empirically studies the effect of Open Access on journal CiteScores. We have found that the general effect is positive but not uniform across different types of journals. In particular, we investigate two types of heterogeneous treatment effect: (1) the differential treatment effect among journals grouped by academic field, publisher, and tier; and (2) differential treatment effects of Open Access as a function of propensity to be treated. The results are robust to a number of sensitivity checks and falsification tests. Our findings shed new light on Open Access effect on journals and can help stakeholders of journals in the decision of adopting the Open Access policy." Also see the summary in the LSE Impact Blog on October 30, 2018 (perma.cc link), emphasizing the effects of a journal flip or conversion to OA.
    • See K.C. Kazikdas, M. Tanik, and A. Ural, Changing trends in otorhinolaryngology publishing, ACTA Otorhinolaryngologica Italica, March 25, 2019 (perma.cc link): "The aim of this study is to compare the changes in impact factors and citation numbers of Open Access (OA) vs subscription-based (SB) journals between 1999 and 2016....There was a statistical difference as the proportion of OA Journals were not equal to the proportion of SB Journals throughout the years 1999 and 2016, and it showed the tendency to increase greater compared to SB Journals (p < 0.01). Although the overall level of impact factors of SB journals was generally high, by comparing two regression models, it was obvious that the level of increase of the impact factors of OA journals were significantly higher (p < 0.01)."
    • See Cui Huang et al., The effect of “open access” on journal impact factors: A causal analysis of medical journals, Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, November 1, 2019 (perma.cc link): "OA enhances JIFs." As I put it in a tweet about this article, "OA journals can play the JIF game and win, even if it's better not to play at all."
    • See Nuria Bautista-Puig et al., Do journals flipping to gold open access show an OA citation or publication advantage?, Scientometrics, June 13, 2020 (perma.cc link): "[We found] robust evidence...that flipping journals tend to have an OA Citation Advantage compared to non Gold-OA journals, and that this advantage is already visible a few years after the switch. It corroborates the conclusions from a series of previous studies on OA flipping....Whether this citation advantage also occurs in relation to non-OA journals in general, excluding hybrid OA serials, remains to be assessed in a follow-up study....[We found] no statistically significant evidence that journals switching to OA increase their publication output faster than non Gold-OA journals do. Therefore, there is no solid evidence for an OA Publication Advantage, nor for an OA Publication Disadvantage."
    • See Yi Xiang Zhan et al., Evaluation of articles in metabolism research on the basis of their citations, Biochemia Medica, December 15, 2020 (perma.cc link): In a study of metabolism journals with high and low citation rates, "most of [the open-access journals] were ranked in the top 25% for citation rate, and none were ranked in the bottom 25%. This suggests that publishing in an open access journal that provide better access to articles can increase the citation rate."
    • See New research from Springer Nature confirms value in ‘Going for Gold’, Springer Nature, October 27, 2021 (perma.cc link). Both green and gold OA show the advantage, but gold significantly more than green. The advantage extends beyond citations to downloads and altmetric scores. "Gold OA articles achieve greater impact compared to subscription articles with earlier versions available e.g. via Green OA routes. On average, the latter type only achieves 1.07 times higher citations than non-OA articles, compared with 1.64 times higher achieved by Gold OA articles....Gold OA articles achieve far greater attention and awareness with nearly five times higher Altmetric Attention Scores compared to non-OA articles, while subscription articles with earlier versions available e.g. via Green OA routes only have two times higher Altmetric scores than non-OA articles in hybrid journals....Gold OA articles continue to be used more with results showing that they are downloaded over six times more than non-OA articles....Variations by discipline are seen but Gold OA exceeds the reach and impact of both non-OA articles and subscription articles with earlier versions available."
    • For real-time news and comment on the open-access citation advantage (for and against its existence), follow the oa.advantage tag at the Open Access Tracking Project.
    • For evidence that OA increases submissions, see Chapter 8, endnote 11 (note call at p. 159, note text at pp. 216-217). Also see the updates and supplements for p. 145, below.

  • At p. 17, I say, "In general, scholarly journals don’t pay editors...either. In general, editors...are paid salaries by universities to free them, like authors, to donate their time and labor to ensure the quality of new work appearing in scholarly journals." Add these notes.
    • Journal editors acknowledge this point, and even emphasize it as part of an argument for universities (if not publishers) to better reward their important work. See Alan Rauch, Ecce Emendator: The Cost of Knowledge for Scholarly Editors, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 23, 2014 (perma.cc link): "[S]cholarly publishing is still a big business. University libraries make enormous outlays of cash to ensure that the faculty of each department have access to the very best and most recent research. But editors see none of that money. And their labor to support the mechanism is, more often than not, completely unrewarded and unsupported."
    • Also see James C. Alwine et al., What Is the Price of Science?, mBio, March 2, 2021 (perma.cc link): "Historically...[e]ditors and peer reviewers were provided minimal, if any, financial support. The scientific community considered these roles essential responsibilities to the scientific endeavor and served them voluntarily, a tradition that remains to this day."

  • At p. 18, I say, "Academic publishers are not monolithic...." Add this note.
    • See my article, Will open access undermine peer review?, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, September 2, 2007: "For convenience, I'll refer to those who raise [the objection that OA undermines peer review] as the publisher trade associations or lobbyists. I can't use the shorter term 'publishers' because so few have taken a position on it. Publishers are not monolithic, even if their lobbyists want to appear to speak for all of them. While some publishers do support the objection, some reject it, and a growing number of publishers embrace both OA and peer review."
    • See Library Loon, Pyrrhic publishers, Gavia Libraria, June 10, 2011: "[T]he Loon must note that 'publishers' is not a monolith. 'Publishers' are not suing Georgia State; SAGE, Oxford, and Cambridge are. However. The vast bulk of toll-access publishers have consistently ranged themselves behind mendacious attacks on open access, behind Washington lobbyists fighting against the NIH Public Access Policy and policies like it, behind these lawsuits, behind anti-ETD whisper campaigns. Only a paltry few have any excuse whatever to say 'we're different from the monolith' " (emphases in original).

  • At p. 18, I say, "This variety reminds us (to paraphrase Tim O'Reilly) that OA doesn't threaten publishing; it only threatens existing publishers who do not adapt." Add this note
    • See Barry Eisler, The digital truths traditional publishers don't want to hear, The Guardian, April 29, 2013. "We have to be careful not to conflate publishing services with the entities that have traditionally provided them. The services are essential; the entities are not. This would seem a fairly obvious point, and yet as thoughtful and experienced a person as novelist James Patterson is now calling for a bailout of the legacy publishing industry, apparently because he fears that publishing is dying. No. Publishing isn't dying; it is evolving. Authors understand this, and are embracing it. Legacy publishers need to do the same."

  • At p. 20, I say, "OA isn’t an attempt to bypass peer review." Add this comment.
    • In this paragraph I say, "While OA to unrefereed preprints is useful and widespread, the OA movement isn’t limited to unrefereed preprints and, if anything, focuses on OA to peer-reviewed articles." Today I'd rewrite that sentence this way: "While OA to unrefereed preprints is useful, widespread, and growing fast, the OA movement isn’t limited to unrefereed preprints and focuses at least as much on OA to peer-reviewed articles."

  • At p. 21, I say, "OA is not an attempt to reform, violate, or abolish copyright." Add these notes.
    • I'm not denying that some OA proponents have recommended the reform, violation, or abolition of copyright law. Indeed, I recommend the reform of copyright myself; see my updates to an adjacent passage on p. 21, immediately below. In this passage I'm merely saying that supporting OA doesn't commit one to support any of these particular stances toward copyright.
    • In a blog post from September 21, 2008, on Aaron Swartz' Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto, I disavowed illegal tactics for attaining OA. "I don't oppose the illegal tactics because I think current copyright law is just. On the contrary, I think it is grotesquely unbalanced and unjust. Nor do I oppose civil disobedience. But I don't accept that copyright infringement is civil disobedience and, more importantly, I don't accept that advancing OA through deliberate violations of copyright law would do more good than harm. I have three basic reasons: (1) OA is already lawful and doesn't require the reform or violation of copyright law, even if it could leap forward with the right reforms. (2) OA activists will never match the publishing industry's funds for litigation. (3) One of the most persistent and harmful misunderstandings of OA is that it violates copyright law. We've come a long way in educating policy-makers out of that misunderstanding. But the Orwellian Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (a.k.a. Conyers bill) is just one recent piece of evidence that we still have a lot of educating to do and that publishers can still make a lot of hay from the misunderstandings which remain. A campaign to give the publishing lobby its first valid evidence that OA violates copyright is the last thing we need. For an earlier take on some of these issues, see my 2003 article, Not Napster for Science....I should say for the record that one problem with current copyright law is that it leaves the line between legal and illegal tactics very fuzzy. By criticizing illegal tactics, I don't mean to leave the impression that it's always easy to tell what they are. By recommending only lawful tactics, I don't mean that we shouldn't push the envelope." For more background on the Conyers bill, see my three critiques of it, one from October 2008, one from March 2009, and one from March 2012.
    • Also see my November 2009 article, Knowledge as a Public Good. "Copyright law originated in the 18th century when full-text copying of any lengthy text was a time-consuming and error-prone job. When copyright arose, and for centuries after, it prohibited acts that were difficult to commit. But today it prohibits acts that are easy to commit. That doesn't invalidate copyright law, as law. But it reduces the law's effectiveness as a barrier of exclusion, even if it ought not to reduce its effectiveness. The compliance arising from the difficulty of violation is no longer quite so invisibly blended together with the compliance arising from respect for the law. Hence our understanding of the extent of respect for the law is not quite so distorted. In fact, compliance is down. Way down. Speaking for the US, I doubt that we've seen more widespread and conspicuous violation of any laws since Prohibition."
    • Also see my March 2016 disavowal of Sci-Hub. "Sci-Hub leaves the false impression that OA requires copyright infringement, or that OA must be unlawful....Anti-OA publishers argued for years that OA, or OA policies, intrinsically violated copyright. They were wrong, and in my opinion most of them knew it. But it took years for widespread public correction to have an effect. I was one of many who took part in that effort....One result of that communal effort is that publishers have gradually stopped raising that false objection, and newcomers have gradually stopped making that false assumption. The risk of unlawful OA services is that they could trigger a new wave of false assumptions about (1) the lawfulness of OA, (2) the wide range of lawful options for researchers to make their work OA, and (3) the importance of persuading researchers to make one of those lawful choices."

  • At p. 21, I say, "OA isn't an attempt deny the reality of costs."
    • See the updates to p. 143 below.

  • At p. 24, I say, "Not all plagiarists are smart, but the smart ones will not steal from OA sources indexed in every search engine....OA deters plagiarism." Add these notes.
    • See my article, Open Access and Quality, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, October 2, 2006. "Because OA will only reduce plagiarism by smart plagiarists, the effect may be small. And today the effect is small in any case because so little of the literature is OA. But just as we can expect good things from a pest-resistant strain of wheat, even when we've just introduced it in one field, we can expect good things from this plagiarism-resistant strain of research literature."
    • See this October 2016 interview with Matt Hodgkinson, Head of Research Integrity at Hindawi. He's seen a rising number of plagiarism cases since he entered academic publishing in 2003. Some of this growth is due to "an industrialization of misconduct." But some is due to better detection, thanks to OA. "Some of this is down to technology and openness enabling detection of poor practices – such as better plagiarism detection and more content being online and thus easily searchable, particularly when it is not hiding behind a paywall."
    • For more on OA and plagiarism, including real-time updates, see the items tagged with oa.plagiarism by the Open Access Tracking Project.

  • At p. 24, I say, "OA isn't an attempt to punish or undermine conventional publishers....The goal is constructive, not destructive." Add this note.
    • See my Open Access Overview, first released June 21, 2004 and often updated: "The purpose of the campaign for OA is the constructive one of providing OA to a larger and larger body of literature, not the destructive one of putting non-OA journals or publishers out of business. The consequences may or may not overlap (this is contingent) but the purposes do not overlap."

  • At p. 24, I say, "[M]ost toll-access publishers are already adapting, by allowing author-initiated OA, providing some OA themselves, or experimenting with OA." Add this note.
    • See ALPSP report indicates publisher health but OA concerns, Research Information, October 24, 2013: "In 2008 half of publishers had some form of open access but this had risen to two thirds by 2012. Most publishers surveyed now have a hybrid model in place across all titles (i.e. author has option to pay for their article to be open access). However take up of the hybrid model by authors is low, 1 per cent of articles published. There has also been a large increase in publishers offering open access after an embargo period (normally 12 months)." I do not have access to the report itself, or I would quote from it directly.

  • At p. 26, I use an analogy to fireworks in New York harbor to introduce the problem of distinguishing OA for professionals from OA for lay readers. Add this note.
    • I should have remembered this better analogy that I used in May 2010. In defending a Congressional bill mandating OA, I tried to head off an objection that I knew publishers would raise: "Finally, FRPAA makes no assumptions about how many members of the lay public are interested in reading peer-reviewed scientific research articles. It doesn't matter that some members of the lay public won't care to read the articles that will become OA, or won't understand them, just as it doesn't matter that some drivers won't care to drive on a given stretch of publicly-funded road." See Suber, FRPAA introduced in the US House of Representatives, May 2, 2010.

  • At p. 26, I say, "OA isn't universal access." Add these notes.
    • One of the barriers to universal access is censorship. For an argument that an OA variant can help bypass censorship barriers, see my May 2011 article, Free Offline Access: A Primer on OA' (OA Prime): "Swapping thumb drives of OA' literature bypasses censors and surveillance in oppressive countries."
    • Another barrier to universal access is the digital divide. It continues and is larger than most people think. See Ian Sample, Universal internet access unlikely until at least 2050, experts say, The Guardian, January 10, 2019. "While half the world’s population now uses the internet, a desperate lack of skills and stagnant investment mean the UN’s goal of universal access, defined as 90% of people being online, may not be reached until 2050 or later, they said....In December [2018], the UN's International Telecommunication Union (ITU) declared that global internet access had crossed a threshold with more than half of the world's population now online....But the first half of the world was the easier to bring online. Connectivity swept through developed nations and other regions where high incomes, good education and dense urban centres smoothed the way. The second half is expected to be harder to hook up."

  • At p. 27, I say, "Most online literature is in English, or another single language, and machine translation is still very weak." Add these notes.

  • At p. 27, I refer to "handicap access barriers" and "handicapped users". Add this note.
    • These terms were ill-chosen even in 2012 and I regret them. Today I'd refer to "disability access barriers" and "disabled or impaired users".

Chapter 2: Motivation

Read the OA text:

Updates and supplements for Chapter 2:

  • At p. 29, I say, "For four decades, subscription prices have risen significantly faster than inflation and significantly faster than library budgets." Add these notes.
    • Correction. In endnote 2 at p. 181, I link to a graphic from the ARL report, Monograph and Serial Expenditures in ARL Libraries, 1986-2004. The URL I used for that graphic is now dead. Here is a working URL from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/20121030025208/http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/monser04.pdf.
    • Correction. In the same endnote, I cite Stephen Bosch, Kittie Henderson, and Heather Klusendorf, "Periodicals Price Survey 2011: Under Pressure, Times Are Changing," Library Journal, April 14, 2011. The URL I used for that article is now dead, and LJ provides no redirect. Here's a working URL, http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2011/04/publishing/periodicals-price-survey-2011-under-pressure-times-are-changing/ (perma.cc link).
    • See Steven Bosch and Kittie Henderson, The Winds of Change: Periodicals Price Survey 2013, Library Journal, April 25, 2013. "This year, the serials pricing data indicates that prices are increasing at about the same rate as last year. Increases seemed to have plateaued at about 6% for 2013. Data from the merged ISI indexes shows a 6% increase for 2013, unchanged from 2012....The Consumer Price Index (CPI), on the other hand, advanced 1.7% for 2012, which means serials inflation continues to far exceed general inflationary pressures and library budget adjustments."
    • Data from journal aggregator EBSCO show that subscription prices from 2009 to 2013, averaged across all fields, rose by more than 20%.
    • See the ARCL 2016 Academic Library Trends and Statistics, American Library Association, July 20, 2017 (perma.cc link): "In the past five years, 21% of all academic libraries saw increases for staffing while 19% saw decreased funding and 60% reported flat budgets."
    • The EBSCO Serials Price Projection Report for 2019 (perma.cc link), published in September 2018, confirms that both trends continue. "Library budget growth remains a top concern, generally lagging behind annual inflation in journal pricing in spite of the annual price increase caps applied to many e-journal packages....Though overall budgets in the U.S. academic library market show modest improvements, the budget for serials materials generally have not kept pace with annual journal price inflation."
    • See Stephen Bosch, Barbara Albee, and Sion Romaine, Costs Outstrip Library Budgets: Periodicals Price Survey 2020, Library Journal, April 14, 2020 (perma.cc link): "A Strategic Library 2020 Library Purchasing Survey of libraries of all types reported that almost 60 percent of respondents had a flat budget. The latest Publishers Communication Group (PCG) whitepaper Library Budget Predictions for 2018 reports that overall library budget predictions for growth are modest at a 1 percent increase....The 5 to 6 percent average price increase observed in 2020 is expected to remain constant for 2021, and this will lead to further contraction of resources for library users."
    • See Dan Pollock and Ann Michael, Library Spending and the Serials Crisis, DeltaThink, May 3, 2020 (perma.cc link): "[M]edian spending on journals...continues to increase in real terms (regardless of the inflation index used), while overall library spend are now declining. This suggests that budgets, too, are in real terms decline."

  • At p. 30, I start subsection #2 in which I offer data showing that researchers do not have access to all the research they need. See endnotes 3 and 4 at p. 182. Add these notes.
    • Also see Jennifer Howard, JSTOR Tests Free, Read-Only Access to Some Articles, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 13, 2012: "Every year, JSTOR said, it turns away almost 150 million individual attempts [from readers without subscriptions] to gain access to articles."
    • Also see Ross Housewright, Roger C. Schonfeld, and Kate Wulfson, UK Survey of Academics 2012, Ithaka S+R, May 16, 2013 (perma.cc link). From pp. 38-39: "[A]bout half of all respondents —slightly more in the arts and humanities than in other fields— strongly agreed that they “often would like to use journal articles that are not in [their] library’s print or digital collections.” And only slightly more than a third strongly agreed that they can “almost always get satisfactory access” to needed journal articles that are not in their library collections, a pattern that holds across disciplinary groupings. When asked how they gain access to needed materials that their institution’s library does not directly provide, more than two-thirds of our respondents indicated that they “often” or “occasionally” simply give up." From p. 42: "Almost 60% of academics at non-RLUK [Research Library UK] institutions strongly agreed that they would often “like to use journal articles that are not in my library’s print or digital collections,” compared with less than 40% of academics at RLUK institutions."
    • Also see the Taylor & Francis Open Access Survey, March 2013. One survey question asked T&F authors what they thought of the statement, "Researchers already have access to most of the articles they need." Of 14,541 respondents, 38% disagreed (26%) or strongly disagreed (12%).
    • Also see Daisy Larios et al., Access to scientific literature by the conservation community, PeerJ, July 9, 2020 (perma.cc link): "Roughly half (49%) of the respondents find it not easy or not at all easy to access scientific literature."
    • Also see Mary Kennedy, The Results Are In of our Open Access Survey, ScienceOpen, October 29, 2021 (perma.cc link): "83% of the respondents agree that the scholarly community could perform research more effectively if all scientific communication were made freely available under an open access license....95% of respondents have had the experience of being unable to access a research article they needed due to paywalls....83% have downloaded an open access book for their research....Half of the respondents admitted to at least once illegally downloading a research paper that they couldn’t access because it was behind a paywall."

  • At p. 30, I say, "[C]umulative price increases...forced the Harvard Library to undertake 'serious cancellation efforts' for budgetary reasons." In endnote 5 (note text at p. 182), I cite two sources. Here are eight, including the original two, in chronological order.
    • A letter from Sidney Verba, the Harvard University Librarian, January 1, 2004. "As of January 1 [2004], the University is eliminating a number of journals published by Elsevier....Harvard libraries will fulfill requests for articles from these journals through interlibrary loan and third-party document delivery services. The decision to eliminate these journals was...driven not only by current financial realities, but also —and perhaps more importantly— by the need to reassert control over our collections and to encourage new models for research publication at Harvard....Of greatest concern to the Digital Acquisitions Committee and to the University Library Council was the lack of any [Elsevier] option by which Harvard could prune its holdings and reduce its level of spending. Libraries wishing to cancel subscriptions could do so, but only by incurring steeply increased fees that obliterate any potential savings —while Elsevier's revenues continued to rise....Bundling has created an artificial environment that sustains journals that might otherwise not be viable on their own....The combined costs of Elsevier subscriptions far outrun even its closest competitors, while prudent cancellation decisions lead only to steeper fees. Like so many other institutions, Harvard's collections have become hostage to this situation. Declining the bundled agreement and intentionally reducing our outlay for Elsevier titles will ultimately give us the ability to respond to the marketplace unfettered by such artificial constraints."
    • 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," Harvard Magazine, 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...."

  • At pp. 30-32, I say, "Several sub-Saharan African university libraries subscribed to zero [subscription-based scholarly journals in 2008], offering their patrons access to no conventional journals except those donated by publishers." Add these notes.
    • See Samuel Kwaku Smith Esseh, Strengthening Scholarly Publishing in Africa: Assessing the Potential of Online Systems, doctoral dissertation at University of British Columbia, 2011 (perma.cc link), at pp. 252-253: "In most research and university libraries in Africa, the data show a serious gap in terms of inadequate funding for journal subscriptions. While a total of 26% of libraries indicated with certainty that they had not budgeted for journal subscriptions, another 11% libraries were not sure if any budget had been set aside. Those who did report available funds (less than 8%) had a budget of between $250,001 and $500,000 for journal subscriptions. The majority (32, or 49%) had a yearly budget of between $1 and $250,000. When this range is further broken down and carefully examined, what is evident is that a total of 78% of librarians (within the $1-$250,000 budget range) reported a subscription budget of less than $100,000 per year."
    • See Tao Tao and Lori Carlin, China's New STM Policies: By the Numbers, DeltaThink, November 15, 2020 (perma.cc link): "Over 80% of Chinese universities may have access to little or no content behind a paywall, including content they themselves produced as researchers. With library budget increases at less than 3% annually (anecdotally), there is no reason to believe that this picture would change in the foreseeable future."

  • At p. 32, I say, "[B]ig deals give universities access to more titles than they had before and reduce the average cost per title. But when libraries try to cancel individual titles that are low in quality or low in local usage, publishers raise the price on the remaining titles. Bundling gives libraries little room to save money with carefully targeted cancellations, and after a point forces them to cancel all or none." Add this note:
    • See Fei Shu et al., Is It Such a Big Deal? On the Cost of Journal Use in the Digital Era, College & Research Libraries, September 2018 (perma.cc link): "big deal bundles do decrease the mean price per subscribed journal, academic libraries receive less value for their investment. We find that university researchers cite only a fraction of journals purchased by their libraries, that this fraction is decreasing, and that the cost per cited journal has increased."

  • At p. 32, I say, "Big deals are too big to cancel without pain, giving publishers leverage to raise prices out of proportion to journal costs, size, usage, impact, and quality." First see endnote 7 at pp. 182-183. Add this note:
    • See Stephen Bosch, Barbara Albee, and Sion Romaine, Deal or No Deal: Periodicals Price Survey 2019, Library Journal, April 4, 2019. For evidence that journal subscription price increases do not correlate with any tested journal impact metric, see the graphic just below Table 9.

  • At p. 32, I say, "In 2010, Elsevier's journal division had a profit margin of 35.7 percent while ExxonMobil had only 28.1 percent." Add this note.
    • The profit margin for STM publishing at Elsevier rose to 39% in 2013. See the Reed Elsevier Annual Reports and Financial Statements 2013. (Thanks to Heather Morrison.)
    • The profit margin for academic publishing at Informa, which owns Taylor & Francis, was 35% in 2013. See Informa's Full Year Results for the Year Ended 31 December 2013. (Thanks to Heather Morrison.)
    • See David Harvie, Geoff Lightfoot, Simon Lilley, and Kenneth Weir, What are we to do with feral publishers? Organization, August 14, 2012. Quoting from the self-archived edition: "Sage, the publisher of this journal, shows a gross profit across both books and journals of over 60 per cent. A smaller publisher, Emerald, which concentrates more on journals, is able to register a gross profit of over 75 per cent. Given that the perceived quality of the journal enables publishers to demand higher prices, and Emerald has relatively few highly ranked journals, it is likely that gross profits for journals for major publishers are even higher than the 77 per cent recorded by Emerald. We are aware of only two other industries where these sorts of return are on offer: that in illegal drugs and the delivery of university-level business education...."

  • At p. 33, I say, "[Most] big deals include confidentiality clauses preventing universities from disclosing the prices they pay. The effect is to reduce bargaining and price competition even further." Add this note.
    • Also see Elsevier's David Tempest defend confidentiality clauses in answer to a question at Oxford University, April 2013. Watch the video or read this portion of the transcript: "Stephen Curry...: I’m glad David Tempest is so interested in librarians being able to make costs transparent to their users, because at my university, Imperial College, my chief librarian can not tell me how much she pays for Elsevier journals because she’s bound by a confidentiality clause. Would you like to address that? [Loud applause for the question] David Tempest: Well, indeed there are confidentiality clauses inherent in the system, in our Freedom Collections. The Freedom Collections do give a lot of choice and there is a lot of discount in there to the librarians. And the use, and the cost per use has been dropping dramatically, year on year. And so we have to ensure that, in order to have fair competition between different countries, that we have this level of confidentiality to make that work. Otherwise everybody would drive down, drive down, drive drive drive, and that would mean that ... [The last part is drowned in the laughter of the audience.]"
    • For another kind of defense of confidentiality clauses, see Phil Davis, Non-Disclosure Agreements — Economic Tool or Kabuki Theatre? Scholarly Kitchen, May 29, 2012. Davis argues that signing non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and then violating them in private can help libraries more than abolishing NDAs. But he does not provide data on how many librarians follow this practice, and he does not argue that actual non-disclosure would help libraries more than disclosure.

  • At p. 33, I quote James McPherson's findings from 2003: "In 1986 [academic] libraries spent 44 percent of their budgets on books and 56 percent on journals; by 1997 the imbalance had grown to 28 percent for books and 72 percent for journals." Add this note.
    • See David Harvie, Geoff, Lightfoot, Simon Lilley, and Kenneth Weir, What are we to do with feral publishers? Organization, August 14, 2012. Quoting from the self-archived edition: "Since 1999, spending on books has fallen by almost a fifth in real terms, and from almost 12 per cent of libraries' total spending to just over 8 per cent. Expenditure on serials, on the other hand, has increased sharply: from just under £70 million to over £130 million. In real terms this represents an increase of 63 per cent; journals' share of total library spending rose from 16 per cent to almost 20 per cent."
    • See Robert Darnton, The New Age of the Book, New York Review of Books, March 18, 1999: "Until recently, monographs used to account for at least half the acquisitions budget of most research libraries. In 1996-1997, however, 78 percent of the acquisitions budget in the library of the University of Illinois at Chicago went for periodicals, 21 percent for monographs. Syracuse University’s library spent 75 percent on periodicals and 17 percent on monographs. The library at the University of Hawaii spent 84 percent on periodicals and 12 percent on monographs. (The numbers don’t add up to 100 percent, since there are other categories of expenditures.) The decline in the purchase of monographs among large research libraries over the last ten years comes to 23 percent."
    • See Stephen Bosch, Barbara Albee, and Sion Romaine, Costs Outstrip Library Budgets: Periodicals Price Survey 2020, Library Journal, April 14, 2020 (perma.cc link): "On average, doctoral degree-granting institutions spent 77.2 percent of their materials budgets on ongoing commitments to subscriptions in 2017; comprehensive schools spent an average of 82.4 percent; baccalaureate schools spent an average of 79.5 percent, and associate degree-granting institutions spent an average of 64.9 percent. On average, academic libraries spent 76 percent of their materials budget on ongoing subscriptions."
    • See Dan Pollock and Ann Michael, Library Spending and the Serials Crisis, DeltaThink, May 3, 2020 (perma.cc link): "Serials spending is growing, and is taking an increasing share of library budgets (from around 25% share in 1998 to just under 40% share in 2019 in our data). In this sense, there is a 'serials crisis.'"

  • At p. 33, I say, "[T]he journal crisis, concentrated in the sciences, has precipitated a monograph crisis, concentrated in the humanities." Add this note.
    • For evidence that the effect on book purchases was delayed, especially for university-press books, see Elisabeth A. Jones and Paul N. Courant, Killer serials: Did electronic journals really destroy the university press? Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 50, 1 (2013) pp. 1-11. "Our first research question asked whether there had actually been a downturn in library purchasing of university press books since 1985, and if so, whether that decline was temporally coincident with the sharp increases in serials prices that began in the 1980s and 1990s....[Q]uite intriguingly, the answer to the second question would appear to be a decisive no: only one library in the sample – the very smallest, at Barry University – shows a consistent decline in purchasing from university presses extending back to the 1980s. To the extent that any of the other libraries cut their purchasing from the sample presses, they tended to do so later, mainly around either 2000 or 2007 – dates which, likely not coincidentally, mark the beginnings of the two most recent major U.S. economic downturns....Libraries’ overall monographic purchasing may have gone flat in the 1980s and declined after 2000, but based on these data, the same cannot be said for their purchasing of university press monographs. Cutting those purchases truly does seem to have been a strategy of last resort, likely linked more closely to the overall economic conditions of the past decade than to the rising serials costs which came much earlier...."

  • At p. 34, I say, "Some publishers don't allow libraries to share digital texts by interlibrary loan and instead require them to make printouts, scan the printouts, and lend the scans." Add this note.
    • See Eric Hellman, eBook ILL is silly. The reason why will bore you, Go To Hellman, March 22, 2014. "But if a library can do digital ILL, what is to prevent libraries from sharing a resource so widely that only one library in the world needs to buy the item? The solution that e-journal publishers typically use is the "print-and-ship" solution. In other words, a library is allowed to send articles from a subscribed journal only if they print it out first. The transaction is thus identical to what it was back in the dark ages of ink and paper and xerox machines. For publishers, the friction of print-and-ship discourages libraries from canceling subscriptions; besides, the big-deal model of bundling many subscriptions into one has been much more advantageous for publishers than the document-delivery model that ILL competes with....Printing article PDFs and mailing them is a stretch, but mapping this model into ebooks is a farther stretch...."

  • At p. 35, I say, "[Libraries] must explain to patrons that cookies and registration make anonymous inquiry impossible and that some uses allowed by law are not allowed by the technology." Add this note:
    • See Cody Hanson, User Tracking on Academic Publisher Platforms, presentation at the Coalition for Networked Information Spring 2019 Member Meeting, April 8-9, 2019. "I studied the page source from fifteen different publisher platform sites and found that publishers of library resources use technology on their platforms that actively undermine patron privacy. This advertising and marketing technology makes it impossible to ensure that the use of electronic library resources can be private....I found that, on average, each publisher site had eighteen third-party assets being loaded on their article pages. The median was ten. One publisher platform, the only one I will name here today, had zero: InformPubsOnline. One platform had over 100. In total, I found 139 different third-party asset sources across these fifteen articles."

  • At p. 37, I say, "Editors and referees donate the peer-review judgments to improve and validate [the] quality [of journal articles]." Add this note.
    • In endnote 13 (note call at p. 37, note text at p. 184) I cite a study showing that the value of this unpaid labor, worldwide, came to about £1.9 billion/year in 2008, or about $3 billion/year. However, the URL for that citation points to a news article about the study, not the study itself. First, the URL to the news article has changed to this: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/402189.article. Second, here's the full citation and proper link to the study itself: Activities, costs and funding flows in the scholarly communications system, Research Information Network, May 19, 2008. Third, here's an excerpt from the study at p. 8: "We have estimated the unpaid non-cash costs of peer review undertaken in the main by academics at £1.9bn globally each year [about $3bn]. If payment were to be made in cash to meet these costs, there would be a significant transfer of funds to academics and the HE sector globally. If universities were able to capture the payments made to peer reviewers, it might be possible to make these payments neutral in terms of university budgets. But our assumption is that the majority of payments would in effect form additions to salaries. Since the estimated breakeven price of a major discipline journal would increase by 43%, the result would be an increase in the costs of subscriptions to academic institutions globally of the order of £1.4bn. The estimated increase in the costs of subscriptions to UK libraries in the HE sector would be of the order of £53m, a rise of 45% compared with their current subscription expenditure."

  • At p. 37, I say, "Publishers argue that they add value to the submitted manuscripts, which is true. But other players in the game, such as authors, editors, and referees, add far more value than publishers." Add these notes.
    • See my article, Archived postprints should identify themselves, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, May 2, 2005: "If you tuned in late, I acknowledge that journals add value. It's a myth that OA wants to dispense with these valuable services....The true bone of contention is not whether these services are valuable but [whether they are worth what we pay for them, and] how to pay for the most essential services without creating access barriers for readers."
    • I stand by my comment from March 26, 2007 (perma.cc link): "Speaking for myself, I've never denied that journals add value. To me the question is not whether a journal adds value but how to pay for the most essential kinds of added value without creating access barriers for readers." This is entirely compatible with my other arguments that publishers often subtract value as well (more below).
    • The value added by conventional publishers must be weighed against the value subtracted by their business model. See my article, Problems and opportunities (blizzards and beauty), SPARC Open Access Newsletter, July 2, 2007: "[A]fter [subscription-based] publishers add value through peer review and copy editing they feel financial pressure to subtract value by imposing password barriers, locking files to prevent copying or cutting/pasting, freezing data into images, cutting good articles solely for length, and turning gifts into commodities which may not be further shared."
    • OA publishers can add the same value as TA publishers. Hence, even if the added value is high, it's not an argument for TA over OA. It's merely an argument for publishing over non-publishing. Moreover, after adding value, OA publishers do not subtract value, as conventional publishers do.
    • See my article, Balancing author and publisher rights, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, June 2, 2007: In a position paper by the ALPSP (Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers), AAP/PSP (Association of American Publishers / Professional/Scholarly Publishing), and STM (International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers), "publishers are arguing that because they add value to the publication, they deserve exclusive rights in it....This is neither balanced nor good for research. Publishers do add value, primarily the organization of expert volunteers who provide peer review. But no matter how many other forms of publisher-added value we recognize, and no matter how we estimate their overall benefits, there's no doubt that publishers add *less* value to the final product than authors, who do the research and writing, and funders, who pay for the original research....There are two main reasons why we find ourselves in the odd situation in which publishers get to control access even though they add less value than authors or funders. The first is that publishers demand compensation for their services, while authors and funders do not. The second is that publishers believe the only way to be compensated is to control access and charge for it. This is their business model from the age of print, when it was physically impossible to make perfect copies for a worldwide audience at zero marginal cost. Their business model depends on scarcity, which for digital texts in a networked world is always artificial scarcity. Publishers are not appealing to the principle that adding value carries the right to control access. If they were, then all contributors who added value would have to share control. Nor are they appealing to the principle that the right to control access belongs to the contributor who adds the greatest value. If they were, they'd have to make a serious argument that their contribution is more valuable than the author's or funder's. They are demanding the right to control access because they need compensation for their services and choose a business model that depends on access barriers and artificial scarcity. Even if we don't think this situation is perverse and cries out for change, at least we should notice that their position is not about balance. It's about what publishers need or want, regardless of what authors need or want. Am I saying that publishers should join authors and funders in working without direct monetary compensation? Not at all. Publishers deserve to be paid for the value they add. But it doesn't follow that they deserve to control access...."
    • See David Goodman et al., Open Access and Accuracy: a comparison of authors' self-archived manuscripts and published articles, Learned Publishing, July 2007 (self-archived version) (perma.cc link): "Advocates of [self-archiving] are certain that these versions differ only trivially from the publishers' versions; many of those who oppose them are equally certain that there can be major discrepancies. In a pilot study, we have examined the actual differences in a small number of such article pairs in the social sciences and in biology. Using an operational classification of the extent of error, we have determined that neither pronouncement is likely to be correct. We found numerous small differences that affect readability between open access and publishers' versions. We also found a low frequency of potentially confusing errors, but sometimes it was the publisher's and sometimes the manuscript version that was more accurate. We found two cases where errors introduced by the publisher omit technical details that are necessary to evaluate the validity of the conclusions. However, we found no error that actually affected the validity of the data or results."
    • See Edward Wates and Robert Campbell, Author’s version vs. publisher’s version: an analysis of the copy-editing function, Learned Publishing, April 2007: "In a sample of 189 articles the process of copy-editing resulted in a significant number of changes. None of these materially altered the conclusions of an article, which is more the purview of the peer-review process, but they did produce a more consistent and accurate article of record. This is particularly important in the electronic environment, where accuracy of linking, for example, could be critical in establishing correct citation data."
      • Also see Alma Swan's July 7, 2007 recap of the Wates and Campbell data: "The biggest category of corrections by the publisher [Blackwell] was concerned with the references (42.7% of all copy editing changes), the next biggest category (34.5%) was concerned with minor syntactical or grammatical changes and a small proportion (5.5%) of changes corrected author ‘errors that might otherwise have led to misunderstanding or misinterpretation’."
      • Also see Corey Tomsons' July 11, 2007 comment (perma.cc link): "With the arrival of open access, publishers are understandably worried they might be cut out of the process....Given that Robert Campbell is President and Publisher of Blackwell, and Edward Wates is Blackwell’s UK Journal Production Director, it should be no surprise the study give a rosy picture of the contributions by their own publishing company. It may also be no surprise that overwhelming number of errors involve citations – a category of error which might be caused in part by publishers’ insistence upon in-house style guides."
    • See Richard Smith, A great day for science, The Guardian, October 11, 2008. "Indeed, publishers arguably subtract value by Balkanising the research. Scientific research is fundamentally different from a thing, a car or a banana, in that ideas can be exchanged and increase exponentially without anybody losing. The more people have access to scientific ideas, the more new ideas." If I may paraphrase: TA publishers subtract value by blocking or diminishing network effects. Also see Smith's later piece, A bad bad week for access, The Guardian, June 28, 2012. "[OA is] taking a long time to come. The vested interests are huge, powerful, and well connected. None of the people who wrote the articles I've been accessing were paid for writing them. They are supported by public money, and publishers are making money by restricting access to their work. I argued to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission that far from adding value to the publishing process publishers are subtracting value. I stand by that, and I'm angry."
    • See Glenn S. McGuigan and Robert D. Russell, The Business of Academic Publishing: A Strategic Analysis of the Academic Journal Publishing Industry and its Impact on the Future of Scholarly Publishing, E-JASL: The Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship, Winter 2008. McGuigan and Russell quote from a Deutsche Bank report ("Reed Elsevier: Moving the Supertanker," Company Focus: Global Equity Research Report, January 11, 2005, p. 36, not online): "We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process. We are not attempting to dismiss what 7,000 people at [Reed Elsevier] do for a living. We are simply observing that if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be available."
    • I stand by my statement from March 2, 2011: "Among fee-based OA journals, competition for authors will include fee competition. Competition for authors should mean more added value, such as shortening turnaround times and integrating text and data files. It should also mean less subtracted value, such as truncating good articles solely for length, locking PDFs, and freezing processable data into unprocessable images."
    • See Sanford G. Thatcher, Copyediting's Role in an Open-Access World, Against the Grain, April 2011 (perma.cc link). Summarizing a study comparing the accepted author manuscripts in DASH, the Harvard OA repository, with the versions of record published in journals: "By and large, the copyediting did not result in any major improvements of the manuscripts as they appear at the DASH site. As with the technical editing done for STM journals...the vast majority of changes made were for the sake of enforcing a house formatting style and cleaning up a variety of inconsistencies and infelicities, none of which reached into the substance of the writing or affected the meaning other than by adding a bit more clarity here and there. More problematic from the viewpoint of scholarly rigor are the errors in citation and inaccuracies in quotation. As noted in my earlier article, mistakes like these have a way of being repeated since people will often not take the trouble to go back to the original texts but merely trust the authors of these articles to have given the right information about page numbers, dates of publication, authors’ names, and the like and to have accurately transcribed passages from the sources used. Unfortunately, these are just the kinds of errors that are seldom caught by copyeditors either because the extra work involved in discovering them to be errors is usually not considered to be justified by the publishers who pay the copyeditors." Also see comments on the Thatcher study by Phil Davis, Stuart Shieber, and Ellen Duranceau.
    • See Ross Mounce, A visit to the BioMedCentral offices, November 7, 2012 (perma.cc link): "Another thing I learn’t from this manuscript was that publishers commonly outsource their typesetting to developing countries (for the cheaper labor available there). So in this instance BMC sent our MS to the Philippines to be re-typeset for publication and when the proofs came back we encountered some really comical errors e.g. Phylomatic had been re-typeset as ‘phlegmatic’."
    • See Andrew Odlyzko, Open Access, library and publisher competition, and the evolution of general commerce, preprint, February 4, 2013. "As an author, I find that copy editing subtracts value, by forcing me to do extra work, usually for no good reason, and often to correct what the copy editors have done." This is my own experience as well.
    • See Richard Smith, The business of academic publishing: “a catastrophe”, The Lancet, October 6, 2018. "As I watched Paywall: The Business of Scholarship, I was taken back 30 years to when I thought for the first time about the business aspects of academic publishing. I was an assistant editor at the BMJ, and the editor asked me to join a meeting with a group of rheumatologists who wanted a share in the Annals of Rheumatic Diseases, a journal we owned. “We do the research published in the journal”, said one of the rheumatologists. “We do the peer review, we edit the journal, we read it, and we store it in our libraries. What do you do?” “Tell them what we do”, said the editor to me. I was at a complete loss."
    • See Martin Klein et al., Comparing published scientific journal articles to their pre-print versions, International Journal on Digital Libraries, December 2019 (first online at this journal February 2018) (perma.cc link): "Our analysis revealed that the text contents of the scientific papers generally changed very little from their pre-print to final published versions." Also note that the April 2016 preprint version (perma.cc link) of this article, posted to arXiv, triggered online discussion long before the December 2019 journal version. The quoted sentence appears in both versions.
      • Also see Clarissa Carneiro et al., Comparing quality of reporting between preprints and peer-reviewed articles in the biomedical literature, Research Integrity and Peer Review, December 1, 2020 (perma.cc link): "The greatest difference observed from preprints to their peer-reviewed versions was the prevalence of conflict of interest statements, an item that is commonly required at journal submission."
      • Also see Liam Brierley et al., Preprints in motion: tracking changes between posting and journal publication, bioRxiv, April 4, 2021 (perma.cc link): "Does the information shared in preprints typically withstand the scrutiny of peer review, or are conclusions likely to change in the version of record? We found that the total number of figure panels and tables changed little between preprint and published articles. Moreover, the conclusions of 6% of non-COVID-19-related and 15% of COVID-19-related abstracts undergo a discrete change by the time of publication, but the majority of these changes do not reverse the main message of the paper."
      • Also see Lindsay Nelson et al., Robustness of evidence reported in preprints during peer review, The Lancet, November 2022 (perma.cc link). "We quantified attrition dynamics of more than 1000 epidemiological estimates first reported in 100 preprints matched to their subsequent peer-reviewed journal publication. Point estimate values changed an average of 6% during review; the correlation between estimate values before and after review was high (0·99) and there was no systematic trend. Expert peer-review scores of preprint quality were not related to eventual publication in a peer-reviewed journal."
      • Also see Anthony D. Bai et al., Comparison of Preprint Postings of Randomized Clinical Trials on COVID-19 and Corresponding Published Journal Articles, JAMA Network Open, January 27, 2023 (perma.cc link). "In this systematic review of 152 COVID-19 RCT preprints posted in 2021, 119 (78%) were subsequently published in a scientific, peer-reviewed journal. When preprint and journal article pairs were compared, there were differences in terms of outcomes, analyses, results, or conclusions in 65 of 119 studies (55%); however, the main conclusion remained consistent for all but 2 studies (2%)."
      • Also see Melanie Sterian et al., An evaluation of the preprints produced at the beginning of the 2022 mpox public health emergency, Research Integrity and Peer Review, October 7, 2024 (perma.cc link). "Minimal to no change in quality from preprint to published was identified: all observational studies (10/10), most case series (6/7) and all surveillance data analyses (3/3) had no change in overall quality....Numerical results changed from preprint to published in 53% of studies, however most of these studies (22/32) had changes that were minor and did not impact main conclusions of the study."
    • For another example of subtracted value, see Samuel Moore in a tweet thread, July 24, 2020. "Just spent three hours fixing typesetter-introduced errors in a forthcoming article. They had swapped around two sentences in the abstract (???) and incorrectly introduced commas left, right and centre. The reason this takes so long to fix is that the errors were so basic that it completely shattered my trust in their competence. I'm still pretty sure I missed half the errors they introduced and have no faith that my corrections will be implemented correctly."
    • For another example of subtracted value, see Conor Meehan in a tweet thread, February 6, 2021. "Journal-enforced limits of reference numbers suck. All these papers deserve the excellent credit for all the excellent work our paper is built on and now I have to cut some for an out of date paper publication reason."
    • For another example of subtracted value, see Mike Taylor, Elsevier charge $37.95 for access to an unformatted manuscript with intrusive watermarking and the illustrations removed, Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, March 3, 2021 (perma.cc link).
    • Also see Peerzada Tajamul Mumtaz, Impact of 'impact factor' on early-career scientists, Rising Kashmir, August 14, 2021 (perma.cc link): "Pressuring early-career scientists to publish in high-impact multidisciplinary journals may also force them to squeeze their best work into a restrictive publication format (limiting page numbers and graphical elements) that, ironically, can reduce its ultimate impact."

  • At p. 38, I say, "[M]ore than 7,500 peer-reviewed OA journals are finding ways to pay their bills." Add this note.

  • At p. 39, I say, "Scholarly publishing is permeated by state action, public subsidies, gift culture, and anticompetitive practices." Add this note.
    • Also see my March 2010 article, Open access, markets, and missions: "Publishers benefit from all these traditional distortions or modifications of the market and only protest new ones that would benefit researchers. In formulating their objections, they position themselves as champions of the free market, not as beneficiaries of its many distortions and modifications. Some stakeholders see scholarly publishing as the best of both worlds: a functional hybrid of public funding to produce research and private profit seeking to vet and distribute it. Others see it as the worst of both worlds: a dysfunctional monster in which research funded by taxpayers and donated by authors is funneled to businesses which lock it up and meter it out to paying customers. But there's no doubt that it's a cross of two worlds. To call it a market is like calling mule a horse."

  • At p. 39, I say, "Most scientific research is funded by public agencies using public money, conducted and written up by researchers working at public institutions and paid with public money, and then peer-reviewed by faculty at public institutions and paid with public money. Even when researchers and peer reviewers work at private universities, their institutions are subsidized by publicly funded tax exemptions and tax-deductible donations. Most toll-access journal subscriptions are purchased by public institutions and paid with taxpayer money." Add this note.
    • See Stuart Shieber, Public underwriting of research and open access, The Occasional Pamphlet, April 4, 2014. "The penetration of the notion of “taxpayer-funded research”, of “research their tax dollars have paid for”, is far greater than you might think....[A]ll university research benefits from the social contract with taxpayers that makes universities tax-exempt....It’s difficult to estimate the size of this form of support to universities. The best estimate I’ve seen puts it at something like $50 billion per year for the income tax exemption. That’s more than the NIH, NSF, and (hardly worth mentioning) the NEH put together. It’s on par with the total non-defense federal R&D funding....All university research, not just the grant-funded research, benefits from the taxpayer underwriting implicit in the tax exemption social contract. It would make sense then, in return, for taxpayers to require open access to all university research in return for continued tax-exempt status...."

  • At p. 39, I say, "Every scholarly journal is a natural mini-monopoly in the sense that no other journal publishes the same articles." Add these notes.
    • Where I said, "Every scholarly journal is..." I'd like to say instead, "Every scholarly journal today is...." This kind of mini-monopoly is optional, and breaking the mini-monopoly is desirable. See Peter Suber, Thoughts on first and second-order scholarly judgments, Free Online Scholarship Newsletter, April 8, 2002. First-order scholarly judgments are judgments about what is true or probably true on a given topic or question. Second-order judgments are about which first-order judgments you ought to read, given your research project or limited time. Second-order judgments can be produced by services using careful human study, such as conventional peer review, or by tools, such as search engines. "The beauty of second-order [services and tools]...is that there can never be too many of them. If proliferating first-order judgments creates information overload, then proliferating second-order judgments creates competition, and this competition will be beneficial for users....Second-order judgments are valuable even when they conflict, because different users have different needs, interests, projects, standards, and approaches. You should have a choice among services competing to help you decide what deserves your time and attention." What I've called free-floating editorial boards (February 2009 blog post) or freestanding editorial boards (this book, p. 64]) can create any number of coexisting and competing peer-review judgments on the same work. Of course, these independent editorial boards can themselves be judged by other second-order judgments (or if you like, third-order judgments) and develop their own reputations for scope, methodological orientation, rigor, reliability, and bias.
    • See Peter Suber, "Preface" to Solomon, Laakso, and Björk, Converting Scholarly Journals to Open Access: A Review of Approaches and Experiences, Harvard Library, June 2016, p. 3, where I argue that this natural mini-monopoly is one reason (among other reasons) to favor flipping toll-access journals to OA over launching new OA journals. "[W]ithout question, new OA journals advance the primary goal of providing OA to more and more research. But they don't save libraries money, an important secondary goal. They don't save libraries money unless they justify the cancellation of existing subscription journals. But because different journals publish different articles, journals are not fungible, and free journals do not directly displace priced journals, or justify their cancellation, even when they exist in the same field and at the same level of quality. By contrast, every converted OA journal removes a subscription line from the budget of every subscribing library, without removing access to the journal's research. This frees up money for other good purposes, including the growth and sustainability of OA itself. It helps solve the inescapable background problem that the money needed to support high-quality OA in every field is largely tied up in subscriptions to conventional, non-OA journals. The alternative is to find significant new money for OA, which is as unlikely as it is unnecessary."
    • See Alexander Grossmann and Björn Brembs, Assessing the size of the affordability problem in scholarly publishing, PeerJ, June 18, 2019, preprint. "[E]ach article can be found at only one journal of one publisher exclusively. Hence, due to this lack of competition, subscription pricing need not be coupled to publication costs...The APC-OA 'market'...suffers from analogous non-substitutability problems as the subscription market, leading to market failure and hyper-inflation also there [citations]....It is therefore straightforward to hypothesize that any policy that fails to address the non-substitutability problem in scholarly communication will also fail to solve the affordability problem."

  • At p. 40, I say, "Laid on top of this natural monopoly are several layers of artificial monopoly." Add these notes.
    • See Mark McCabe, The impact of publisher mergers on journal prices: an update. ARL Bimonthly Report, #207, December 1999. "During the sample period (1988–1998) two significant mergers occurred: one between Pergamon (57 biomedical titles) and Elsevier (190) and the other between Lippincott (15) and Kluwer (75). To estimate the impact of these mergers on the prices of the biomedical journals being studied, a subset of data from the larger sample of medical libraries was analyzed. According to these empirical estimates, each of these mergers was associated with substantial price increases; in the case of the Elsevier deal the price increase was due solely to increased market power....For example, compared to premerger prices, the Elsevier deal resulted in an average price increase of 22% for former Pergamon titles, and an 8% increase for Elsevier titles. This asymmetry probably reflects the corresponding asymmetry in premerger journal portfolio size for the two firms. That is, Pergamon’s relatively small biomedical portfolio prevented it from realizing it could profitably set prices at the same level as Elsevier for journals in the same class. In the Lippincott/Kluwer merger, a 35% price increase in former Lippincott titles was due in part to increased market power, but also due in part to an apparent increase in the inelasticity of demand for the titles. That is, after the merger, Lippincott titles were even less likely to be cancelled. These results also contain a likely explanation for the persistent journal price inflation observed in most academic fields.10 The sensitivity of library demand to price increases is very small by normal standards (a 1% increase in price results in a 0.3% decline in subscriptions). Given this inelastic demand, publishers have a strong incentive to increase prices faster than the growth rate of library budgets...."
    • See Pritpal Tamber, Is Scholarly Publishing Becoming a Monopoly? BioMed Central News and Views, an editorial, October 3, 2000. "In recent years merger mania has dominated the professional publishing landscape....Between January 1998 and June 1999, the number of leading publishers in science/technology fell from 13 to 10 as Wolters Kluwer swallowed up Ovid Technologies and Plenum publishing, and the Thomson Corporation left the medical field entirely....At the same time, the medical publishing industry was reduced from eight to five leading publishers....However, all this activity would have paled to insignificance had a proposed merger between Reed Elsevier...and Wolters Kluwer taken place in 1998. This would have created the largest player in the professional publishing industry, leap-frogging the Thomson Corporation (which has little activity in the science/technology or medical markets). The merger failed after facing regulatory scrutiny...but the companies continued to make acquisitions of smaller companies, Reed Elsevier making up to 70 in 18 months....."
    • In the wake of Reed Elsevier's 2001 acquisition of Harcourt, the UK Office of Fair Trading (OFT) investigated anti-competitive practices in the academic journal publishing industry. In September 2002 it issued its report, The market for scientific, technical and medical journals. In Chapter 5, the report lists "evidence that the market may not be working well", including hyperinflationary price increases (Section 5.1), higher prices at large for-profit publishers than small non-profit publishers (5.2 - 5.5), use of high-profit journals to subsidize low-profit journals (5.7), higher profit margins in STM fields than in other fields (5.9 - 5.11), and bundling (5.12 - 5.13). In Chapter 7, the OFT admits that the "evidence...gives cause for concern" but explains why it is reluctant to intervene. One reason, ironically, is that publisher price increases have been so excessive for so long that "a point may have been reached where it is in the interests of publishers, as well as customers, the level of price increases to be reduced" (7.2). Another reason, also ironic, is the incipient open-access movement (7.4 - 7.7). The report concludes that, "However, if competition fails to improve, or should additional significant information come to light, we may consider further action." Also see the OFT press release for the report. Prices have continued to rise faster than inflation since the report came out, but the OFT has not acted.
    • See Thomas M. Susman and David J. Carter, Publisher Mergers: A Consumer-Based Approach to Antitrust Analysis, Information Access Alliance, June 2003 (perma.cc link). "By reducing competition and raising prices, publishers of STM and legal serial publications are forcing libraries to eliminate subscriptions and reducing broad access to research information. While publishers continue to reap the benefits of higher prices (despite fewer subscriptions), the body of academic research is reaching an ever-diminishing audience....If...the journals of the merging entities compete directly for library funds, antitrust authorities should be willing to block those mergers even though the journals seem to have little facial content overlap."
    • See Albert A. Foer, Can Antitrust Save Academic Publishing? A presentation at the American Library Association Annual Meeting, Orlando, Florida, June 28, 2004. At the time, Foer was the President of the The American Antitrust Institute. "Between the merger wave [in academic publishing] and the invention of the Big Deal, not only the nation but the English-speaking world seems to be headed for that dangerous territory in which a small number of individuals, working through international corporations, may gain the power to control important aspects of the production and distribution of critically important information. We have an obligation to stop this movement."
    • See Thomas M. Susman, Statement on Behalf of the Information Access Alliance, Prepared for the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission Hearings on Single-Firm Anticompetitive Conduct, November 2006. "The IAA believes that single-firm anticompetitive conduct accounts at least in some part for the serious problems confronting research libraries today. Our concerns include the rapid expansion of publisher bundles, the perceived lack of viable alternatives in the marketplace, the frequent demand for nondisclosure clauses in contracts, publishers' practices of requiring multi-year commitments, and the strict limitations on reducing the scale of bundles....In short, with their limited budgets and inability to reduce the numbers of titles within bundles, libraries are effectively restrained by the journal bundle from purchasing titles from other publishers. This, in turn, creates a major strategic entry barrier in the journals market that forecloses entry by new or smaller publishers and allows major bundling publishers to continue supracompetitive price increases...."
    • See my article, Balancing author and publisher rights, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, June 2, 2007: "A significant fraction of publisher revenue doesn't come from the value they add but from price increases made possible by monopoly power and market dysfunction. Reducing their prices to the value they add would be a nice change."
    • See George Monbiot, Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist, The Guardian, August 29, 2011 (perma.cc link). "Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist?...While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but...to academic publishers....Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities....You might resent Murdoch's paywall policy, in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier's journals will cost you $31.50....Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the academic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free....The returns are astronomical: in the past financial year, for example, Elsevier's operating profit margin was 36%....More importantly, universities are locked into buying their products. Academic papers are published in only one place, and they have to be read by researchers trying to keep up with their subject. Demand is inelastic and competition non-existent, because different journals can't publish the same material....What we see here is pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it....In the short term, governments should refer the academic publishers to their competition watchdogs....The knowledge monopoly is as unwarranted and anachronistic as the corn laws. Let's throw off these parasitic overlords and liberate the research that belongs to us."
    • The Library at the University of California Berkeley formerly maintained a dynamic list of Publisher Mergers. But apparently it laid down the project around February 16, 2012. Even later copies of the list in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine were not updated later than that.
    • The Columbia Journalism Review also kept a list of Who Owns What among publishers. It included some academic publishers but didn't focus on them. However, it has not been updated since April 2014. (Thanks to Stephen Beale for the tip.)
    • See Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon, The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era, PLoS ONE, June 10, 2015 (perma.cc link). "The five major publishers in NMS [Natural and Medical Sciences] [namely, Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and the American Chemical Society], accounted, in 1973, for little more than 20% of all papers published. This share increased to 30% in 1996, and to 50% in 2006, the level at which it remained until 2013 when it increased again to 53%. In this domain, three publishers account for more than 47% of all papers in 2013: Reed-Elsevier (24.1%; 1.5 fold increase since 1990), Springer (11.9%; 2.9 fold increase), and Wiley-Blackwell (11.3%; 2.2 fold increase). The American Chemical Society (3.4%; 5% decrease) and Taylor & Francis (2.9%; 4.9 fold increase) only account for a small proportion of papers. In the SSH [Social Sciences and Humanities], the concentration increased even more dramatically. Between 1973 and 1990, the five most prolific publishers [namely, Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis, and Sage] combined accounted for less than 10% of the published output of the domain, with their share slightly increasing over the period. By the mid-1990s, their share grew to collectively account for 15% of papers. However, since then, this share has increased to more than 51%."

  • At p. 40, I say, "[L]arge commercial publishers charge higher prices and raise their prices faster than small, nonprofit [TA] publishers. Yet, the scholarly consensus is that quality, impact, and prestige are generally higher at the nonprofit society journals." Endnote 15 (note text at pp. 184-185) documents the claims about quality, impact, and prestige. Add these notes.
    • See Mathias Dewatripont, Victor Ginsburgh, Patrick Legros, and Alexis Walckiers, Pricing of Scientific Journals and Market Power, Journal of the European Economic Association, April-May 2007 (perma.cc link). Quoting from the self-archived edition: "We classified these journals into three categories: (a) FP journals published by for-profit publishers, (b) NFP journals managed by not-for-profit publishers (scientific societies, university presses, etc.), and NFPP journals published and distributed by FP firms on account of scientific societies....Our empirical investigation documents the following: [1] There exist large price differences across fields. [2] These differences seem to be correlated with the market power of publishers. The larger the concentration ratio, the larger the average price in a field, the price to which should be added the large difference between FPs, NFPPs and NFPs. [3] As a general rule, FP journals charge four times as much on average than NFP journals, for a given number of citations, age, language, number of articles, and field (or concentration ratio). Journals of scientific societies managed by FP publishers (NFPP) are twice as expensive as NFP journals (scientific societies exercise some control on prices). [4] Prices are positively correlated with quality measured by the number of citations they receive (even when citations are instrumented), and this effect is larger for FP journals....We take the first finding as indicative of the fact that substitution possibilities across journals are limited, allowing for a significant amount of discretion in the setting of journal prices....We confirm earlier research concerning the large price difference between FP and NFP journals, and show that prices of NFPP journals are somewhere in between. Moreover, we show that prices increase with citation counts and we have argued that costs should tend to fall when citation counts rise. This is consistent with “value-based pricing” (à la McCabe 2002, 2004) rather than with cost-based pricing, and is again indicative of publishers’ ability to exercise discretion in price setting, because journals and papers are hardly substitutes, and researchers need all of them...."
    • See John Dove et al., Transparency: What Can One Learn from a Trove of Invoices? Scholarly Kitchen, November 7, 2019 (perma.cc link). Analyzing APCs paid by the Gates Foundation from August 2016 to March 2019, the authors conclude, "Traditional publishers charge significantly more for APCs than OA-only publishers....In 2016 the average APC charged by traditional publishers for their OA Journals was $2,508 — $877 higher than the average APC charged by OA-only publishers. By 2019 traditional publishers’ APCs had increased to an average of $3,285 — $1,510 higher OA-only publishers. Over these four years the [Gates] Foundation is experiencing an annual rise in prices for APCs from the traditional publishers of 9.7% per year compared with an average annual rise of just 2.9% from the OA-only publishers."
    • Most society publishers don't have the revenues or surpluses of the commercial giants. In 2010 Elsevier reported profit margins (36%) larger than those at ExxonMobil (28%); see p. 183n8. But most society journals are not in that league, and not even close. Many are in the red. Insofar as publisher profiteering is part of the argument for OA (and it needn't be), it only applies to the commercial giants, not to small, nonprofit society publishers.
    • Some societies join the commercial giants in lobbying against OA policies, and argue that OA is intrinsically harmful to society publishers, or that OA harms small nonprofit publishers as such. I make many concessions to society publishers, but I cannot make this one. Since 2007, Caroline Sutton and I have maintained a list of society publishers of OA journals. In 2007 we found 425 societies publishing 450 full (non-hybrid) OA journals. In 2011 we published a second edition of our list showing 530 societies publishing 616 full OA journals. After publishing our 2011 results, we posted our list to a Google spreadsheet open to community editing. As of February 24, 2014, it showed 848 societies publishing 801 full (non-hybrid) OA journals. As of January 23, 2019, it showed 1,077 societies publishing 1,041 full (non-hybrid) OA journals.

  • At p. 40, I say, "Large conventional publishers spend some of the money they extract from libraries on marketing and “content protection” measures that benefit publishers far more than users." Add this note.
    • At that point in the text I cite Roger Clarke, The cost profiles of alternative approaches to journal publishing, First Monday, 2007. But I should also have added a quotation from his piece. "For–profit publishers have higher cost–profiles than not–for–profit associations, because of the additional functions that they perform, in particular their much greater investment in branding, customer relationship management and content protection. The difference is particularly marked in the case of eJournals — a computed per–article cost of US$3,400 compared with US$730. This point is sufficiently significant that further examination is warranted...."

  • At pp. 40-41, I describe the sense in which librarians are more attuned to the journal pricing crisis than faculty. Add this note.
    • As a class, librarians are not only more knowledgeable about the issues, but more active in working to change the system of scholarly communication. In a July 2011 interview with Richard Poynder, I put it this way: "Librarians lobby for OA mandates. They write to their representatives in the legislature. They make phone calls and visit. They network and organize. They communicate with one another, with their patrons, and with the public. They launch, maintain, and fill repositories. They write up their experiences, case studies, surveys, and best practices. They pay attention. On average, they understand the issues better than any other stakeholder group, including researchers, administrators, publishers, funders, and policymakers...."

  • At p. 46, I quote from Thomas Jefferson's beautiful 1813 letter to Isaac McPherson. In endnote 24 (p. 187), however, I only cite a print edition of the letter. Here's an online edition as well (perma.cc link). Appropriately, the relevant parts of the letter are reprinted in Philip Kurland and Ralph Lerner (eds.), The Founder's Constitution, University of Chicago, 1987, as annotations to the copyright clause in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8.

Chapter 3: Varieties

Read the OA text:

Updates and supplements for Chapter 3:

  • At p. 50, I say, "Also like conventional journals, most [OA journals] are honest and some are scams." Add these notes.
    • For work on suspicious OA journals and publishers, the OA community is indebted to Richard Poynder and Jeffrey Beall. For example, see Richard Poynder's interviews with Bentham (April 2008), Dove Medical Press (November 2008), Libertas Academica (January 2009), Sciyo (February 2010), InTech (October 2011), OMICS (December 2011), and fellow investigator Jeffrey Beall (July 2012). Also see the many strands of Poynder's inquiry into Scientific Journals International (starting in July 2008). Similarly, see Jeffrey Beall's list of predatory publishers, list of predatory journals, and blog devoted to "critical analysis" of OA publishing. Update: Note that Beall took his list offline on January 15, 2017.
    • See the ten-year anniversary statement from the BOAI, which made recommendations for the next ten years, Ten years on from the Budapest Open Access Initiative: setting the default to open, September 12, 2012. Recommendation 4.1: "We should do more to make publishers, editors, referees and researchers aware of standards of professional conduct for OA publishing, for example on licensing, editorial process, soliciting submissions, disclosing ownership, and the handling of publication fees. Editors, referees and researchers should evaluate opportunities to engage with publishers and journals on the basis of these standards of professional conduct. Where publishers are not meeting these standards we should help them improve as a first step....As one means for evaluating a new or unknown OA publisher or OA journal, we recommend that researchers consult the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) and its code of conduct....We encourage all OA publishers and OA journals to apply best practices recommended by OASPA or to seek membership in the association, which would entail a review of their practices and an opportunity to amend these where necessary."
    • See my article, Ten challenges for open-access journals, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, October 2, 2009, especially Section 6, "Doubts about honesty": "Are OA journals a scam? Are fee-based OA journals a scam? Are some fee-based OA journals scams? Do some observers believe that some fee-based OA journals are scams? Does this belief harm OA journals as a class? Although you edit or publish OA journals yourself, you probably gave one, two, or three "yes" answers to these five questions. That's the challenge....The challenge behind this challenge is that we rarely have more than grounds for suspicion. We'll often have doubts about our doubts about a journal's honesty. In my own mind, it's important to leave space to distinguish a scam from a clumsy start-up. An entirely honest but clumsy start-up might announce titles far in advance of their content and forget to disclose the editors or owners. My recommendation is two-sided. On the other hand, don't create a hostile or unwelcoming environment for new start-ups....Don't let ours become a revolution that eats its own children....The OASPA code of conduct is a beacon here. Not only does it say the right things: disclose your peer review process, your contact info, your fees, and don't spam. It is the voice of OA publishers themselves, not critics of OA publishers. It shows that OA publishers are willing to articulate these norms and willing to enforce them. It's public self-regulation. It's available for supporters, critics, and start-ups to consult it as an emerging standard....[T]he Davis/Anderson hoax from June 2009...made all OA journals look bad....You might quarrel with the word "all". Not all OA journals charge publication fees. Not all OA journals that do charge fees take the money and fail to deliver honest peer review, or even a cursory human glance. True and true. The actual number of journals like TOISCIJ [The Open Information Science Journal] is very small. But most people who hear about the Davis/Anderson hoax don't understand the distinctions among OA journals, just as most people who heard about the 1996 Sokal hoax didn't understand the distinctions among cultural studies journals or even among humanities journals. Jumping to the conclusion that the problem lies with OA as such or publication fees as such is not justified and not fair. But that's the challenge. By contrast, TA journal scams –-like the nine fake journals published by Elsevier–- seldom trigger generalizations about the faults of TA journals as such. From long familiarity, most academics have learned to discriminate among TA journals. But most are still learning to discriminate among OA journals."
    • How often are scholarly authors lured into these journals? See David Solomon and Bo-Christer Björk OA Coming of Age, The Scientist, August 6, 2012. "While poor quality publishers are proliferating, often creating hundreds of cookie-cutter journals, they tend to publish relatively few articles. On the other hand, PLoS recently published its 50,000th article. We reanalyzed data from a study we recently published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology that characterized the APCs of journals charging them. We found that two thirds of the approximately 106,000 articles published in 2010 in these journals, listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, were in publications listed by the 2010 Journal Citation Report (JCR) and another 11 percent were listed in the Scopus abstract and citation database but not in the JCR. The publishers of these indexes screen the journals they list for quality including ensuring that they are properly peer-reviewed. This suggests that the majority of scientists publishing in OA journals that charge APCs are savvy enough to avoid low quality publishers. It appears that they care about the quality of the journals in which they publish, as do the promotion and tenure committees that evaluate researchers. Beall and others have pointed out a legitimate concern with predatory publishing, but it is important to keep that concern in perspective."
    • See Joshua Eykens et al., Identifying publications in questionable journals in the context of performance-based research funding, PLoS ONE, November 8, 2019 (perma.cc link): "[A]wareness of the risks of questionable journals does not lead to a turn away from open access in general. The number of publications in open access journals rises every year, while the number of publications in questionable journals decreases from 2012 onwards."
    • For my suggestions on how to evaluate OA journals too new to have trustworthy reputations for high or low quality, see my online handout, How to make your own work open access (first put online October 2012, periodically updated).

  • At p. 50, I say, "As early as 2004, Thomson Scientific found that 'in each of the broad subject areas studied there was at least one OA title that ranked at or near the top of its field' in citation impact." Add these notes.

  • At p. 50, I say, "It's hard to generalize about OA journals beyond saying that they have all the advantages of being OA and all the disadvantages of being new." Add this note.
    • It's common to see discussions of the disadvantages of being new, for example, to lack name-recognition or reputation. It's also fairly common to see the resulting prejudice against new journals. But it's rare to see the direct claim that newness as such reduces quality or honesty (which would apply to both OA and TA journals). See Edward Harvey, Predatory journal publishing: Is this an alternate universe?, Canadian Journal of Surgery, June 2021 (perma.cc link): "It is critical to remember that there is no current substitute for established journals with a long publishing-house-affiliated history. New journals that arrive on the scene can be important sources of information, particularly in subspecialty areas. Unfortunately, like 'alternative facts,' alternative journals are more accurately described as both dishonest and predatory."

  • At p. 50, I say, "Like conventional publishers, there are a few large OA publishers and a long tail of small ones...." Add these notes.
    • See Salvatore Mele, First Results of the SOAP Project, a presentation at the Conference of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, Prague, August 23, 2010 (perma.cc link). The few large OA publishers are better about providing libre OA than the long tail of small ones. See esp. slides #7 and #10. Half of the 14 "large" OA publishers use CC licenses, most of them (82%) using CC-BY licenses and the rest (18%) using CC-BY-NC. Of the smaller OA publishers, only about one-fifth used CC licenses.
    • See Jan Erik Frantsvåg, The size distribution of open access publishers: A problem for open access? First Monday, December 2010. The long-tail of small publishers limits the ability of OA publishing to take advantage of economies of scale. "All these elements suggest that small–scale operation of OA publishing is economically inefficient, and that OA publishing best be organized in larger publishing institutions."
    • See William H. Walters and Anne Linvill, Characteristics of Open Access Journals in Six Subject Areas, College and Research Libraries, May 2011 (perma.cc link): "[T]he largest [OA journal] publishes more than 2,700 articles per year, but half publish 25 or fewer....Overall, the OA journal landscape is greatly influenced by a few key publishers and journals."

  • At p. 52-53: For clarity, read the terminology box on p. 53 before starting Section 3.1 on p. 52.

  • At p. 53, I define "gold OA" (in the terminology box) as "OA delivered by journals, regardless of the journal's business model." I use the same definition in the glossary at p. 175. Add this note.
    • This is what the term "gold OA" meant from the beginning. However, a growing number of people now use the term differently. They drop the important qualification "regardless of the journal's business model" and use the term "gold OA" as if it picked out one particular business model, namely, the use of author-side fees or article processing charges (APCs). Originally the term "gold OA" covered both fee-based OA journals and no-fee OA journals. I use the term that way in this book, and many of us still use it that way. But many people use the term today as if it covered just fee-based OA journals. Some do this because they don't acknowledge the existence, let alone the dominance, of no-fee OA journals. Some recognize the plurality of OA journal business models but believe "gold OA" is the name for the fee-based business model. If "gold" had always meant fee-based, journal-provided OA, there would be no harm; we could use other terms for no-fee, journal-provided OA, as some people do today with terms like "platinum" or "diamond" OA. But because "gold" originally meant something broader, the new usage causes harm by making a formerly clear term ambiguous. Many people are understandably confused when an article or policy refers to "gold OA" without defining what it means by the term. The new usage also causes harm by leading many people to believe that all or even most journal-provided is fee-based OA, which is a factual error, not just a diction error. The new usage (as I said elsewhere about an earlier case of terminological drift) is due to "newcomers and bystanders who, through compound interest on initial misunderstanding, make our clear term fuzzy." I've been pushing against it. But I certainly acknowledge (as I did in yet another earlier case of terminological drift) that "I'm in no position to legislate usage." Hence I make this appeal. Whether you think "gold OA" means "journal-provided OA, regardless of business model" or "journal-provided OA based on author-side fees or APCs", you could still communicate more effectively if you'd use clarifying adjectives to modify the noun, for example, "fee-based gold" and "no-fee gold". If it's important to refer to APCs, then "APC-based gold" and "no-APC gold" would also work, although they will be less self-explanatory to outsiders.

  • At pp. 54-55, I say, "One of the early victories of the OA movement was to get a majority of toll-access publishers and journals to give blanket permission for author-initiated green OA. But this victory remains one of the best-kept secrets of scholarly publishing, and widespread ignorance of it is the single most harmful consequence of green OA's invisibility." Add this note.
    • See the ten-year anniversary statement from the BOAI, which made recommendations for the next ten years, Ten years on from the Budapest Open Access Initiative: setting the default to open, September 12, 2012. Recommendation 1.7: "Publishers who do not provide OA should at least permit it through their formal publishing agreements....The minority of subscription-based publishers who do not yet allow author-initiated green OA, without payment or embargo, should adopt the majority position."

  • At p. 55, I refer to the "invisibility" of green OA. Add these notes on the general invisibility of green OA compared to gold OA (in chronological order).
    • See Ian Rowlands and Dave Nichols, New Journal Publishing Models: An International Survey of Senior Researchers, CIBER (Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research), September 22, 2005. The original link is dead and I can't find a live one. But here's an excerpt from the study, quoted in a blog post I wrote at the time: "Authors are not at all knowledgeable about institutional repositories: less than 10 per cent declared that they know 'a little' or 'a lot' about this development...."
    • See the Research Information Network, Researchers' use of academic libraries and their services, September 1, 2006, especially section 9.4. "Our survey shows a significant discrepancy between the proportion of librarians who say their institution has an open access institutional repository (52%) and the proportion of researchers who believe that their institution has such a repository (15%). As Figure 37 shows, the gap is even greater between the 20% of librarians who say they don’t know whether their institution has an open access institutional repository and the 72% of researchers who don’t know...."
    • See Faculty Attitudes and Behaviors Regarding Scholarly Communication: Survey Findings from the University of California, from the UC a Office of Scholarly Communication and the California Digital Library eScholarship Program, August 2007. "In May 2006, a special committee of the UC Academic Council proposed that faculty routinely grant to the University a limited, nonexclusive license to place their scholarly publications in a noncommercial, publicly accessible online repository....Despite full faculty governance review and discussion, the survey revealed that the vast majority of the faculty was unaware of the proposal....[In addition to] the lack of faculty knowledge about the potential change in University policy (mentioned above)...respondents were overwhelmingly unaware of eScholarship services, a University-wide set of tools and electronic publishing services for enabling the electronic creation and dissemination of published and unpublished works. This is an interesting contrast to the relative success of eScholarship, as evidenced by the significant quantity, quality, and regularity of contributions and the heavy use that content receives...."
    • See Richard Poynder's interview with me from October 2007. In response to one of his questions, I described the situation this way: "The fact is that green OA has always had to fight for recognition. Its novelty makes it invisible. People understand OA journals, more or less, because they understand journals. But there's no obvious counterpart to OA archiving in the traditional landscape of scholarly communication. It's as if people can only understand new things that they can assimilate to old things. All of us [OA advocates] have had the experience of describing green OA at a meeting and then getting questions that presuppose that all OA is gold OA. All of us have seen critics object to green OA policies by pointing out supposed shortcomings of gold OA."
    • See Alma Swan, Key Concerns Within the Scholarly Communication Process, Key Perspectives, March 2008. This is a report to the JISC Scholarly Communications Working Group. "Researchers...think that placing work on their websites is an adequate substitute for depositing in a repository and have a poor appreciation of what institutional repositories are trying to achieve in general."
    • See Sue Thorn, Sally Morris, and Ron Fraser, Learned societies and open access: key results from surveys of biosciencesocieties and researchers, Serials, March 2009. "[R]espondents were confused about what was or was not a repository of self-archived material." (While I cite this study for the proposition that green OA has been invisible or misunderstood, I am critical of many of its other conclusions; see my blog post on it from July 2008, after the study had appeared as a report and before it was published as a journal article.)

  • At p. 55, I say, "Most publishing scholars will choose prestige over OA if they have to choose. The good news is that they rarely have to choose. The bad news is that few of them know that they rarely have to choose....There are two reasons why OA is compatible with prestigious publication, a gold reason and a green one...." Add these notes.
    • On the first part of this assertion, that publishing scholars will choose prestige over OA, see the UK Survey of Academics 2012 from Ithaka S+R, JISC, and RLUK, May 14, 2013 (perma.cc link). At pp. 69-72 the authors interpret the results presented in Figure 40: "Three factors —all closely related to the prominence and reach of the publication— were rated as very important by more than 4 in 5 respondents: that the current issues of the journal are circulated widely, are well read by academics in their field, and have a high impact factor....And other factors —the journal’s accessibility in developing nations...and the journal making its articles freely available online so there is no cost to purchase or read them— were rated as important by less than a third of respondents overall." Ithaka reported similar results in its US Faculty Survey 2009 (April 2010) (perma.cc link); see pp. 25-26 and Figure 23. I discuss the 2009 version of the results in Unanimous faculty votes, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, June 2, 2010: "I don't dispute the Ithaka findings. In fact, I've often argued myself that scholars will choose prestige in their field over OA, when they have to choose. I've only tried to make clear that they rarely have to choose [here omitting citations to four earlier articles]....[I]t's not hard to reconcile this evidence with the evidence of the unanimous faculty votes [for university green OA policies]. The Ithaka finding is about gold OA, and the unanimous faculty votes are about green OA. Green OA policies allow faculty to submit their work to the journals of their choice. One of the primary reasons why OA mandates focus on green rather than gold OA (or repositories rather than journals) is precisely to preserve this sort of academic freedom. When the high-profile journals in a field are TA, then a green OA policy allows faculty to have the best of both worlds: prestige from the journal publishing the article and OA from the institutional repository. It's not at all surprising that faculty, or faculty who understand their OA options, will take the best of both worlds when they can. That explains both the preference for high-profile journals and the support for green OA. Meantime, more and more OA journals are moving into the top cohort of prestige and impact in more and more fields, a second reason why authors rarely have to choose between prestige and OA...."
    • See my blog post from June 2013: "Why is [it] misleading [to say "scholars favour prestige over access"]? Because it suggests that there's a trade-off between prestige and OA. Unfortunately, this is a widespread misunderstanding. It arises from unfamiliarity with the growing number of high-prestige OA journals (a fact about gold OA) and ignorance of the long-standing willingness of most TA journals, including most high-prestige TA journals, to allow deposit in OA repositories (a fact about green OA). I put the trade-off between prestige and OA in the elite group the top 25 misunderstandings about OA in my 2009 field guide to misunderstandings about OA."
    • For what happens when prestige is taken out of the picture, see Mary Kennedy, The Results Are In of our Open Access Survey, ScienceOpen, October 29, 2021 (perma.cc link): "In the survey, we posed the following scenario, 'If the price of APCs and the reputation of the journal were not factors in the decision, would you rather publish your paper in an OA or subscription-based journal?' No one chose a subscription-based journal over an open access journal."

  • At p. 55, I say, "If there are no prestigious OA journals in your field today, you could wait (things are changing fast), you could help out (by submitting your best work), or you could move on to green." Add this note.

  • At p. 57, I say, "[S]cholars who regularly read research in a...disciplinary repository, such as arXiv for physics or PubMed Central for medicine, readily grasp the rationale for depositing their work in OA repositories...." Add this note.
    • See my Predictions for 2008, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, December 2, 2007: "I predict that the rate of spontaneous self-archiving will start to rise significantly when the volume of OA literature on deposit in repositories reaches a critical mass. The mass will be critical when researchers routinely search repositories, or routinely find what they seek in repositories. Only by using repositories as readers will they appreciate the value of using them as authors. For now, this critical mass exists for the largest disciplinary repositories, such as arXiv and PubMed Central. We shouldn't expect it to exist for any single institutional repository, since researchers search for literature by topic or field, not by institution. But we can expect a critical mass to develop for the network of institutional repositories....[S]cholars who find articles in repositories must be led to realize that they are finding them in repositories. They need to see and credit the role of the repositories, not just the role of Google or OAIster or the search engine that brought them there."

  • At pp. 57-58, I say, "Because most publishers and journals already give blanket permission for green OA, the burden is on authors to take advantage of it....The reason the spontaneous rate [of self-archiving] is lower than the nudged, assisted, and mandated rate is rarely opposition to OA itself. Almost always it's unfamiliarity with green OA (belief that all OA is gold OA), misunderstanding of green OA (belief that it violates copyright, bypasses peer review, or forecloses the possibility of publishing in a venerable journal), and fear that it is time-consuming. In this sense, author unfamiliarity and misunderstanding are greater obstacles to OA than actual opposition, whether from authors or publishers." Add this note.
    • See Mikael Laakso, Green open access policies of scholarly journal publishers: a study of what, when, and where self-archiving is allowed, Scientometrics, December 13, 2013. "Of the 1,1 million articles included in the analysis, 80.4% could be uploaded [with publisher permission] either as an accepted manuscript or publisher version to an institutional or subject repository after one year of publication....With previous studies suggesting realized green OA to be around 12% of total annual articles the results highlight the substantial unused potential for green OA....The threshold for making a green OA copy available voluntarily is in such cases low, but what remains to be aligned is author attitude."

  • At p. 58, I refer to the fear that self-archiving is time-consuming. But there is evidence to answer these fears. Add these notes.
    • See Leslie Carr and Stevan Harnad, Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving, Working Paper, University of Southampton, March 15, 2005 (Last Modified, March 2, 2012). Two months of log activity at an active institutional repository showed that "The median time for metadata entry is 5 minutes and 37 seconds per paper. The average is 10 minutes 40 seconds owing to the long tail of the distribution....A researcher who writes one paper per month would accordingly find themselves (or their designees) spending an average of...about 39 minutes per year in metadata entry tasks related to self-archiving." For a later version of the same study, see Leslie Carr, Stevan Harnad, and Alma Swan, A Longitudinal Study of the Practice of Self-Archiving, Working Paper, University of Southampton, April 20, 2007 (Last Modified, March 2, 2012).
    • See Alma Swan and Sheridan Brown, Open access self-archiving: An author study, Technical Report, University of Southampton, June 6, 2005. "Authors have frequently expressed reluctance to self-archive because of the perceived time required and possible technical difficulties in carrying out this activity, yet findings here show that only 20% of authors found some degree of difficulty with the first act of depositing an article in a repository, and that this dropped to 9% for subsequent deposits."
    • Also see the Survey on open access in FP7, European Commission, 2012. At p. 5: "The majority of respondents find it easy or very easy to have time or manpower to self-archive peer-reviewed articles...."

  • At p. 58, I say, "author unfamiliarity and misunderstanding are greater obstacles to OA than actual opposition." I already have some documentation on author unfamiliarity and misunderstanding in endnote 9 (note text at p. 189). Add these notes.
    • For real-time news and comment on unfamiliarity and misunderstanding of OA, see the items tagged with oa.unfamiliarity by the Open Access Tracking Project.
    • See Claire Creaser et al., Authors Awareness and Attitudes Toward Open Access Repositories, New Review of Academic Librarianship, 16 (Supplement 1), October 2010, pp. 145-161. The authors have self-archived a copy, though it is not yet OA. "Levels of Open Access awareness do not necessarily equate to levels of repository awareness. For example, authors participating in the focus groups tended to associate Open Access with the “Gold Road.” Authors were asked to name suitable subject-based repositories and in some cases the “repositories” named were, in fact, Open Access journals and/or publishers (e.g., Biomed Central, PLoS)....[M]ost expressed some difficulty in defining what a repository was and what sort of material it might hold.... Some understood repositories to hold only working article series or pre-prints and were somewhat taken aback by the idea of submitting published articles to an institutional repository....Furthermore, authors tend to have a highly restrictive view of copyright permissions relating to pre-prints and post-prints. Significantly, they were unaware that a growing number of publishers support open access by allowing the deposit of stage-two manuscripts in repositories...."
    • See Jenny Fry et al., PEER Behavioural Research: Authors and Users vis-à-vis Journals and Repositories: Final Report, August 2011. "There appears to be a lack of awareness of publishers’ open access embargo periods, with just over half of authors surveyed in phase 2 stating that they did not know or could not remember what embargo period, if any, was enforced by the publisher when they placed their article in an OAR [OA repository]....[D]uring the project there was some uncertainty identified over the precise meaning of the term ‘Open Access’, with focus group participants expressing uncertainty over what ‘Open Access’ really entails....However, the phase 1 findings indicate that general awareness of OA is growing compared to results from earlier seminal studies conducted by Rowlands et al. (2004) and Swan and Brown (2004, 2005)....The analysis of the free text responses received in the phase 1 survey also revealed a discrepancy between what was reported in the multiple choice questions and what researchers really understand OAR to be....Examples of low levels of awareness of institutional repositories included workshop participants learning of the existence of a repository at their institution through discussion with the research team at the workshop. Others were not always sure whether their institutional repository was OA or available for access only by members of the institution...."
    • See the Taylor & Francis researcher survey 2019, October 2019, and the TechXplore summary of its findings on author unfamiliarity with OA. Quoting the latter: "Sixty-six percent of researchers didn't recognize any of 11 different initiatives presented to them, including the 2002 Budapest Open Access Declaration (with the highest level of researchers, 12 percent, aware of this) and the Open Access Button (with the lowest level of awareness, at just 2 percent). Just 5 percent of researchers are aware of Plan S —an initiative with potential to significantly affect publishing options for researchers around the world. Plan S has hit the headlines and been the focus of many political discussions around its aim of making all scholarly publications open access by 2025."

  • At p. 65, I conclude my argument that we should pursue green and gold OA simultaneously. Add these notes.
    • For recent research on the relative proportions of green and gold OA in the natural sciences, broken down by field, see Bo-Christer Björk et al., "Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009," PLoS ONE, June 2010, especially Figure 4. Gold exceeds green in medicine, biology, and biochemistry, and green exceeds gold in every other field covered.
    • See Yassine Gargouri et al., Green and Gold Open Access Percentages and Growth, by Discipline, Working Paper, University of Southampton, June 16, 2012. "We compared the percent and growth rate of Green and Gold OA for 14 disciplines in two random samples of 1300 articles per discipline out of the 12,500 journals indexed by Thomson-Reuters-ISI using a robot that trawled the web for OA full-texts. We sampled in 2009 and 2011 for publication year ranges 1998-2006 and 2005-2010, respectively. Green OA (21.4%) exceeds Gold OA (2.4%) in proportion and growth rate in all but the biomedical disciplines....The spontaneous overall OA growth rate is still very slow (about 1% per year). If institutions make Green OA self-archiving mandatory, however, it triples percent Green OA as well as accelerating its growth rate."
    • See my article, Tectonic movements toward OA in the UK and Europe, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, September 2, 2012, in which I reaffirm my support for green and gold OA, as complementary, but criticize the Finch Report and new OA policy at the Research Councils UK (RCUK) for failing to take full advantage of green. "I'm not recommending a green-only policy. I support gold OA and I support paying for it. I acknowledge that (today) gold makes it easier than green to eliminate embargoes and ensure libre OA, and I strongly want to eliminate embargoes and ensure libre. More, I supporting demanding immediate libre OA in exchange for paying any part of the cost of publication. Green and gold are complementary, and I support a dual or mixed policy in order to get the advantages of each. My summary objection to the Finch recommendations and current RCUK policy is that they don't take sufficient advantage of green and, in the case of the Finch report, do not even acknowledge the advantages of green. As a result, the current RCUK/Finch policy will likely pay more than necessary, make the transition slower than necessary, leave a regrettable percentage of publicly-funded research non-OA, and put the business interests of publishers ahead of the access interests of researchers."
    • See my July 2013 interview with Richard Poynder: "I still believe that green and gold are complementary, and that in the name of good strategy we should take full advantage of each. From this perspective, my chief disappointment with the RCUK policy is that it doesn’t come close to taking full advantage of green."

  • At p. 69, I recommend CC-BY licenses for OA research, and mention some other organizations and initiatives that do so as well. Add this note.

  • At pp. 72-73, I point out that most OA journals fail to offer libre OA. Add these notes.
    • See the ten-year anniversary statement from the BOAI with recommendations for the next ten years, Ten years on from the Budapest Open Access Initiative: setting the default to open, September 12, 2012. See esp. the second bullet of recommendation 2.1: "OA journals are always in a position to require open licenses, yet most of them do not yet take advantage of the opportunity. We recommend CC-BY for all OA journals."
    • Also see my article, The rise of libre open access, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, June 2, 2012. "The failure of 70% OA journals to offer any kind of open license is an embarrassment. It shows that most OA journals don't understand the benefits of libre OA, don't understand their own power to assure it, or both."

  • At p. 73, I say, "I’ve argued that it’s unfair to criticize the OA movement for disparaging gratis OA (merely on the ground that its public statements call for libre) or neglecting libre OA (merely on the ground that most of its success stories are gratis). But two related criticisms would be more just. First, demanding libre or nothing where libre is currently unattainable makes the perfect the enemy of the good. Fortunately, this tactical mistake is rare. Second, settling for gratis where libre is attainable makes the good a substitute for the better. Unfortunately, this tactical mistake is common, as we see from the majority of OA journals that stop at gratis when they could easily offer libre." Add this note.
    • See the ten-year anniversary statement from the BOAI with recommendations for the next ten years, Ten years on from the Budapest Open Access Initiative: setting the default to open, September 12, 2012. See esp. the third bullet of recommendation 2.1: "We should achieve what we can when we can. We should not delay achieving gratis in order to achieve libre, and we should not stop with gratis when we can achieve libre."

  • At p. 73, endnote 2 (note text at p. 191), I document the fact that most OA journals offer gratis but not libre OA. Add this note.
    • Note 20 at p. 191. Correction. I cite a page within the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) on the tally of DOAJ-listed journals using CC licenses. That URL is now dead. In its place, please see this newer page within the DOAJ on the tallies of DOAJ-listed journals broken down by the CC licenses they use. For a summary of the numbers nine months after the book came out, confirming the diagnosis made in the book, see my blog post for March 27, 2013. For a summary of numbers roughly eight years after the book came out, showing a gratifying reversal, see my tweet for February 9, 2020.

  • At p. 73, I discuss the tactical mistakes of demanding "libre or nothing" when libre may be unattainable, and settling for gratis OA when libre is attainable. Add this note.
    • See the third bullet to Recommendation 2.1 of the BOAI-10 statement, September 12, 2012: "In developing strategy and setting priorities, we recognize that gratis access is better than priced access, libre access is better than gratis access, and libre under CC-BY or the equivalent is better than libre under more restrictive open licenses. We should achieve what we can when we can. We should not delay achieving gratis in order to achieve libre, and we should not stop with gratis when we can achieve libre."

  • At p. 75, I say, "Don't leave users uncertain about they may and may not do....Don't make them err on the side of nonuse." Add these notes.
    • See Clipping Our Own Wings Copyright and Creativity in Communication Research, a report from the Ad Hoc Committee on Fair Use and Academic Freedom, International Communication Association, March 2010 (perma.cc link): "A survey of communication scholars' practices...reveals that copyright ignorance and misunderstanding hamper distribution of finished work, derail work in progress, and most seriously, lead communication researchers simply to avoid certain kinds of research altogether. Nearly half the respondents express a lack of confidence about their copyright knowledge in relation to their research. Nearly a third avoided research subjects or questions and a full fifth abandoned research already under way because of copyright concerns." (I already cite this work in Chapter 3, endnote 21. But I take this opportunity to update it with a quotation and working URL.)
    • See Patricia Aufderheide, The Chilling Effect of Copyright Permissions on Academic Research: The Case of Communication Researchers, Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property Research Paper Series, May 1, 2020 (perma.cc link): "Survey research shows that researchers...are often unsure or confused, even unknowing, about fair use; and that this lack of knowledge and/or familiarity leads to both failure to execute and failure to initiate."
    • See Amanda Wakaruk et al., Introducing the Copyright Anxiety Scale, Journal of Copyright in Education and Librarianship, September 9, 2021: "Copyright chill [is] a situation in which a legitimate use of copyright-protected materials is discouraged or inhibited by the threat of legal action, real or perceived.…37.2% of respondents said they had avoided or not completed activities or projects because of copyright issues and…28.0% said they could describe a time when concerns about copyright hampered or prevented them from doing something.…copyright anxiety is a real phenomenon for many and has practical consequences that can impede creativity and potentially legitimate forms of sharing content." Also see the follow-up blog post by the authors, November 5, 2021 (perma.cc link).

  • At p. 77, I say, "It's pointless to appeal to [scholarly authors] as a bloc, because they don't act as a bloc. It's not hard to persuade or even excite them once we catch their attention, but because they are so anarchical, overworked, and preoccupied, it's hard to catch their attention." Add this note:

Chapter 4: Policies

Read the OA text:

Updates and supplements for Chapter 4:

  • At p. 78, I start discussing OA policies at universities and funding agencies. Add this note.
    • See the ten-year anniversary statement from the Budapest Open Access Initiative, with recommendations for the next ten years, Ten years on from the Budapest Open Access Initiative: setting the default to open, September 12, 2012. Recommendation 1.1 calls for an OA policy at every university: "Every institution of higher education should have a policy assuring that peer-reviewed versions of all future scholarly articles by faculty members are deposited in the institution’s designated repository...." Recommendation 1.3 calls for an OA policy at every funding agency: "Every research funding agency, public or private, should have a policy assuring that peer-reviewed versions of all future scholarly articles reporting funded research are deposited in a suitable repository and made OA as soon as practicable."

  • At p. 78, I say that about one-quarter of peer-reviewed journals are OA. Add these notes.
    • By the time the book came out, the fraction was closer to one-third. In the book, I used the common industry estimate that there are about 25,000 peer-reviewed scholarly journals in all fields and languages. As of July 28, 2012, the Directory of Open Access Journals listed 8,000 peer-reviewed OA journals. Using the original estimate for the total number of peer-reviewed OA journals, this means that 32% of the total were OA in July 2012.
    • It's very difficult to get an accurate number for the total number of peer-reviewed journals in all fields and languages. 25k is still the most commonly used industry estimate. However, even limiting the count to titles indexed in Ulrich's, the number is now closer to 28k. See the discussion thread on this question at LibLicense in August 2012. (If we use 28k as the total number of peer-reviewed journals, then in July 2012, 28% were OA.) Moreover, there are reasons to think the Ulrich list is itself incomplete. See for example Jack Meadows, "The Growth of Journal Literature: A Historical perspective," in Blaise Cronin and Helen Barsky Atkins (eds.), The Web of Science. A Festschrift in Honor of Eugene Garfield, ASIS&T Monograph Series, 2000, pp. 87-107. In 1987, Meadows estimated that there were 71k peer-reviewed journals worldwide. (Thanks to Jean-Claude Guédon for the reference to Meadows.)

  • At p. 79, I say that there are no gold OA mandates. But several have been proposed. Add these notes.
    • In May 2006, Academy of Science of South Africa proposed a policy that would pay for gold OA, build the infrastructure for green OA, but stop short of mandating green OA. The original report is now offline, but I quoted relevant excerpts in a blog post at the time. "[T]he Department of Science and Technology [should take] responsibility for ensuring that Open Access initiatives are promoted to enhance the visibility of all South African research articles and to make them accessible to the entire international research community. Specifically: online, open access (“Gold route”) versions of South African research journals should be funded...." (My post praises the willingness to fund gold, but criticizes the unwillingness to mandate green.)
    • In March 2007, Australia's Productivity Commission proposed a gold OA mandate. The press release, report, and overview have been taken offline, but I quoted the relevant language in my blog post at the time. "A concern with mandating open access is that it would reduce the incentives for subscribers to pay for conventional journal access and, in turn, the incentives for publishers to supply journals. Mandated access would, therefore, be likely to require a new payment mechanism to elicit sufficient publishing services such as through the direct subsidisation of providers or of authors. Among the possible payment mechanisms, the Commission prefers an 'author pays' approach...." (My post includes criticism of the proposal.)
    • In a November 2009 interview, Henk Schmidt, Rector of Erasmus University Rotterdam, described his plans to require OA, with a preference for gold over green. "I intend obliging our researchers to circulate their articles publicly, for example no more than six months after publication. I’m aiming for 2011, if possible in collaboration with publishers via the 'Golden Road' and otherwise without the publishers via the 'Green Road'." In September 2010, he announced the school's new OA policy, which is green.
    • In January 2011 talk, J.J. Engelen, Chairman of the Governing Board of the primary public research funder in the Netherlands (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, or NWO), described his preference for a future gold OA policy. "These goals of scientic publishing are best reached by means of an open access publishing business model....Open access publishing should become a requirement for publicly funded research. In order to make open access publishing a success, the enthusiastic cooperation of the professional publishing companies active on the scientific market is highly desirable." (The talk was published later in 2011.)
      • The first link in the paragraph above is now dead (November 2013), and the Internet Archive has no copy "due to robots.txt." Can anyone help me find a working link to Engelen's January 2011 talk? Note that the urgency is low because the talk was later published, and I have a working URL to the published version in the last link in the paragraph above.
      • Also see my blog post from November 17, 2013 in which I quote two Dutch proposals for gold OA mandates, and argue that gold OA mandates are a bad idea.
    • In July 2012, the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) published AusAID Research Strategy 2012–16, containing a new OA policy which could be construed as a gold OA mandate. From p. 1: "In support of the transparency agenda in the Government's aid policy we will: ...require researchers to publish in open access journals, or make pre-publication versions of their work available." The word "or" in the final clause might mean that if grantees provide (green) OA to their preprints, then they needn't publish in OA journals. So far I have not been able to determine how AusAID interprets that sentence. Also see my blog post on the policy.
    • In July 2012, the Research Councils UK announced a new OA mandate favoring gold over green, and the UK government accepted the recommendations of the Finch Group to the same effect. For analysis and critique, including some discussion of the sense in which they are and are not gold OA mandates, see my article, Tectonic movements toward OA in the UK and Europe, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, September 2, 2012. "The RCUK policy is not a gold OA mandate, or not a simple one, because in some circumstances it can be satisfied with green. But it deliberately steers authors toward OA journals and in that sense approaches a gold OA mandate. When the author's journal offers no suitable green option, the policy becomes a definite gold OA mandate. (Moreover, it's a gold policy with incentives for journals not to offer suitable green green options....)"
    • Also see the September 2013 report of the UK House of Commons Select Committee on Business, Innovation and Skills. The committee strongly criticized the RCUK and Finch Group for failing to acknowledge or appreciate the good reasons why all previous OA mandates have been green. See especially Paragraphs 25, 31-33, 61, 66, 70.

  • At p. 80, I start discussing rights-retention policies. It should be clear from the text, and from many of my previous writings, that this is the model I favor. I reiterated and elaborated my position in October 2012 when Stuart Shieber and I released the first version of our guide to Good practices for university open-access policies. The guide distinguishes six kinds of policy, unlike the book which only distinguishes four. It explicitly recommends rights-retention policies and explains why that model is preferable to other models. It also maintains a list of institutions that have adopted the kind of rights-retention policy we recommend. Stuart and I update the guide in real time, and it contains my latest thinking on rights-retention OA policies for universities.

  • At p. 81, endnote 7 (note text at p. 194). At the end of this note, I cite Frankel and Nestor's 2010 legal analysis showing that Harvard-style rights-retention policies successfully avoid copyright problems.

  • At p. 82, I say, "Because shifting the default is enough to change behavior on a large scale, waiver options don't significantly reduce the volume of OA. At Harvard, the waiver rate is less than 5 percent and at MIT it's less than 2 percent." Add this note.
    • See my article, Three principles for university open access policies, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, April 2, 2008. "Some shortfall from 100% OA is probably inevitable, like the friction in a machine, and a small shortfall is harmless. I even believe that some deliberate exceptions (as opposed to unintended failures) could be desirable, for example, to muster support to pass the policy and to accommodate unexpected circumstances. We don't have to pretend to anticipate unanticipated cases; it's enough to make OA the default....My preference is to think about which policy will bring an institution closest to 100% OA (Principle 1) without violating academic freedom (Principle 2)...."

  • At p. 84, line 13. Correction. "...journal are..." should be "...journals are...." (This correction applies only to the first print edition and the earliest digital editions.)

  • At p. 86, I say, "For detailed recommendations on OA policy provisions, and specific arguments for them, see my 2009 analysis of policy options for funding agencies and universities." Add this note.

  • At p. 86, endnote 12 (note text at pp. 195-196).
    • At p. 196, line 4. Correction. "...in the institutional review..." should be "...in the institutional repository...." (This correction applies only to the first print edition and the earliest digital editions.)
    • In July 2012, the Catholic University of Louvain strengthened its OA mandate from July 2008 to follow the promotion, tenure, and internal funding incentives used at the University of Liege. When the new Louvain policy takes effect on January 1, 2013, "the Academic Council will only consider duly deposited publications in its internal research performance evaluations and that deposit will also be one of the criteria in the allocation of institutional research funds."
    • For a regularly updated list of institutions recommending that committees evaluating candidates for promotion, tenure, funding, awards, or other purposes should only review articles on deposit in the institutional repository, see the entry on Internal use of deposited versions in Stuart Shieber and Peter Suber (eds.), Good practices for university open-access policies, Harvard Open Access Project, first released October 2012.

  • At p. 86, I start the subsection titled, Digression on the Word "Mandate". Add this note.
    • Wikipedia formerly had an article Open-access policies, which now redirects to the article Open-access mandate. This is a mistake, like redirecting from cats to tigers. It's a mistake even if you like tigers better than other cats. OA mandates are a proper subset of OA policies, just as tigers are a proper subset of cats, and Wikipedia needs a place to discuss non-mandatory policies. The article recognizes this, and covers non-mandatory policies alongside mandatory ones. But by covering them all in the article on mandates, it further stretches the term "mandate" and needlessly undermines attempts to make OA terminology less ambiguous. Moreover, it gives needless new ammunition to those critics and opponents whose objections are based more on the connotations of the word "mandate" than on the the actual provisions of mandatory OA policies.

  • At p. 89, endnote 16 (note text at pp. 196-197). Here I'm documenting the claim that "Alma Swan's empirical studies of researcher attitudes show that an overwhelming majority of researchers would 'willingly' comply with a mandatory OA policy from their funder or employer." Add these notes.
    • A May 2011 survey from the European Commission shows similar researcher attitudes toward open data mandates. See Survey on open access in FP7, European Commission, 2012 ((perma.cc link), p. 7: "Three quarters of those respondents with an opinion would agree or strongly agree with an open access mandate for data in their research area, providing that all relevant aspects (e.g. ethics, confidentiality, intellectual property) have been considered and addressed....Only a small number of respondents, 13 %, have no opinion on the question."
    • Also see Wilhelm Peekhaus, A cohort study of how faculty in LIS schools perceive and engage with open-access publishing, Journal of Information Science, July 22, 2019 (perma.cc link): "Willingness to comply with gold open-access mandates has increased significantly since 2013."

  • At pp. 94-95, I argue that policy-makers should watch for the moment when they could strengthen green gratis OA policies into green libre policies. Add this note.
    • See the ten-year anniversary statement from the BOAI, which made recommendations for the next ten years, Ten years on from the Budapest Open Access Initiative: setting the default to open, September 12, 2012. Recommendation 2.1, first bullet: "OA repositories typically depend on permissions from others, such as authors or publishers, and are rarely in a position to require open licenses. However, policy makers in a position to direct deposits into repositories should require open licenses, preferably CC-BY, when they can."

Chapter 5: Scope

Read the OA text:

Updates and supplements for Chapter 5:

  • At p. 97, I say that OA "is not limited to publicly-funded research, where the argument is almost universally accepted, but includes privately funded and unfunded research." Add these notes.
    • Funding agencies with strong OA policies include both public and private agencies. Among the major private funding agencies with OA policies are the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Open Society Foundations, and Wellcome Trust. Universities with strong OA policies cover all faculty research articles, regardless how or whether the underlying research was funded.
    • See Cory Doctorow, Why all pharmaceutical research should be made open access, The Guardian, November 20, 2012: "The reason pharma companies should be required to publish their results [and make them OA] isn't that they've received a public subsidy for the research. Rather, it is because they are asking for a governmental certification saying that their products are fit for consumption, and they are asking for regulatory space to allow doctors to write prescriptions for those products. We need them to disclose their research – even if doing so undermines their profits – because without that research, we can't know if their products are fit for use."

  • At pp. 102-103, I say, "As soon as scholars had digital networks to connect peers together, they began using them to tinker with peer review. Can we use networks to find good referees, or to gather, share, and weigh their comments? Can we use networks to implement traditional models of peer review more quickly or effectively? Can we use networks to do better than the traditional models?" Add this note.
    • See the editorial in Nature, Tracker is a boon for innovation in peer review, March 5, 2019. "Barely a week goes by without a new proposal to improve peer review: how to make it faster, better at spotting errors, more transparent, less prone to bias, less burdensome."

  • At p. 103, I say, "Open access is a kind of access, not a kind of editorial policy." Add this note.
    • See Peter Suber, Open Access Overview (original 2004, frequently updated since then), in which I elaborate. "OA is a kind of access, not a kind of business model, license, or content. [1] OA is not a kind of business model. There are many business models compatible with OA, i.e many ways to pay the bills so that readers can reach the content without charge....[2] OA is not a kind of license. There are many licenses compatible with OA, i.e. many ways to remove permission barriers for users and let them know what they may and may not do with the content....[3] OA is not a kind of content. Every kind of digital content can be OA, from texts and data to software, audio, video, and multi-media. The OA movement focuses on peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints. While most of these are just text, a growing number integrate text with images, data, and executable code. OA can also apply to non-scholarly content, like music, movies, and novels, even if these are not the focus of most OA activists."

  • At p. 104, I argue that the quality of a journal does not depend on its price or medium. "We see this whenever toll-access journals convert to OA without changing their methods or personnel." Add this note.
    • See Peter Suber, "Preface" to Solomon, Laakso, and Björk, Converting Scholarly Journals to Open Access: A Review of Approaches and Experiences, Harvard Library, June 2016, p. 3, where I give several reasons to favor flipping toll-access journals to OA over launching new OA journals. Here's the last of them: "New journals start from scratch, while converted journals bring their readership, authors, editors, referees, quality, standards, and reputations with them. This matters because all new journals – OA and non-OA alike – start with a credibility problem aggravated by a vicious circle. They need a good reputation in order to attract good submissions, and they need good submissions in order to build a good reputation. Many born-OA journals have broken this vicious circle through high quality, hard work, and persistence, just as many other high-quality born-OA journals have failed to break it. But converted-OA journals bypass the vicious circle and don't need to break it. Their credibility is continuous and uninterrupted. Conversion brings uncommon benefits that make it desirable even in fields where there is no shortage of high-quality, born-OA journals."

  • At p. 105, endnote 4 (note text at pp. 199-200), I cite research showing that "[w]hile...fears [that making a thesis or dissertation OA will reduce the odds that a journal will publish an article length version] are sometimes justified, the evidence suggests that in most cases they are not." Add these notes.
    • See Marisa Ramirez and five co-authors, Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Sciences? College and Research Libraries, forthcoming, January 2015: "Though previous studies have shown that journal editors are willing to consider manuscripts derived from electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), faculty advisors and graduate students continue to raise concerns that online discoverability of ETDs negatively impact future opportunities to publish those findings. The current study investigated science journal policies on open access ETDs and found that more than half of the science journals contacted (51.4%) reported that manuscripts derived from openly accessible ETDs are welcome for submission and an additional 29.1% would accept revised ETDs under certain conditions."
    • See Gail Macmillan, Jordan Hill, and Karen DePauw, ETDs and Open Access: Understanding the Digital Landscape of Open Access in the Graduate School Arena, October 21, 2013. From slide 5: "Only 3 universities in the US reported that they do not make any of their ETDs publicly available. 1/3 of the US respondents and over half of the I’nat’l institutions make their entire ETD collections publicly available." From slide 9: "Few institutions embargo ETDs permanently; only one in each category [US and non-US]. One year or more seems to be the norm worldwide." From slide 13: "89% [of surveyed publishers in the social sciences and humanities] will accept manuscripts based on ETDs." From slide 14: "Journal editors are more enthusiastic about receiving submissions based on ETDs than are university presses. Two-thirds of the journals “always welcome” submissions from ETDs, while one-tenth of the university presses do. This is not to say the university presses discourage submissions based on ETDs. Nearly half consider ETD-based submissions on a case-by-case basis."
    • See Can't Find It, Can't Sign It: On Dissertation Embargoes, Harvard University Press Blog, July 26, 2013. "From our perspective [at Harvard University Press], a missing element in [concerns that OA will prevent future publication of the dissertation as a book]...is the possibility of a dissertation's availability actually working in favor of a young scholar seeking a contract. HUP Assistant Editor Brian Distelberg, for instance, notes how a project's discoverability can be the means by which his interest is sparked: "I'm always looking out for exciting new scholarship that might make for a good book, whether in formally published journal articles and conference programs, or in the conversation on Twitter and in the history blogosphere, or in conversations with scholars I meet. And so, to whatever extent open access to a dissertation increases the odds of its ideas being read and discussed more widely, I tend to think it increases the odds of my hearing about them." ...An enormous part of a university press acquisitions editor's job is to be out scouting for new voices, new ideas, and new inquiries. And as Distelberg notes, much of that scouting takes place online, where these conversations are happening. If you can't find it, you can't sign it."
    • See Marisa Ramirez and four co-authors, Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Social Sciences and Humanities?, College and Research Libraries, July 2013: "The findings indicate that manuscripts that are revisions of openly accessible ETDs are always welcome for submission or considered on a case-by-case basis by 82.8 percent of journal editors and 53.7 percent of university press directors polled....Only 4.5 percent of all respondents indicated that they would never consider an ETD for publication...."
    • See Jennifer Howard, Putting Dissertation Online Isn't an Obstacle to Print Publication, Surveys Find, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 12, 2012: "Are you a science graduate student worried that making your thesis or dissertation available online will hurt your chances of getting it published? Gail McMillan, director of the digital library and archives at Virginia Tech, has good news for you. In a recent survey of science-journal editors, 87 percent indicated they would consider articles drawn from openly accessible electronic theses and dissertations, or ETD's....Many students and their faculty advisers, however, cling to the idea that publishers will balk at publishing work if it's already freely available online. Ms. McMillan has found that those fears cut across disciplinary lines. Decisions about whether to restrict access to electronic work tend to be driven by anecdote, she said, and faculty members tend to play it safe when dispensing career advice. "I think faculty want to err on the side of caution," she said. "I wish they would look at the data." ...The results of the 2012 survey have not yet been published. The results of the 2011 survey are available in an article, "Do Open-Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Social Sciences and Humanities?," forthcoming in the journal College & Research Libraries and available now as a preprint...."
    • See Kate Valentine Stanton and Chern Li Liew, Open access theses in institutional repositories: an exploratory study of the perceptions of doctoral students, Information Research, December 2011. "While awareness of open access and repository archiving is still low, the majority of interview and survey respondents were found to be supportive of the concept of open access. The perceived benefits of enhanced exposure and potential for sharing outweigh the perceived risks. The majority of respondents were supportive of an existing mandatory thesis submission policy."
    • For a growing list of the policies of individual publishers, see Publisher Policies: Thesis content and article publishing, maintained by Scholarly Publishing @ MIT Libraries.

  • At p. 107, I say, "Royalties on most scholarly monographs range between zero and meager." Add this note.
    • See Things You Should Know Before Publishing a Book, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 29, 2014, Rachel Toor's interview with Elizabeth Knoll, an editor for 17 years at Harvard University Press. Quoting Knoll: "Sad to say, it's extremely unlikely that your book is going to make you or your publisher any real money....You can probably make more money having a first-class yard sale."
    • See the Authors Alliance interview with Robert Darnton, September 11, 2015 (perma.cc link). Quoting Darnton: "I like to joke that the royalties from [his 1968 book, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France] provide me with enough revenue to take my wife to dinner once every three years — if she pays for her half of the bill."

  • At p. 109, I say, "ebook readers are becoming more and more consumer friendly. If the 'net boost to sales' phenomenon is real, and if it depends on the ergonomic discomforts of reading digital books, then better gadgets may make the phenomenon disappear." Add this note.

  • At pp. 109-110, endnotes 8-10 (note texts at pp. 200-202), I cite research showing that OA to full-text books sometimes increases the net sales of print editions. Add these notes.
    • John Hilton III wrote his doctoral dissertation on this question, April 2010. From his blog post summarizing the dissertation: "Deseret Book placed eight books online for free download. All of these were 'backlist' titles. This study tracked what happened as a result of those books being available....During the ten weeks of the study the books were downloaded 102,556 times. Collectively, the books sold 68 more copies in the ten weeks they were online for free versus the ten previous weeks. This was an increase in sales of 26%. Over the same period of time in 2008, sales of these same books decreased by 38%. Furthermore, a study of comparison titles that were not put online for free found that sales of comparison books decreased both in 2008 and 2009....There was a moderately strong correlation (r=.65) between downloads and Internet print sales (the more books that were downloaded, the more books were purchased online). Thus if more books had been available and downloaded the number of additional books sold would likely have increased."
    • See Caroline Wintersgill, Open Access, Open Minds: Who should be the academic gatekeepers? politics|upside|down, October 11, 2013 (perma.cc link): "[M]y experience at Bloomsbury is that average commercial sales of ‘open’ titles are about 10% ahead of comparable ‘non-open’ titles."
    • See Brianna L. Schofield et al., Understanding and Negotiating Book Publication Contracts, Authors Alliance, October 2018, pp. 61-62 (perma.cc link): "Eric von Hippel, an economist at MIT..., studies the economics of distributed and open innovation. Professor von Hippel wanted to "walk the walk" and make his previously published book, Sources of Innovation, freely available to the public online. So, he struck a deal with his publisher: If hard copy sales declined after he made his book freely available online, he would pay the publisher $1,000 as compensation for lost sales. If sales went up, the publisher would keep the profits and allow him to keep posting the free version. Happily, sales of printed copies went up, so he was able to keep the free version available online. Based on the success of this experiment, von Hippel was able to negotiate a non-exclusive license with his publisher for his next two books, Democratizing Innovation and Free Innovation."
    • See Abhishek Nagaraj and Imke Reimers, Digitization and the Demand for Physical Works: Evidence from the Google Books Project, SSRN, April 20, 2020 (perma.cc link): When the Google Books project digitized books from Harvard Library, the results reduced "loans within Harvard but increased sales of physical editions by about 35%, especially for less popular works. Rather than harming copyright holders, mass digitization could significantly increase the diffusion of historical works."
    • For real-time news and comment on this question, follow the oa.books.sales tag at the Open Access Tracking Project.

  • At pp. 114-15, I say, "We need access to medical or physical research before we can use it to tackle a cure for malaria or devise a more efficient solar panel." If I were writing the book today, I'd add a section on unmet demand for access by research-based business, industry, and manufacturing. This material doesn't belong in Section 5.5.1, on access for lay readers, because those who need access in these businesses are not lay readers but research professionals. And most of the rest of the book focuses on research professionals in the academic world, not research professionals in the non-academic world. But for now, I'll use this passage at pp. 114-115 as the hook for adding updates and supplements on research-based business, industry, and manufacturing. Add these notes.
    • See the Obama White House directive of February 22, 2013, requiring the largest federal funding agencies to develop OA mandates within the next six months. "Scientific research supported by the Federal Government catalyzes innovative breakthroughs that drive our economy. The results of that research become the grist for new insights and are assets for progress in areas such as health, energy, the environment, agriculture, and national security. Access to digital data sets resulting from federally funded research allows companies to focus resources and efforts on understanding and exploiting discoveries. For example, open weather data underpins the forecasting industry, and making genome sequences publicly available has spawned many biotechnology innovations. In addition, wider availability of peer-reviewed publications and scientific data in digital formats will create innovative economic markets for services related to curation, preservation, analysis, and visualization. Policies that mobilize these publications and data for re-use through preservation and broader public access also maximize the impact and accountability of the Federal research investment. These policies will accelerate scientific breakthroughs and innovation, promote entrepreneurship, and enhance economic growth and job creation."
    • See Australian Government's Office of the Chief Scientist, Top Breakthrough Actions for Innovation, December 2012, p. 6 (perma.cc link): "Breakthrough Action Two: Business must have increased access to publicly funded expertise, infrastructure and open-access to research data, especially in areas of national priority....Specific actions:...Provide free and open access to data and other outputs of publicly funded research."
    • See Darrell West, Allan Friedman, and Walter Valdivia, Building an Innovation-Based Economy, The Brookings Institution, November 2012. "One of the most important policy questions about innovation is how the nation can extract the maximum social benefit from its investments in research and development....The protection of intellectual property (patents and copyrights) introduces the profit incentive to inventive activity, but this is a rather ineffective incentive if the innovator does not or cannot pursue profit. That is precisely the case of public R&D because the general expectation is that new knowledge created with taxpayers’ money may be made available to taxpayers at minimum cost....The expectation of a wide dissemination of public research has inspired a bill that is currently being considered in Congress. We should support the Federal Research Public Access Act...that mandates public dissemination of federally funded research within six months of publication..." (Emphasis in original.)
    • See Francie Diep, Startups Root for Cheaper Peeks at Scientific Papers, NBC News, May 24, 2012 (perma.cc link): "Meanwhile, a group of important stakeholders in the dispute tends to be overlooked: startups and small businesses. Small biomedical and energy companies, for example, read many academic papers....[T]he small-company founders we interviewed agreed that they would benefit from freer access....'Obviously we have to keep up on the latest science out there,' said Brian Glaister, CEO of a Seattle-based startup called Cadence Biomedical. His company is working on a spring-powered device that people with weak legs can wear to help them walk. 'It's a pain in the butt if we can't get access' to a paper, Glaister said....He says his company, which plans to launch its first commercial product in a few weeks, cannot afford the small-company subscription deals that publishers offer: He needs access to so many journals by so many publishers, the total cost would be prohibitive....Another small company that feels the pinch of paying for journal articles is AltaRock Energy, a geothermal energy startup also based in Seattle...."
    • See Harvard University's January 2012 response to the first question in the White House call for comments on OA to peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally-funded research (perma.cc link): "Businesses need access to cutting-edge research to stimulate innovation, for example to develop new medicines, reduce the size and energy requirements of computer chips, strengthen lightweight composite materials, reduce harmful emissions from fossil fuels, increase the efficiency of solar panels, and make food safer. Public access to publicly funded research nourishes R&D in these industries, allowing them to develop new products, improve existing products, and create jobs. The question is not whether useful, publicly funded, basic or pre-competitive research will continue. Even in an age of budget cuts, it will continue. The question is whether we will make the results of that research easily available to all those who can make use of it, or whether we will allow it to be locked down by a private interest at the expense of the public interest....Public access not only facilitates innovation in research-driven industries such as medicine and manufacturing. It stimulates the growth of a new industry adding value to the newly accessible research itself. This new industry includes search, current awareness, impact measurement, data integration, citation linking, text and data mining, translation, indexing, organizing, recommending, and summarizing. These new services not only create new jobs and pay taxes, but they make the underlying research itself more useful. Research funding agencies needn't take on the job of provide all these services themselves. As long as they ensure that the funded research is digital, online, free of charge, and free for reuse, they can rely on an after-market of motivated developers and entrepreneurs to bring it to users in the forms in which it will be most useful. Indeed, scholarly publishers are themselves in a good position to provide many of these value-added services, which could provide an additional revenue source for the industry."
    • See John Houghton, Alma Swan, and Sheridan Brown, Access to research and technical information in Denmark, a report commissioned by Denmark’s Agency for Science, Technology, and Information (Forsknings- og Innovationsstyrelsen) and Denmark's Electronic Research Library (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek), April 2011 (perma.cc link): "Research articles, patent information, scientific and technical standards, technical and market information were seen as the most important information sources [for small and medium-sized businesses, SMEs]. Forty eight per cent rated research articles as very or extremely important, and among those in research roles a higher 64% did so....More than two-thirds reported having difficulties accessing market survey research and reports and Doctoral or Masters theses, 62% reported difficulties accessing technical reports from government agencies and 55% reported difficulties accessing research articles....[R]esearch articles and market survey research and reports are seen to be both important and difficult to access...Use of Open Access materials is widespread. More than 50% used free institutional or subject repositories and Open Access journals monthly or more regularly, and among researchers 72% reported using free institutional or subject repositories and 56% Open Access journals monthly or more regularly....Access barriers and delays involve costs. It would have taken an average of 2.2 years longer to develop or introduce the new products or processes in the absence of contributing academic research. For new products, a 2.2 years delay would cost around DKK 36 million (EUR 4.8 million) per firm in lost sales, and for new processes it would cost around DKK 211 000 per firm."
    • See Harnessing Openness to Improve Research, Teaching and Learning in Higher Education from the business-oriented Committee for Economic Development, November 2009 (perma.cc link): "This more open model of research is consistent with the research mission of the university to create and disseminate knowledge —and appears to lead to both broader and deeper research while increasing the pace of innovation....Not only do we believe that the NIH policy is consistent with copyright law and good public policy —to increase the pace of innovation and avoid making the taxpayer pay twice for taxpayer-funded research —but we believe that the public-access mandate should be expanded....The intellectual property arguments that have been invoked to oppose public-access mandates for government-funded research and the digitization and partial display of the world’s books suggest to us the need to recalibrate our intellectual property rules for the digital age. Intellectual property rules should serve not only those who first create a work (and subsequent rights holders) but should also recognize the needs of users who often are follow-on creators....Governments should...[r]eview and recalibrate intellectual property rules recognizing the increasing importance for innovation of users as follow-on innovators....Why should we care about the degree of openness? Over the course of our work we have found that greater openness fosters quicker and broader innovation, primarily because of the potential for many more people to contribute....Expanding the rights of first innovators leaves less room for follow-on innovation by users, leading to its underproduction."
    • Also see the letter supporting the proposed OA mandate at the NIH from the US Chamber of Commerce, October 22, 2004: "The U.S. Chamber of Commerce (Chamber), the world's largest business federation, representing more than three million businesses of every size, sector, and region, is pleased to provide the following comments concerning the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) proposed action: Enhanced Public Access to NIH Research Information.' ...The Chamber strongly supports NIH’s effort to ensure that scientific information arising from NIH-funded research is made freely available....The Chamber strongly disagrees with the proposed six-month delay for publishing taxpayer-funded information [and recommends immediate or undelayed OA]....With ready access to such taxpayer-funded information, stakeholders are better informed and able to engage in constructive, informed public dialogue with others, resolve uncertainties, and, relevant to business interests, the Chamber’s members are better able to plan future business operations. This outcome is good for America and good for American industry, as it will create new business opportunities, thereby strengthening our economy and making America more competitive in the global marketplace." Note that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce reversed course, and by 2010 opposed (perma.cc link) federal policies to mandate OA for publicly-funded research. One thing that happened between 2004 and 2010 is that Elsevier joined the organization.
    • Also see the updates and supplements for p. 133, below, on studies showing that the economic benefits of OA exceed the costs. Some of the studies cited there focus on benefits to non-academic sectors of the economy.

  • At p. 115, I say, "We need access to an earthquake prediction before we can use it to plan emergency responses." Also see endnote 13 at p. 202. Add these notes.
    • There are many other examples of predictions with life-saving potential locked behind paywalls. For example, see Bernice Dahn et al., Yes, We We Warned About Ebola, New York Times, April 7, 2015 (perma.cc link). "The conventional wisdom among public health authorities is that the Ebola virus, which killed at least 10,000 people in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, was a new phenomenon, not seen in West Africa before 2013....The conventional wisdom is wrong. We were stunned recently when we stumbled across an article by European researchers in Annals of Virology [actually, Annales de l'Institut Pasteur / Virologie]: 'The results seem to indicate that Liberia has to be included in the Ebola virus endemic zone....[M]edical personnel in Liberian health centers should be aware of the possibility that they may come across active cases.' ...What triggered our dismay was not the words, but when they were written: The paper was published in 1982." The journal, published by Elsevier, is not OA.
    • For a general study of this kind of access failure in health research, disproportionately harming the global south, see Elise Smith et al., Knowledge sharing in global health research – the impact, uptake and cost of open access to scholarly literature, Health Research Policy and Systems, August 2017 (perma.cc link).

  • At p. 117, I say, "One reason to think [that publishers act] in bad faith [when they claim that OA is primarily for lay readers] is that [this claim] overlooks the very conspicuous fact that the OA movement is driven by researchers who are emphatic about wanting the benefits of OA for themselves." Add these notes.
    • I stand by this elaboration in a blog post from May 20, 2006: "There are two mistakes to avoid here. One is to think that OA has no role to play in helping non-scientists understand science. We can call this the Royal Society mistake, after the RS's recent report on educating lay readers about science that doesn't even mention OA. The other mistake is to think that the overriding purpose of OA is to educate lay readers. No OA advocates believe this, but some publisher-opponents of OA either believe it or pretend to believe it in order set it up as a straw man and knock it down. ([A] recent example is the American Society of Human Genetics, as quoted in the NYTimes for May 8, perma.cc link.) To avoid both mistakes we have to accept that the problem and solution are both complicated. OA will play a role in public education about science — it's neither irrelevant nor sufficient — and the size of that role is up to all of us."

  • At p. 117, endnote 17 (note text at p. 204). Here I'm citing evidence and research showing demand among lay readers for access to cutting-edge medical research. Add these notes, some of which are about lay demand for research outside the field of medicine.
    • See the editorial in the New York Times for August 7, 2003 (perma.cc link): "Most of us, admittedly, will not have much use for free access to new discoveries in, say, particle physics. But it is a different matter when it comes to medical research. Popular nostrums abound on the Web, but it can be very hard, if not impossible, to find the results of properly vetted, taxpayer-financed science — and in some cases it can be hard for your doctor to find them, too."
    • As early as 2007, BioMed Central reported that one of its OA articles on a popular subject (nutritional supplements) had been downloaded more than 16,000 times in less than one month.
    • See the Congressional testimony of David Lipman, Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, July 29, 2010: "Last year, 99% of the articles in PubMed Central were downloaded at least once, and 28% were downloaded more than 100 times. Although we can collect only aggregated information about users of PubMed Central, we can infer they represent a mix of people from the education and business sectors, as well as private citizens. Based on the type of Internet domain from which they access PubMed Central (e.g., .com, .edu, .net, .gov), we estimate that approximately 25% of our users are from universities, 40% are private citizens or those using personal Internet accounts, and 17% are from companies (the remainder consists of government users or others). These kinds of numbers support the notion that PubMed Central has become a broad-based repository for researchers, students, clinicians, entrepreneurs, patients and their families."
    • See Who needs access? You need access! (perma.cc link) — a web site from the @ccess working group collecting the stories of people who need research access. Some are research professionals and some are lay readers. Currently (March 2013) the site categories include Artists, Developing world, Fossil preparators, Independent Researchers, Nurses, Patient Groups, Patients, Small businesses, Teachers, and Translators.
    • See Susannah Fox and Maeve Duggan, One in four people seeking health information online have hit a pay wall, Pew Internet & American Life Project, January 15, 2013: "Twenty-six percent of internet users who look online for health information say they have been asked to pay for access to something they wanted to see online....Of those who have been asked to pay, just 2% say they did so. Fully 83% of those who hit a pay wall say they tried to find the same information somewhere else. Thirteen percent of those who hit a pay wall say they just gave up. Men, women, people of all ages and education levels were equally likely to report hitting a pay wall when looking for health information. Respondents living in lower-income households were significantly more likely than their wealthier counterparts to say they gave up at that point."
    • See my blog post from July 2017, summarizing some of the evidence showing demand among lay readers for access to cutting-edge research. (Some of the evidence was already noted in the book or in these updates to the book.)
    • See Seth Gershenson, Morgan S. Polikoff, and Rui Wang, When Paywall Goes AWOL: The Demand for Open Access Education Research, IZA Institute of Labor Economics, February 2019 (perma.cc link): "We estimate the causal effect of open access to academic journal articles on article downloads by exploiting a natural experiment in which the paywall to several prestigious educational research journals was unexpectedly taken down for two months. Using the always open-access AERA Open as a control group, we find credibly causal evidence that removing the paywall increased monthly downloads by 60 to 80%." There's reason to think that many of the new readers were not professional researchers. "[I]n the case of educational research, citations are not necessarily the correct measure of impact, as teachers, schools, and districts may use journal articles to inform their policy and practice without ever formally citing the research."
    • See Dave deBronkart, Open access: remember the patients, BMJ, April 18, 2019 (perma.cc link): "A growing number of us patients are experiencing a comparable frustration at having newly minted knowledge kept from us —for financial reasons. While I fully understand the economic needs of the people who create and publish knowledge, I implore all of them—all of you—to “remember the patients.” In your deliberations about policy, please remember the needs of the people for whose ultimate benefit your work exists. And modify the financial structure of this work, to prioritise not just creating the knowledge but also delivering it to those in medical need. Families coping with desperate illness hope that everyone in the healing professions will do everything in their power to bring the newest findings to the point of need. Little do they know that those parties sometimes have other priorities. You should see the look of fear, even outrage, when they learn of this. If I’m suffering, and remedies are developed, what needs should outweigh mine and keep those remedies hidden? If my baby has a potentially fatal disease, and useful knowledge has been developed, what needs should outweigh ours? Or, if my baby’s condition is not fatal but potentially disabling, and new knowledge has come to light, what needs should outweigh ours to keep that hidden?"
    • See Maurizio S.Tonetti Leadership in Publishing, Journal of Dentistry, May 8, 2019 (perma.cc link): "The rather recent link of individual research papers with Internet search engines without the need to use specific databases like Pubmed has opened this world to a new type of reader: the layperson. The key seems to be the difficulty to link the question this broader audience is trying to address with an appropriate and valid source that can contribute to a useful answer. Noise is an overwhelming problem – and more so for less experienced or trained users."
    • The University of Michigan Press made its Ebook Collection temporarily free to read, starting March 20, 2020, as a humanitarian response to the COVID-19 crisis. Four days later it reported (perma.cc link) that downloads had increased 800%.
    • See the November 2020 white paper from Springer Nature, Open for All: Exploring the Reach of Open Access Content to Non-Academic Audiences (perma.cc link) at p. 4: "OA is reaching a substantial number of user groups outside of academia. Approximately 40% of readers surveyed for this analysis on Springer Nature websites were classified as non-academic audiences, including 15% “Halo” users (likely to be reading research for professional purposes but not conducting or publishing research themselves) and 28% “General” users (likely to be reading out of personal or professional interest but outside of a role where conducting, publishing or citing research is typical)."
    • See Martin Eve, Open access publishing is the ethical choice, Wonkhe, May 5, 2021 (perma.cc link): "I had a stroke half a decade ago and found I couldn't access the medical literature on my extremely rare vascular condition. I'm a capable reader, but I couldn't get past the paywalls – which seemed absurd, given most research is publicly funded. While I had, already, long been an open access advocate by that point, this strengthened my resolve. The public is often underestimated. Keeping research locked behind paywalls under the assumption that most people won’t be interested in, or capable of, reading academic research is patronising."
    • See the results of a survey of Dutch researchers conducted by the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO), November 5, 2021 (perma.cc link): "The statement that science should not be open because the general public has too little understanding of science anyway finds little support. Six per cent of those surveyed agree with that statement. Among humanities researchers, the statement finds no support at all."
    • See Janne Pölönen et al., Who are the users of national open access journals? The case of the Finnish Journal.fi platform, Learned Publishing, May 24, 2021 (perma.cc link): A survey of users of the Finnish Journal.fi platform found that 24% were non-academics.
    • See Diana Hicks et al., Widespread use of National Academies consensus reports by the American public, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 22, 2022: "We find half of reported use [of reports from the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM)] to be academic —research, teaching, or studying. The other half reveals adults across the country seeking the highest-quality information to improve how they do their job, to help family members, to satisfy their curiosity, and to learn. Our results establish the existence of demand for high-quality information by the public and that such knowledge is widely deployed to improve provision of services."

  • At pp. 117-118, I say, "A common...argument is that lay readers surfing the internet are easily misled by unsupported claims, refuted theories, anecdotal evidence, and quack remedies. Even if true, however, it's an argument for rather than against expanding online access to peer-reviewed research. If we're really worried about online dreck, we should dilute it with high-quality research rather than leave the dreck unchallenged and uncorrected." Add these notes.
    • In early 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many researchers made their COVID-19 research OA, and to speed up research, many made it OA through unrefereed preprints. Other services popped up to collect and analyze this research. One was Nextstrain. See Klint Finley, Global Officials Call for Free Access to Covid-19 Research, Wired, March 13, 2020 (perma.cc link). Quoting Trevor Bedford, co-founder of Nextstrain: "Nonprofessionals will certainly sometimes misinterpret the information on Nextstrain.org, but I strongly believe that we're pushing things toward more accurate public information....I absolutely believe that transparency is the best thing for global public health to be aiming for right now."
    • Also see Gwinyai Masukume, Why and how medical schools, peer-reviewed journals, and research funders should promote Wikipedia editing, Studies in Higher Education, April 8, 2020 (perma.cc link): "Do academics, both directly and indirectly involved with healthcare, have a moral mandate to ensure that Wikipedia has the most accurate, up-to-date and understandable information? [Yes. As] a physician who is also a long-time Wikipedia editor [I argue that] medical institutions such as peer-reviewed journals, medical schools, research funders and academic reward systems [should encourage academics to contribute their knowledge to Wikipedia]. These stakeholders act as the true guardians of Primum non nocere – first to do no harm....I feel that it is the duty of the medical community to contribute to Wikipedia by ensuring accuracy and sharing medical literature (Turki et al. 2019) beyond exclusive journals and instead moving towards open-sourced information....Although this essay has employed a biomedical lens, its ‘tenets’ are applicable to other disciplines in higher education, and I encourage all academicians to advocate for Wikipedia involvement among their peers and institutions focusing on key gatekeepers of the higher education ecosystem."

  • At p. 118, I say, "OA benefits researchers directly and benefits everyone else indirectly by benefiting researchers." (Also see p. 26.) Add this note.
    • I elaborated on this point in a 2012 interview, Digital access to knowledge: Research chat with Harvard’s Peter Suber, Journalists' Resource, October 16, 2012: "Even if you aren’t interested in reading peer-reviewed research, you benefit from open access. You depend on the medicines, the machines, and the policies made by people who make use of research and in that sense who make use of access to research. So, either you benefit directly, as a researcher, or indirectly, as a consumer of the fruits of research. The only people who oppose open access are some academic publishers, not even all of them. And even academic publishers want to accelerate research insofar as they benefit as individuals from advances in better medicines, longer batteries, cleaner energy, or more-informed decision-making."

  • At pp. 120-123 (and in notes 22-25 at pp. 205-206), I argue that we should want OA for our machines as much as we want OA for ourselves. Add these notes.
    • See Stuart M. Shieber, Statement before the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, U.S. House of Representatives, March 29, 2012: "Opening access to the literature makes it available not only to human readers, but to computer processing as well. There are some million and a half scholarly articles published each year. No human can read them all or even the tiny fraction in a particular subfield, but computers can, and computer analysis of the text, known as text mining, has the potential not only to extract high-quality structured data from article databases but even to generate new research hypotheses. My own field of research, computational linguistics, includes text mining. I have collaborated with colleagues in the East Asian Languages and Civilization department on text mining of tens of thousands of classical Chinese biographies and with colleagues in the History department on computational analysis of pre-modern Latin texts. Performing similar analyses on the current research literature, however, is encumbered by proscriptions of copyright and contract because the dominant publishing mechanisms are not open."
    • See Heather Joseph, With Introduction of FASTR, Congress Picks up the Pace on Open Access Legislation, SPARC, February 14, 2013. "FASTR calls for affected agencies to require articles be provided in formats and under terms that ensure researchers have the ability to freely apply cutting-edge analysis tools and technologies to the full collection of digital articles resulting from public funding. This is a crucial step. As the volume of research information increases, with a mind-boggling 1.5 million research articles published each year, no person can realistically hope to make full sense of this information by simply accessing and reading individual articles on their own. We must enable computers as a new category of reader to help power through this volume, thousands of articles at a time, and to highlight patterns, links, and associations that would otherwise go undiscovered. Computational tools like text mining and data mining are crucial to achieving this, and have the potential to revolutionize the research process. Of course, to be able to apply these kinds of tools, users must be assigned the rights to do so freely across the full collection of articles – not just on single articles, or a on a subset of articles."
    • Some sites offer free online access to certain texts, perhaps even under an open license, but only to users who register first. Sometimes registration is even free of charge. The Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin statements are silent on registration barriers. But registration barriers are unquestionably access barriers (regardless of how we decide the terminological question whether they are barriers to "open access"). Many researchers object to them as irritants, delays, and invasions of privacy. The chief objection may be that registration requirements block machine access, which is a prerequisite to many of the concrete benefits of access for human users, such as search indexing and text mining.

  • At pp. 121-122, I argue that the growing body of OA literature is a "spectacular inducement" to develop software optimized for OA, and conversely, that useful tools optimized for OA "create powerful incentives for authors and publishers to open up their work." Add these notes.
    • A good example of powerful software optimized for OA, and currently forced to exclude paywalled literature, is Iris.ai, an AI-enhanced search engine for research. From a June 16, 2018 interview with Maria Ritola, co-founder of Iris.ai: "When asked about challenges that the team have experienced so far, Ms Ritola was quick to point out the issue of paywalls. She explained that the Iris.ai system is connected to about 130 million open access papers – almost all those available to the public – but that many useful documents are still hidden behind systems that require users to pay for access." For an update on the Iris.ai use of OA literature, see How AI technology can tame the scientific literature, Nature, September 10, 2018. Iris.ai is trained on a database of 134 million OA papers, in part because they're OA.
    • Another example is Paper Digest, which uses AI to summarize research articles. From the About page: "This works only for open access full-text articles that allow derivative generation (i.e. CC-BY equivalent). In case you receive you receive an error message..., either the full text is not available...or the license does not allow derivative generation." Scholarcy is a similar tool with a similar relationship with OA.
    • Another example is ImageNet, an OA database of annotated images launched in 2009 and used for training AI. For details on how it is used, see Dave Gershgorn's July 2017 article in Quartz (perma.cc link).
    • Another example is entity fishing, which "provides automatic entity recognition and disambiguation against Wikipedia and Wikidata."
    • Another example is Unsilo, which runs its AI-based, real-time, knowledge-extraction software on the corpus of OA literature. For example, see the company's post from May 2018: "[T]he system is now running successfully on the UNSILO development servers, and the first results are now visible. The system is trained on an existing corpus, for example of open-access content, but [with publisher cooperation] it could also be the publisher’s existing collection of published articles and chapters."
    • Another example is Capisco, which analyzes Wikipedia texts in order to "avoid[] the need for complete semantic document markup using ontologies."
    • Another example is the Clinical Acronym SenSE disambiGuATOR (CLASSE GATOR) (perma.cc link), which uses context to guess what a medical acronym stands for in clinical notes. "This automatic approach does not rely on manually annotated clinical notes for algorithm training and therefore provides an inexpensive tool for sense disambiguation....CLASSE GATOR [uses] full-text [open-access] research articles from PubMed Central, including a prenatal exposure subset along with the entire open access dataset to learn features that are predictive of certain acronym ‘senses’."
    • Another example is the March 2020 study in which Mike Thelwall and Amalia Mas-Bleda wanted to see how often research papers in different fields were framed by explicit questions. Because they needed to crunch the full-texts of the papers under study, and wanted to study millions of them, they focused on OA papers that permitted that kind of access and analysis.
    • Another example is SciFact, an AI-based system of scientific fact-checking, trained on Wikipedia and fine-tuned on a dataset of OA scientific claims and abstracts. Details here and here.
    • Another example is the Elsevier corpus of 40k OA articles under CC-BY licenses, August 6, 2020 (perma.cc link), created to train AI and NLP software.
    • Another example is the history of epidemics visualization (perma.cc link), August 2020, based on the Wikipedia list of epidemics.
    • Another example is Opscidia, which mines OA research articles to expose and correct fake news (perma.cc link).
    • See Brigitte Vézina and Sarah Pearson, Should CC-Licensed Content be Used to Train AI? It Depends, Creative Commons, March 4, 2021 (perma.cc link). It focuses mostly on copyright and privacy issues. But it should stimulate us to ask whether open content today is sufficiently representative to train AI. If not, it could contribute to bias. My take: If it does, the best solution is to enlarge the corpus of open content and make it more representative.
    • See Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur et al., Can I use this publicly available dataset to build commercial AI software? Most likely not, arxiv, November 9, 2021. The authors show that it's not enough for data to be free on line (gratis OA). It must also be openly licensed (libre OA).
    • Another example is Zachary Flamholz et al., Word embeddings trained on published case reports are lightweight, effective for clinical tasks, and free of protected health information, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, January 2022: "[Word] embeddings trained on published [OA] case reports performed comparably on most clinical tasks to embeddings trained on larger corpora. Open access corpora allow training of clinically relevant, effective, and reproducible embeddings."
    • Another example is an OA repository of medical images for training AI. From Gradient Health.


Chapter 6: Copyright

Read the OA text:

Updates and supplements for Chapter 6:

  • At pp. 126-128, I say that, apart from copyright, publishers have "an independent, background right to refuse to publish any work for any reason. (I support this right and would never want to see publishers lose it.)" Add this note.
    • In my June 2011 article, Open Access and Copyright (perma.cc link) I spell out the argument a bit further. "Publishers have the right to refuse to publish any work for any reason. This is good and we should all celebrate it. Without this fundamental right [that is, if publishers were prohibited by law from refusing to publish certain work], publishing would be a propaganda arm of the state, and all publishing would lose credibility."

  • At p. 128, I argue that the OA policy at the NIH does not violate copyright. Add this note.
    • See the video of my April 9, 2012, debate at Harvard Law School with Mark Seeley, Senior Vice President and General Counsel at Elsevier. At roughly minute 8, Seeley concedes that the NIH policy, and similar OA policies, do not infringe copyrights. At minutes 16 and 18 we pick up that question again for clarification and more explicit discussion. Also see my blog post on the debate, which includes comments from Seeley and my replies.

  • At p. 128, line 22. Correction. "One of practical..." should be "One of the practical...." (This correction applies only to the first print edition and the earliest digital editions.)

Chapter 7: Economics

Read the OA text:

Updates and supplements for Chapter 7:

  • At p. 133, I say, "Many publishers who oppose OA concede that OA is better for research and researchers than toll access." Add these notes.
    • See Bradie Metheny, "NIH open access publishing policy receives initial good marks from most stakeholders," Washington Fax, September 8, 2004; originally online at this URL, for subscribers only, and now apparently not online at all. See my blogged excerpt at the time (perma.cc link): "John Regazzi, managing director of marketing development for Elsevier, the world's largest publisher of journals, said no one can argue against giving the public access to NIH information; it is in the public interest. 'But how you do it is the key,'...Regazzi argued."
    • See Jessica Litman, The Economics of Open-Access Law Publishing, Lewis & Clark Law Review, July 3, 2006 (perma.cc link): "Critics have not quarreled with the goals of open access publishing; instead, they've attacked the viability of the open-access business model."
    • See the KnowledgeSpeak interview with Andrew Richardson, the Managing Director Europe and Vice President for Business Development at Wolters Kluwer Health Medical Research, October 6, 2010: "I think we went through a period as an industry and probably as a company as well, where, we saw open access lobby as a threat. I think we see it much more, as an industry, we see it as an opportunity now....[Open access] is definitely an opportunity rather than a threat and I'd like people on the perceived other side to see it this way as well."
    • See the statement by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) promoting a March 2011 conference: "Open access is here to stay, and has the support of our key partners. Funders see it as the way to maximise access and impact for the research they fund, policy makers are under pressure to make it happen. Publishers know it is much more complicated and threatening to make it work than is apparent to the advocates and the fund holders. But we would benefit from having a compelling, coherent and above all positive story to tell about the role we can play in achieving these objectives. So what can the industry do to respond more pro-actively and positively to open access, while keeping an open mind on individual business models? We want to be seen as partners in the process of science, in the discovery, dissemination, show-casing and stewardship of the outputs of science. Can we learn not just to live with open access, but to love it as well? Has the time come to turn the threat into an opportunity? It is time to find a new consensus."
    • See the Nature page on the Nature Portfolio: "Open approaches accelerate the progress of science." (The page is undated, but I accessed it for this purpose July 16, 2021. perma.cc link.)

  • At p. 133, endnote 2 (note text at pp. 207-208). Here I cite studies showing that the economic benefits of OA exceed the costs. Add these notes.
    • See John Houghton, Bruce Rasmussen, and Peter Sheehan, Economic and Social Returns on Investment in Open Archiving Publicly Funded Research Outputs: Report to SPARC, July 2010. "Preliminary modeling suggests that over a transitional period of 30 years from implementation, the potential incremental benefits of the proposed FRPAA [Federal Research Public Access Act] archiving mandate might be worth around 8 times the costs. Perhaps two-thirds of these benefits would accrue within the US, with the remainder spilling over to other countries. Hence, the US national benefits arising from the proposed FRPAA archiving mandate might be of the order of 5 times the costs. Exploring sensitivities in the model we find that the benefits exceed the costs over a wide range of values. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any plausible values for the input data and model parameters that would lead to a fundamentally different answer."
    • See John Houghton, Bruce Rasmussen, and Peter Sheehan, Economic and Social Returns on Investment in Open Archiving Publicly Funded Research Outputs [in the United States,” SPARC, August 4, 2010. "Preliminary modeling suggests that over a transitional period of 30 years from implementation, the potential incremental benefits of the proposed FRPAA [Federal Research Public Access Act] archiving mandate might be worth around 8 times the costs. Perhaps two-thirds of these benefits would accrue within the US, with the remainder spilling over to other countries. Hence, the US national benefits arising from the proposed FRPAA archiving mandate might be of the order of 5 times the costs."
    • See the Battelle Technology Partnership Practice, Economic Impact of the Human Genome Project, May 2011 (perma.cc link). Quoting the press summary (May 11, 2011): "The $3.8 billion the U.S. government invested in the Human Genome Project (HGP) from 1988 to 2003 helped drive $796 billion in economic impact and the generation of $244 billion in total personal income, according to a study released today by Battelle. In 2010 alone, the human genome sequencing projects and associated genomics research and industry activity directly and indirectly generated $67 billion in U.S. economic output and supported 310,000 jobs that produced $20 billion in personal income. The genomics-enabled industry also provided $3.7 billion in federal taxes during 2010."
    • See Benefits to the Private Sector of Open Access to Higher Education and Scholarly Research, a report commissioned by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and undertaken by the HOST consulting group, October 2011. "A substantial body of research literature establishes the benefits to private sector businesses of publicly funded research. Mansfield (1991,1995,1998), Beisea and Stahle (1998) and other studies provide evidence of tangible economic benefit, in particular in terms of product innovations achieved and revenue gained through enhanced sales. The work of Houghton et al. (2011) confirmed these conclusions and also drew out the benefits of access to research in terms of shortening product and service development cycles. This study confirms the importance placed by businesses on access to scholarly research and its broad impact in terms of product, service and process innovation….Open Access publishing provides a way of opening much more university and scholarly research to the business sector….[M]ost businesses spend considerable amounts of time working around paywalls….The review suggests that, at a time of accelerating pressure on SME [small and medium-sized enterprises] competitiveness, a shift to Open Access would create significant cost savings by enabling businesses to review more quickly the relevance of individual papers and act accordingly. By boosting discoverability OA may also add value directly to levels and speed of knowledge transfer in this part of the economy.
    • See Harvard's eight-page summary of the evidence that OA to publicly-funded research creates jobs, and creates economic benefits far exceeding the costs, as part of its Harvard University's January 2012 response to the first question in the White House call for comments on OA to federally-funded research (perma.cc link).
    • See Neelie Kroes (then Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda) arguing for an EU-wide OA mandate, July 17, 2012 (perma.cc link): "I put a premium on such open systems because they deliver more for their users and for the wider economy. For example when the Human Genome Project results were made accessible, it leveraged a €3 billion research investment into around €500 billion in economic activity. I want more of those benefits to land in Europe. There is a direct connection between this package and our economic future. This package is also a major part of the wider movement to open up what is produced with public money – whether by a government or the organisations they fund. Doing this is a matter of principle. You paid for this research – you should have access to the results. But more than that, open access to scientific information will lead to better and faster research results. Innovation is an over-used word. We talk a lot about it, but don’t do enough of it. One reason for that is that we put obstacles in the way of innovation - like locking up information that is critical for innovators, for entrepreneurs. Open access policies get rid of those obstacles. They make it easier for great thinkers, for great business people, to do what they do best. So this package is big news for any start-up or small company that can’t afford scientific journals.This could help those businesses get their ideas to market 2 years earlier...."
    • See Data Service Infrastructure for the Social Sciences and Humanities, December 31, 2012 (perma.cc link), p. 22: "An economic evaluation of the [UK] Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS)...reveals that for every pound currently invested in data and infrastructure, the service returns £5.40 in net economic value to users and other stakeholders."
    • See James Manyika et al., Open data: Unlocking innovation and performance with liquid information, McKinsey Global Institute, October 2013 (perma.cc link). "Open data can help unlock $3 trillion to $5 trillion in economic value annually across seven sectors [namely, education, transportation, consumer products, electricity, oil and gas, health care, and consumer finance]."
    • See Paul Basken, First Milestone Is Claimed on Long Road to Tracking Science’s Economic Value, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 3, 2014 (paywalled) (perma.cc link). "The National Institutes of Health generates [$2.21] in economic growth for every taxpayer dollar it receives. 'That is an over-100-percent return on the investment,' [Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut] assured her legislative colleagues...." Neither Basken nor the source he summarizes breaks out the portion of the economic impact attributable to the NIH open-access policy.
    • See Neil Beagrie and John Houghton, The Value and Impact of Data Sharing and Curation: A synthesis of three recent studies of UK research data centres, JISC, March 2014 (perma.cc link), p. 17: "A very significant increase in research efficiency was reported by users as a result of their using the data centres. These estimated efficiency gains ranged from 2 and up to more than 20 times the costs."
    • See the European Commission report, Cost-benefit analysis for FAIR research data: Cost of not having FAIR research data, European Commission, March 2018 (perma.cc link): "We found that the annual cost of not having FAIR research data costs the European economy at least €10.2bn every year. In addition, we also listed a number of consequences from not having FAIR which could not be reliably estimated, such as an impact on research quality, economic turnover, or machine readability of research data. By drawing a rough parallel with the European open data economy, we concluded that these unquantified elements could account for another €16bn annually on top of what we estimated....To put this into perspective, research expenditures in Europe amounted to €302.9bn in 2016. While the minimum true cost of not having FAIR can be seen as only 3% of all research expenditures, €10.2bn per year is 78% of the Horizon 2020 budget per year and ~ 400%, of what the European Research Council and European research infrastructures receive combined."
    • See Michael Fell, The Economic Impacts of Open Science: A Rapid Evidence Assessment, Publications, June 26, 2019 (perma.cc link): "There is indicative evidence that open access to findings/data can lead to savings in access costs, labour costs and transaction costs. There are examples of open science enabling new products, services, companies, research and collaborations. Modelling studies suggest higher returns to R&D if open access permits greater accessibility and efficiency of use of findings. Barriers include lack of skills capacity in search, interpretation and text mining, and lack of clarity around where benefits accrue. There are also contextual considerations around who benefits most from open science (e.g., sectors, small vs. larger companies, types of dataset)." Also see Fell's less formal blog-post summary of the article, July 25, 2019 (perma.cc link).
    • Also see the updates and supplements for pp. 114-115, above, on the benefits of OA to research-based manufacturing and other non-academic sectors of the economy.

  • At p. 134, endnote 3 (note text at p. 208), I cite a study showing that green and gold OA both have high benefit-cost ratios, and that the infrastructure for green OA "has largely already been built." For evidence that green OA costs less than gold OA, and that green OA policies are more cost-effective than gold OA policies, see the following.
    • Alma Swan and John Houghton, Going for Gold? The costs and benefits of Gold Open Access for UK research institutions: further economic modelling. Report to the UK Open Access Implementation Group, June 2012 (perma.cc link). From the executive summary: "Based on this analysis, the main findings are: [1] so long as research funders commit to paying publication costs for the research they fund, and [2] publication charges fall to the reprint author’s home institution, [3] all universities would see savings from (worldwide) Gold OA when article-processing charges are at the current averages, [4] research-intensive universities would see the greatest savings, and [5] in a transition period, providing Open Access through the Green route offers the greatest economic benefits to individual universities, unless additional funds are made available to cover Gold OA costs....[F]or all the sample universities during a transition period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of Gold OA - with Green OA self-archiving costing institutions around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university sampled. In a transition period, providing OA through the Green route would have substantial economic benefits for universities, unless additional funds were released for Gold OA, beyond those already available through the Research Councils and the Wellcome Trust...."
    • John Houghton and Alma Swan, Planting the green seeds for a golden harvest: Comments and clarifications on “Going for Gold”, D-Lib Magazine, January/February 2013 (perma.cc link): "At the institutional level, during a transitional period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of unilaterally adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of unilaterally adopting Gold OA – with Green OA self-archiving costing average institutions sampled around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university. Hence, we conclude that the most affordable and cost-effective means of moving towards OA is through Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at relatively little cost....In an all-OA world, it seems likely that the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA, although Green OA would have a higher benefit/cost ratio. However, we are not in an all-OA world yet, nor anywhere near it. The most affordable and cost-effective means of moving towards OA in the meantime is through Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at little cost. Moreover, Green OA may well be the most immediate and cost-effective way to support knowledge transfer and enable innovation across the economy."
    • See Richard Van Noorden, Open access: The true cost of science publishing, Nature, March 27, 2013 (perma.cc link): arXiv "costs some $800,000 a year to keep going, or about $10 per article." For an update, see next.
      • See David Mellor, Brian Nosek, Nicole Pfeiffer, Conflict between Open Access and Open Science: APCs are a key part of the problem, preprints are a key part of the solution, Center for Open Science, January 21, 2020 (perma.cc link): "arXiv...reported an annual operating cost of $1,789,411 in 2018 and published 140,616 papers, or $12.73 per paper. arXiv's 2018 costs included some new development, not just maintenance. In prior years, costs between $8 and $10 per paper were typical. Our organization, the Center for Open Science, launched a preprint hosting service in late 2016 and now hosts 26 preprint services....With shared infrastructure and accelerating growth, we are observing substantial economy of scale. In 2019, we forecast maintenance costs to be $208,076 with 26,143 papers published ($7.95 per paper). Our forecast for 2020 are costs of $229,225 with 33,650 papers published ($6.81 per paper). With continued scaling, we believe that we can reduce the cost per paper even further."
    • See Robert T. Thibault, Amanda MacPherson, Stevan Harnad, and Amir Raza, The rent's too high: Self-archive for fair online publication costs, arXiv, August 17, 2018 (perma.cc link), p. 3: "[I]f enough authors made their publications publicly available by self-archiving their peer-reviewed drafts in institutional repositories at or before the date of official publication, the need for journal subscriptions and gold open access would quickly dwindle. Near-universal self-archiving would remove the paywalls associated with publishing and accessing academic articles, and in turn, establish research output as a public good. The market could then decide how much was worth paying for “fair” gold open access to cover the minimal costs of organizing and adjudicating peer-review."

  • At pp. 134-136 I discuss the "widely varying estimates in the literature on what it costs a university to run an institutional repository." Also see Chapter 7, endnote 4 (note call at p. 136, note text at pp. 208-209). Add these notes.
    • See C. Sean Burns, Amy Lana, and John M. Budd, Institutional Repositories: Exploration of Costs and Value, D-Lib Magazine, January/February 2013. "[I]nstitutions that mediate submissions incur less expense than institutions that allow self-archiving, institutions that offer additional services incur greater annual operating costs than those who do not, and institutions that use open source applications have lower implementation costs but comparable annual operating costs with institutions that use proprietary solutions. Furthermore, changes in budgeting, from special initiative to absorption into the regular budget, suggest a trend in sustainable support for institutional repositories."
    • See David Nicholas and five co-authors, Have digital repositories come of age? The views of library directors, Webology, December 2013. This study provides recent data on the range of repository costs, staffing, and services.

  • At p. 136, I introduce the distinction between fee-based and no-fee OA journals. Add this note.
    • While most OA journals fall into the no-fee category (Chapter 7, endnote 8, pp. 209-210), the fee-based OA category is growing faster than the no-fee category. See Mikael Laakso and Bo-Christer Björk, Anatomy of open access publishing: a study of longitudinal development and internal structure, BMC Medicine, October 22, 2012: "Journals with author-processing charges have seen breakout growth during the last three years, going from 80,700 articles in 2009 to 166,700 articles in 2011." Also see Figure 2 for a graphic representation of the growth of OA journals from 2000 to 2011, broken down by business-model category.

  • At p. 139, I say, "Moreover, even within the minority of fee-based OA journals, only 12 percent of those authors end paying the fees out of pocket. Almost 90% of the time, the fees at the fee-based journals are waived or paid by sponsors on behalf of authors." Here I call note 8 (note text at pp. 209-210). In that note I cite Suenje Dallmeier-Tiessen et al., Highlights from the SOAP project survey. What Scientists Think about Open Access Publishing, arXiv, January 29, 2011, Table 4 (perma.cc link). But I should have included these details from Table 4. Publication fees were paid by the author's funder 59%, by the author's institution 24%, and by the author out of pocket 12%. Also add these new notes.
    • Several studies on how often authors pay publication fees out of pocket have appeared since the 2011 SOAP study. See my summary of their findings, which I hope to keep up to date.
    • When interpreting data on authors who pay publication fees out of pocket, remember that only about 30% of peer-reviewed OA journals overall charge publication fees (Chapter 7, endnote 8, pp. pp. 209-210). Hence, if x% of authors pay these fees out of pocket (according to a given study, see previous bullet), then that means that only about x% of authors at 30% of OA journals overall pay fees out of pocket.
    • Also remember that about 50% of the articles published in peer-reviewed OA journals are published in fee-based journals (see the updates and supplements for p. 170, below). Hence, if we count by article rather than by journal, then if only x% of authors at fee-based OA journals pay fees out of pocket, then that really means that only about x% of authors of 50% of the articles published by OA journals overall, pay fees out of pocket.

  • At p. 140, I say, "The false belief that most OA journals charge author-side fees also infects studies in which authors misinform survey subjects before surveying them. In effect: 'At OA journals, authors pay to be published; now let me ask you a series of questions about your attitude toward OA journals.'" Add this note.
    • I've been complaining about these misleading studies since 2006. But they continue to appear. See my April 2013 blog post on a new survey asserting as a matter of definition that at OA journals, or gold OA, "Authors pay article processing charges...."

  • At p. 141, I say, "[M]ost hybrid journals don't make this promise [to reduce subscription prices in proportion to author uptake of the OA option] and 'double dip' by charging subscription fees and publication fees for the same OA articles." Add this note.
    • See Michelle Brook, The Sheer Scale of Hybrid Journal Publishing, Open Access Working Group, March 24, 2014 (perma.cc link). "With recently published data from the Wellcome Trust, the scale of this double charging has become much more clear. In Oct 2012 – Sept 2013, academics spent £3.88 million to publish articles in journals with immediate online access – of which £3.17 million (82 % of costs, 74 % of papers) was paying for publications that Universities would then be charged again for....Only £0.70 million of the charity’s £3.88m didn’t have any form of double charging." Also see the open data provided by the Wellcome Trust to support this calculation.

  • At p. 141, I say, "SHERPA list[s] more than 90 publishers offering hybrid OA options, including all of the largest publishers." Add this note.

  • At pp. 141-142, I say, "the economics [of hybrid journals] are artificial, since hybrid OA publishers have no incentive to increase author uptake and make the model succeed. The publishers always have subscriptions to fall back on." Add this note.
    • This is one reason why the average publishing fee at hybrid journals has always been higher than the average publishing fee at full (non-hybrid) OA journals.

  • At p. 143, line 11. Correction. "...alone is has..." should be "...alone has...." (This correction applies only to the first print edition and the earliest digital editions.)

  • At p. 143, I say, "There are reasons to think that OA journals cost less to produce than toll-access journals of the same quality...." At pp. 143-144, I spell out some of those reasons, and in note 16 (note call at p. 144, note text at p. 213), I cite several studies in support of this proposition. Add these notes.
    • See Roger Clarke, The Cost Profiles of Alternative Approaches to Journal Publishing, First Monday, December 3, 2007 (perma.cc link): "For–profit publishers have higher cost–profiles than not–for–profit associations, because of the additional functions that they perform, in particular their much greater investment in branding, customer relationship management and content protection. The difference is particularly marked in the case of eJournals — a computed per–article cost of US$3,400 compared with US$730. This point is sufficiently significant that further examination is warranted....[I]t would appear that open access journal publishing is achievable through not–for–profit channels far more cheaply and efficiently than through for–profit organisations....But the primary beneficiaries of these features [higher–quality branding, more active marketing, more aggressive customer management, and content protection] are the publisher and its owners [not authors or readers]." Also see the summary of Clarke's findings by Lee C. Van and Kathleen Born in their Periodicals Price Survey 2008, Library Journal, April 15, 2008: "Commercial publishers have a hard time realizing the economies because they are locked into expensive practices that offset them, including higher quality branding and marketing, more aggressive customer management, and costly content protection systems. Taking those added costs into account, it takes a commercial publisher about $3400 to produce an article for an e-journal, while a nonprofit publisher could produce the equivalent article for about $730. The study suggests that it is easier for the nonprofit association to flip its business model to OA than it is for the large commercial publisher."
    • See the statement from the Public Library of Science published by Richard Poynder on March 8, 2011 (perma.cc link): "Publishing in the conventional system is estimated to cost the academy around $4500 per article. What PLoS (and for that matter BioMed Central, Hindawi, Co-Action, Copernicus and other successful open-access publishers) is showing is that high-quality publishing can be supported by publication fees that are substantially less than the costs of the conventional system...."
    • See my interview with Richard Poynder in July 2011 (perma.cc link). "[Q:] When we spoke in 2007, you said you expected OA to be a cheaper way of publishing research. Is that still your view? [A:] There are good reasons to think that OA publishing costs less, and will continue to cost less, than TA publishing at the same level of quality....However, there are also those who dispute the conclusion, generally without evidence or with misleading evidence, such as the experience of behemoth publishers with legacy overhead from the age of print and subscriptions. I’m happy to leave it an empirical question and wait for more decisive data to emerge. But my hypothesis based on present evidence is that OA publishing will cost less."
    • See Claudio Aspesi, Reed Elsevier: Transitioning to Open Access - Are the Cost Savings Sufficient to Protect Margins? Bernstein Research, November 26, 2012 (perma.cc link): "Spurred by the reading of Peter Suber's book Open Access, which argues that publishers would incur...meaningful savings in the transition to OA, we recently worked with the finance team of a subscription-funded publisher to identify in detail the cost savings which could be achieved in an OA model....We estimate that a full transition to OA could lead to savings in the region of 10-12% of the cost base of a subscription publisher....Savings would derive primarily from discontinuing physical print, the elimination of production management, and the phase out of the sales force. There would also be savings in IT (DRM costs), but they would be partially offset by higher server and communications costs (because of the need to accommodate a larger flux of downloads) and in customer service, since subscriber services would be largely eliminated (in working with this publisher, we estimated that 34% of customer service costs would remain). On the negative side, the largest impact would be the need to ramp up marketing costs, some additional administrative expenses (since invoicing would likely be more fragmented and complex) and – most of all – the loss of advance revenues...."
    • See Andrew Odlyzko, Open Access, library and publisher competition, and the evolution of general commerce, preprint, February 4, 2013 (perma.cc link): "Most of the arguments for Open Access are valid irrespective of the costs of publications, and are based on the public good, efficiency of research, and similar considerations. However, the possibility of moving to dramatically lower cost structures does make a switch to new business models much easier to perform. It has been clear for two decades that much lower costs in scholarly publishing are possible, but with some exceptions, little has been done to the bulk of the literature to move in that direction....That lower costs were possible was obvious even three decades ago, since the costs per article varied wildly between publishers. This showed that costs were not a matter of unavoidable necessity, but of market power, choice, and inertia. This has become far clearer since then. There are many cost reductions that are feasible and desirable...."
    • See Richard Van Noorden, Open access: The true cost of science publishing, Nature, March 27, 2013 (corrected April 5, 2013) (perma.cc link). See esp. the fourth (unnumbered) graphic titled, "The Cost of Publishing", showing that online TA journals cost less to produce than print TA journals, and that OA journals cost less to produce than online TA journals. The graphic draws on data from John Houghton, Economic implications of alternative scholarly publishing models: Exploring the costs and benefits, JISC, 2009.
    • See Wolf Blanckenhorn on his retirement as editor in chief of the OA, society-published Journal of Evolutionary Biology, October 19, 2021 (perma.cc link): "Online open journals can be maintained at minimal cost with a much smaller than present budget, such as e.g. Alpine Entomology, the journal of the Swiss Entomological Society, which operates with moderate membership fees plus some donations/subsidies (in the 1000s)."

  • At p. 145, lines 8-9. Correction. "...redirect money we're currently spending on peer-reviewed journals." should be "...redirect money we're currently spending on peer-reviewed toll-access journals." (This correction applies only to the first print edition and the earliest digital editions.)

  • At p. 145, I say, "To support a wide range of high-quality OA journals, we don't need new money. We only need to redirect money we're currently spending on peer-reviewed toll-access journals." First see endnote 18 at pp. 213-214. Add these notes.
    • See Ralf Schimmer et al., Disrupting the subscription journals’ business model for the necessary large-scale transformation to open access, 2015. "All the indications are that the money already invested in the research publishing system is sufficient to enable a transformation that will be sustainable for the future. There needs to be a shared understanding that the money currently locked in the journal subscription system must be withdrawn and re-purposed for open access publishing services. The current library acquisition budgets are the ultimate reservoir for enabling the transformation without financial or other risks."
    • See Peter Baldwin, Why Are Universities Open Access Laggards? Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Fall 2018. At p. 74 he estimates the "total current costs of article publishing [to be] $10 billion globally, a figure that then needs to be discounted by the 40% profit margin baked in, [and] the lower costs inherent in open access publishing more generally." At pp. 74-75: "The total operational budgets (not counting acquisitions, which we have already earmarked for open access [book] publishing) of public and academic libraries in the U.S. is well over thirteen billion dollars annually. Let us assume that as content is digitized, half of these budgets that would otherwise go to cataloguing, storing, heating, cooling, lending, re-shelving, preserving, and all the other costs of keeping the books as physical objects circulating and in good shape, becomes redundant. The conclusion is that with the monies already sloshing around in the library system, we can both publish all future content as open access, as well as digitize and disseminate all existing library content. It bears repeating: with the monies already in the library system we can make everything in it and everything that ever will be in it available to anyone anywhere in the world who has access to the internet. Everyone will have the Library of Congress on their tablet, and as other nations follow suit, even more than that. And it will not cost a penny more than is already spent on a vastly less efficient system."
    • For more analysis showing that redirecting funds now spent on toll-access literature would more than pay for making it all OA, see the items tagged with oa.redirection by the Open Access Tracking Project.

  • At p. 145, I mention a few benefits that OA brings even to conventional publishers: "increased readership, citations, submissions, and quality." Add these notes.
    • For the evidence on increased citations, see Chapter 1, endnote 6 (note call at p. 15, note text at pp. 178-179). Also see the updates and supplements for p. 15, above.
    • For the evidence on increased submissions and subscriptions, see Chapter 8, endnotes 10 and 11 (note calls at p. 159, note text at pp. 216-217).
    • For the case that OA can increase quality, see my articles, Open access and quality, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, October 2, 2006, and Thinking about prestige, quality, and open access, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, September 2, 2008.
    • Also see my Open Access Overview. OA benefits even conventional journals and publishers: "OA makes their articles more visible, discoverable, retrievable, and useful. If a journal is OA, then it can use this superior visibility to attract submissions and advertising, not to mention readers and citations. If a subscription-based journal provides OA to some of its content (e.g. selected articles in each issue, all back issues after a certain period, etc.), then it can use its increased visibility to attract all the same benefits plus subscriptions. If a journal permits OA through postprint archiving, then it has an edge in attracting authors over journals that do not permit postprint archiving. Of course subscription-based journals and their publishers have countervailing interests as well and often resist or oppose OA. But it oversimplifies the situation to think that all their interests pull against OA."
    • In February 2006, a survey of BMJ authors showed that OA increased submissions and TA would decrease submissions. See Sara Schroter, Importance of free access to research articles on decision to submit to the BMJ: survey of authors, BMJ, February 16, 2006. "Three quarters (159/211) [of surveyed BMJ authors] said the fact that all readers would have free access to their paper on bmj.com was very important or important to their decision to submit to the BMJ. Over half (111/211) said closure of free access to research articles would make them slightly less likely to submit research articles to the BMJ in the future, 14% (29/211) said they would be much less likely to submit, and 34% (71/211) said it would not influence their decision....Authors value free access to research articles and consider this an important factor in deciding whether to submit to the BMJ. Closing access to research articles would have a negative effect on authors' perceptions of the journal and their likeliness to submit."
    • See Péter Jacsó, Open access to scholarly full-text documents, Online Information Review, 30, 5 (2006). "...The paper shows that while open access archives are good for the majority, for publishers, editors and authors, open access articles can substantially increase their impact, and the impact factor for the source journals...."
    • In 2007, Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI) converted four hybrid OA journals to full OA. In 2009 it presented evidence that the conversion boosted the impact factors of all four journals.
    • In the 2008 Journal Citation Reports, Thomson Reuters reported that five OA journals had the highest impact factors in their fields: (1) PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, first out of 15 in Tropical Medicine, (2) PLoS Pathogens, first out of 25 in Parasitology, (3) PLoS Computational Biology, first out of 28 in Mathematical & Computational Biology, (4) PLoS Biology, first out of 71 in Biology, and (5) Journal of Medical Internet Research, first out of 20 in Medical Informatics.
    • See Hans Lossius and Kjetil Søreide, Open access publishing: a girder in the success of the Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine, Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine, an editorial, January 19, 2011. "The Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine (SJTREM) has entered its third year as an open access international scientific on-line journal....Submissions are steadily increasing, and the acceptance rate is per date approximately 40%....[T]he number of SJTREM papers cited in other journals are increasing....SJTREM converted into open access (OA) online publishing in July 2008...."
    • For other benefits, see The Impact of Open Access: The Future of the Academic Information Supply Chain, EBSCO and Red Sage Consulting, October 2012. The report enumerates the well-known publisher fears and objections to OA (at pp. 24-25). But it also enumerates benefits to publishers (at p. 19). Under "Improved dissemination/access" it lists "Maximum dissemination" and "Global access, free at point of use (provisos: peer review process; properly funded)." Under "Financial Benefits" it lists "Potential for increased advertising revenues", "Upfront payment before costs are incurred", "Predictable revenue stream", "Shorter time for new journals to become established/financially viable", "Puts the financial issue back with authors/funders, not the 'budget' of libraries", and "Dealing with fewer sources of income". Under "Strategic Benefits" it lists "Provides a choice of business models", "Allows exploration of alternative pricing models", "More opportunities for publishers to add value, including to content originating from other sources", "Aligns publishers with the stated aims of funders and universities", and "A platform to publish good quality content that did not make it into top journals". Also see my blog post (December 19, 2012) on the strengths and weaknesses of this list.
    • In January 2013, the Journal of Hymenoptera Research reported that its submissions grew after it converted from TA to OA. See Stephen Schmidt et al., The move to open access and growth: experience from Journal of Hymenoptera Research, Journal of Hymenoptera Research, vol. 30, pp. 1–6, January 30, 2013. JHR is published by the International Society of Hymenopterists.
    • Also see Stefan Busch, The careers of converts – how a transfer to BioMed Central affects the Impact Factors of established journals, BioMed Central Blog, January 15, 2014. "At BioMed Central we’ve seen a strong effect on citations and the Impact Factors of publications that move to BioMed Central when they are already well-established titles listed in the Journals Citation Report....Since Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica converted to open access publication seven years ago, its Impact Factor has increased about four-fold, and as a consequence the journal has moved into the top third of the veterinary sciences category in Web of Science....The following graphs for Journal of Experimental & Clinical Cancer Research, Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance, and Genetics Selection Evolution all convey a similar message: the first Impact Factor that is based solely on open access articles (vertical line) represents a significant rise – a doubling and more – compared to the years before the transfer to BioMed Central...." Also see BMC says IFs of its society journals increased after move to OA, Research Information, August 6, 2014, and The Impact Factor of journals converting from subscription to open access, BioMed Central blog, November 6, 2014.

Chapter 8: Casualties

Read the OA text:

h Updates and supplements for Chapter 8:

  • At p. 149, I ask, "Will a general shift to OA leave casualties? For example, will rising levels of green OA trigger cancellations of toll-access journals?" Add these notes.
    • See Scholarly Publishing: Where is Plan B? in which Richard Poynder interviews Claudio Aspesi, March 1, 2012. Quoting Aspesi: "I find it somewhat difficult to believe that any academic or research library has cancelled a single subscription to a medical or life sciences journal because it would be able to access, twelve months later, a relatively modest percentage of the articles published in any one issue of that journal. To argue otherwise invites disbelief and cynicism. It may be true that, at the margin, some articles which would have been sold as an individual download were not downloaded, but — once again — to argue that this makes a material difference to Elsevier's revenues or profits can only irritate and antagonize even more the academic community. I am always happy to learn where I make mistakes and improve my analysis, and would be delighted if Elsevier produced evidence to disprove my scepticism....After all, if Elsevier and the other publishers demand or oppose changes in public policy, they should provide factual evidence that they will be harmed."
    • See Claudio Aspesi and Helen Luong, Reed Elsevier: Goodbye to Berlin - The Fading Threat of Open Access, BernsteinResearch, September 24, 2014: "11 years after the Berlin Declaration on Open Access, however, the rise of Open Access appears to inflict little or no damage on the leading subscription publishers....OA policies have proved right, so far, the critics whoargued that they would not threaten the status of subscription publishers....OA funding [for APCs] may in fact be adding to the profits of STM."
    • See the NIH report from February 2012 (perma.cc link): "The [NIH] Public Access requirement took effect in 2008. While the U.S. economy has suffered a downturn during the time period 2007 to 2011, scientific publishing has grown: [1] The number of journals dedicated to publishing biological sciences/agriculture articles and medicine/health articles increased 15% and 19%, respectively. [2] The average subscription prices of biology journals and health sciences journals increased 26% and 23%, respectively. [3] Publishers forecast increases to the rate of growth of the medical journal market, from 4.5% in 2011 to 6.3% in 2014...."
    • See Simba Information, Combined STM Markets Grew 3.4% in 2011, January 6, 2012 (perma.cc link): "Amid budgetary pressures and a slow economic recovery, the combined markets for science, technical and medical (STM) publishing grew 3.4% to $21.1 billion in 2011."
    • See David Matthews, Elsevier profits near £1 billion despite European disputes, Times Higher Education, February 22, 2019 (perma.cc link): "Elsevier has shrugged off a breakdown in contracts with German and Swedish universities to swell its profits to nearly £1 billion in 2018, its latest financial results reveal. The Amsterdam-based publisher reported an all but unchanged profit margin of 37.1 per cent. It made £942 million in profits on revenues of about £2.5 billion, according to financial results released on 21 February..." (perma.cc link).
    • See A. Townsend Peterson et al., The NIH public access policy did not harm biomedical journals, PLOS ONE, October 23, 2019 (perma.cc link): "To our knowledge, this contribution represents a first quantitative analysis of the proposition that OA reduces the viability of scholarly publishing endeavors. Our results indicate that the NIH policy did not accelerate the death of biomedical journals, impede new journals from appearing, or stop commercial publishers from turning massive profits."
    • See Simba Information, Scientific & Technical Publishing Bucked Headwinds, Posted Strong Growth in 2018, October 24, 2019 (perma.cc link): "[T]he global scientific and technical publishing market grew 3% to $10.3 billion in 2018. Currency exchange fluctuations inflated growth somewhat in 2018, but even taking that into account, this is the highest growth rate tracked by Simba since 2011 when market growth exceeded 4%. The findings stand in stark contrast to media reports that the industry is facing a long-term decline due to the rise of open access publishing. There have been more reports of university libraries canceling their journal subscription packages in 2018 and 2019. The industry also faces threats from websites that freely share pirated copies of copyrighted research papers."

  • At p. 151, endnote 2 (note text at p. 215). Correction. For "Alma Swan's interview with the APS and IOP in which 'both societies said they could not identify any losses of subscriptions' due to OA archiving", please replace http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/11006/, which is no longer valid, with http://cogprints.org/4406/. And add this note:
    • Alma Swan summarized some of the same findings in a message posted to the American Scientist Open Access Forum on February 3, 2005. "Have physics publishers gone to the wall [because of rising levels of green OA through arXiv]? No, and not only have they continued to survive, they have also continued to thrive. I have recently asked questions about this of two of the big learned society publishers in physics, the American Physical Society in the US and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd in the UK. There are two salient points to note: [1] Neither can identify any loss of subscriptions to the journals that they publish as a result of the arXiv. [2] Subscription attrition, where it is occurring, is the same in the areas that match the coverage of the arXiv as it is across any other areas of physics that these societies publish in. Both societies, moreover, see actual benefits for their publishing operations arising from the existence of arXiv....In answer to the question 'Does arXiv worry or threaten your business?' the APS answered: 'We don't consider it a threat. We expect to continue to have a symbiotic relationship with arXiv....' The Institute of Physics Publishing's response was: 'IOPP's experience as a learned society publisher illustrates the strong synergies and mutual benefits that currently exist between major peer-reviewed journals...and the arXiv e-print server....Whilst posting an pre-print or post-print is becoming more of an essential in some areas of the physics community for immediate and wide dissemination, we do not see the arXiv or repositories threatening our business.'"

  • At p. 152, endnote 4 (note text at 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." Add these notes.
    • Susan Hezlet, Access and Accessibility for the London Mathematical Society Journals, Notices of the AMS, March 2014 (perma.cc link). At p. 279, Hezlet reports that the Annals of Mathematics lost subscriptions when it provided green OA to the published versions of its articles. But she concludes "from the scant evidence we have" that there is no danger in allowing green OA to preprints or to the authors' accepted manuscripts.
    • Also see Philip M. Davis, Public accessibility of biomedical articles from PubMed Central reduces journal readership—retrospective cohort analysis, FASEB Journal, April 2013 (perma.cc link). "A longitudinal, retrospective cohort analysis of 13,223 articles...published in 14 society-run biomedical research journals...between February 2008 and January 2011 reveals a 21.4% reduction in full-text...HTML...article downloads and a 13.8% reduction in...PDF...article downloads from the journals' websites when U.S. National Institutes of Health-sponsored articles...become freely available from the PubMed Central repository....The relationship between free access and subscription cancellation behavior is not well understood." Davis predicts that increased downloads will lead to increased cancellations, but cites no evidence that they have already done so.
    • Also see Martin Frank, Open but Not Free — Publishing in the 21st Century, New England Journal of Medicine, February 28, 2013 (perma.cc link). "A longitudinal cohort analysis of 12 subscription-based research journals in physiology revealed that PubMed Central drew approximately 14% of full-text article downloads away from journal websites when articles deposited in PubMed Central became freely available to the public 12 months after publication [citing an October 2012 study by Phil Davis]. Similarly, the open-access journals from the Public Library of Science (PLOS) had a 22% loss of traffic to PubMed Central [citing a November 2013 blog post by Kent Anderson] The persistent reduction in full-text downloads from journal websites contributes to a loss of the advertising revenue that partially offsets the cost of publication." Although increased cancellations would support Frank's thesis more than decreased downloads, he cites no evidence of increased cancellations.
    • One study from a major publisher trade association shows that green OA actually increases downloads from publisher web sites. See the June 2012 final report of the PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) study (perma.cc link), at p. 11: "A Randomised Controlled Trial indicates that making preprints visible in PEER repositories is associated with more traffic to the publisher sites at the aggregate level, but this varies by publisher and subject. Overall, PEER is associated with a significant, if relatively modest, increase in publisher downloads, in the confidence range 7.5% to 15.5%" (emphasis added). Also see the June 2012 PEER Usage Study (perma.cc link) at pp. 3-4: "This report reviews the findings of an experiment to measure the effect of exposing early article versions in repositories on downloads of the version of record at various publishers’ web sites....There was a positive effect on publisher downloads in all four broad subject areas, but this was statistically significant only in the life (20.3%, CI95 13.1% to 27.9%) and physical sciences (13.1%, CI95 5.2% to 21.6%). The uplift in medicine and in the social sciences and humanities could be a chance effect. Larger publishers experienced a strong uplift (12.6%, CI95 8.3% to 17.0%), while the increase for smaller publishers was much weaker (3.3%) and could be a chance effect (p=0.53)....For three publishers, the uplift was both statistically significant (at the 5% level) and in double figures." Note that the PEER study was coordinated by the International Association of Science, Technical and Medical Publishers, and funded by the EC eContentplus programme.
    • 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 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."
    • Other evidence suggests that while levels of green OA continue to rise, and library budgets to fall, the fortunes of conventional journal publishing continue to rise. See the financial analysis of the academic publishing industry by Simba Information, January 6, 2012 (perma.cc link): "Amid budgetary pressures and a slow economic recovery, the combined markets for science, technical and medical (STM) publishing grew 3.4% to $21.1 billion in 2011."
    • In February 2012, the NIH updated its own evidence that its policy has caused no harm to date [(perma.cc link): "The [NIH] Public Access requirement took effect in 2008. While the U.S. economy has suffered a downturn during the time period 2007 to 2011, scientific publishing has grown: [1] The number of journals dedicated to publishing biological sciences/agriculture articles and medicine/health articles increased 15% and 19%, respectively. [2] The average subscription prices of biology journals and health sciences journals increased 26% and 23%, respectively. [3] Publishers forecast increases to the rate of growth of the medical journal market, from 4.5% in 2011 to 6.3% in 2014...."
    • Also in February 2012, Elsevier revealed that its sales and profits both increased in 2011 (perma.cc link): "The science and technology field performance particularly stood out...." Also see Elsevier's own summary of its 2011 financial results (perma.cc link): "Underlying revenue up 2%....Underlying adjusted operating profit up 5%; up 4% at constant currencies....[W]e expect to deliver another year of underlying revenue and profit growth in 2012...."
    • Also see the updates and supplements for p. 157, below, on the state of evidence that increased levels of green OA or shortened embargoes on green OA cause journal cancellations.

  • At p. 154, I start a section entitled, "There is evidence that green OA decreases downloads from publishers' web sites." Add this note.
    • See Philip M. Davis, Public accessibility of biomedical articles from PubMed Central reduces journal readership: retrospective cohort analysis, The FASEB Journal, April 3, 2013. "A longitudinal, retrospective cohort analysis of 13,223 articles (5999 treatment, 7224 control) published in 14 society-run biomedical research journals in nutrition, experimental biology, physiology, and radiology between February 2008 and January 2011 reveals a 21.4% reduction in full-text hypertext markup language (HTML) article downloads and a 13.8% reduction in portable document format (PDF) article downloads from the journals' websites when U.S. National Institutes of Health-sponsored articles (treatment) become freely available from the PubMed Central repository. In addition, the effect of PubMed Central on reducing PDF article downloads is increasing over time, growing at a rate of 1.6% per year. There was no longitudinal effect for full-text HTML downloads." The Davis study confirms earlier studies showing reduced downloads; also like earlier studies, it does not show reduced subscriptions or increased cancellations.

  • At p. 154, I say that even when users have privileges at a library subscribing to a needed journal, "authentication is a hassle." Add these notes.
    • See Peter Suber, The Database Paradox, Library Hi Tech, 10, 4 (1992) pp. 51-57. "Students already know that they can pursue any topics that interest them by using the library. But some barrier of intimidation prevents many from doing so, even when their curiosity is intense. We may hope that some of the advances in information technology will tear down this barrier and open the doors of knowledge to those who have in effect been waiting outside with longing. I suspect that the evolution of this technology is in the direction of ever greater user-friendliness. However, I can imagine serious ergonomic mistakes that would make the barrier even higher than it is now."
    • See Dorothea Salo, My Gripe About E-Journals, Caveat Lector, November 14, 2005: "If I follow that link [from a blog post to an interesting-looking article], I'm stuck. The journal website does not offer me a way to authenticate as belonging to MPOW [My Place Of Work]. It doesn't even tell me whether MPOW subscribes to that journal or not....To get to the article, I have to go to MPOW's website, drill down into it to find the journal in MPOW's bewildering plethora of e-resources, and finally try for the article — by which time I've typically forgotten the citation information...."
    • See Richard Smith, A bad bad week for access, The Guardian, June 28, 2012 (perma.cc link). "It occurs to me that I might be able to access the article through Imperial [College London], so I ring the library....[After connecting with a helpful librarian, I learn that] it’s a four stage process for me get online access to a journal in the library. I have to be induced...to have my photograph taken and get an identity card (I couldn’t because the man was on holiday), go physically to the library with my card, and then contact the IT department to get access to the library VPN....I can’t believe that it will still be like this in 10 years' time...."
    • See John Bohannon, Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone, Science Magazine, April 28, 2016 (perma.cc link). "Some critics of Sci-Hub have complained that many users can access the same papers through their libraries but turn to Sci-Hub instead —for convenience rather than necessity. The data provide some support for that claim. The United States is the fifth largest downloader after Russia, and a quarter of the Sci-Hub requests for papers came from the 34 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the wealthiest nations with, supposedly, the best journal access. In fact, some of the most intense use of Sci-Hub appears to be happening on the campuses of U.S. and European universities....Even for journals to which the university has access, Sci-Hub is becoming the go-to resource, says Gil Forsyth, another GWU engineering Ph.D. student. “If I do a search on Google Scholar and there’s no immediate PDF link, I have to click through to ‘Check Access through GWU’ and then it’s hit or miss,” he says. “If I put [the paper’s title or DOI] into Sci-Hub, it will just work.” He says that Elsevier publishes the journals that he has had the most trouble accessing...."
    • See Benjamin Kaube, Scientists should be solving problems, not struggling to access journals, The Guardian, May 21, 2018 (perma.cc link). "My research suggests it takes 15 clicks on average [to find and access a journal article], multiple logins into different repositories, dead links, and waiting on endless redirects. The scale of this problem is huge: 10 million researchers around the world access 2.5bn journal articles online each year....I've calculated that research output equivalent to around 11,500 academics is lost each year....[M]ainstream digital content [is] just a click away, but to access a scientific article you have to navigate institutional login pages, subscriptions, and paywalls. If you're off campus, that's another nightmare all together. The high cost and inconvenience associated with accessing research papers has given rise to unauthorised alternatives, including a 'dark web' of crowdsourced journal articles."
    • See Lucinda Southern, Incognito no more: Publishers close loopholes as paywall blockers emerge, DigiDay, May 14, 2019 (perma.cc link). My paraphrase: At least for paywalled newspapers, the authentication hassle for paying customers is a bigger problem than gaps in the paywall that let skilled geeks enter without paying.
    • See Nathan J. Robinson, The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free, Current Affairs, August 2, 2020 (perma.cc link): "A problem beyond cost, though, is convenience. I find that even when I am doing research through databases and my university library, it is often an absolute mess: the sites are clunky and constantly demanding login credentials. The amount of time wasted in figuring out how to obtain a piece of research material is a massive cost on top of the actual pricing."
    • See Bruce Hamilton's tweet on August 17, 2020: "Nice that your paper is out. But if you put it behind a paywall & didn't preprint, so that I have to open the vpn, type in a password, and then unlock my phone for two-factor authentication, and then find that my Uni doesn’t have access, I'm gonna read something else."
    • See Farhad's comments on the authentication hassle, February 1, 2022 (perma.cc link): "Accessing a paper from home through OpenAthens and Shibboleth is like you simply pay for a cup of coffee in advance but to get the coffee you should climp up a ladder, squeeze thorugh a toilet’s window and swallow a frog!"
    • See Mike Taylor's 47-step authentication hassle when trying to open a "Seamless access" article in a journal to which his university subscribes, June 26, 2023 (perma.cc link).

  • At p. 155, I say that green OA mandates typically apply only to the final version of the author's peer-reviewed manuscript, not to the published version. I also say that "[l]ibraries wanting to provide access to copyedited published editions will still have an incentive to subscribe." Add this note.
    • We can turn the argument around. If publishers claim that this is not an incentive to subscribe, then they would seem to be saying that their copyediting and other enhancements to the peer-reviewed manuscripts add little or nothing that is worth paying for.

  • At p. 157, I start a subsection entitled, "Some studies bear on the question of whether increased OA archiving [green OA] will increase journal cancellations." Add these notes, some on increased levels of green OA and some on shortened embargoes on green OA.
    • Also see the February 2012 report from the business-oriented Committee for Economic Development, The Future of Taxpayer-Funded Research: Who Will Control Access to the Results? (perma.cc link). From the executive summary at p. 6: "No persuasive evidence exists that greater public access as provided by the NIH policy has substantially harmed subscription-supported STM publishers over the last four years or threatens the sustainability of their journals or their ability to fund peer review."
    • See Harvard's January 2012 submission to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (perma.cc link): "[I]f publishers believe that short embargo periods would harm them, they should release data showing it. Researchers, research institutions, and taxpayers cannot be expected to prove the negative, or to prove the harmlessness of short embargoes. Until there is data to show harm, we must act in the public interest and provide early or immediate public access to publicly funded research. If publishers provide data showing substantive harm, then it may become appropriate to consider what kind of compromise with the public interest might be justified."
    • Also see the June 2012 final report of the large-scale PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) study, supported by the European Commission's eContentplus program and coordinated by the International Association of Science, Technical and Medical Publishers (perma.cc link). The July 2012 report summary put it this way: "Usage research in this so-called 'PEER Observatory' revealed that large-scale deposit of research articles [in OA repositories] results in increased access and use, including via the publisher website." From the final report at p. 11: "A Randomised Controlled Trial indicates that making preprints visible in PEER repositories is associated with more traffic to the publisher sites at the aggregate level, but this varies by publisher and subject. Overall, PEER is associated with a significant, if relatively modest, increase in publisher downloads, in the confidence range 7.5% to 15.5%" (emphasis added).
    • Also see the September 2013 report (perma.cc link) of the UK House of Commons Select Committee on Business, Innovation and Skills. After reviewing the state of the evidence, the committee concluded that "there is no available evidence base to indicate that short or even zero embargoes cause cancellation of subscriptions" (Paragraph 44). "We note the absence of evidence that short embargo periods harm subscription publishers" (Paragraph 49).
    • Also see the January 2014 press release from Taylor & Francis, Taylor & Francis extend green Open access zero embargo pilot scheme for Library & Information science authors until end 2014. "Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, has been running a Library & Information Science Author Rights pilot scheme that allows authors to post their peer-reviewed Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) to an institutional repository immediately after publication. The two year pilot scheme, first introduced in 2011, has now been extended for at least a further year....As part of the pilot, a survey was conducted....Having the option to upload their work to a repository directly after publication is very important to these authors: more than 2/3 of respondents rated the ability to upload their work to repositories at 8, 9, or 10 out of 10, with the vast majority saying they feel strongly that authors should have this right. The implementation of the author rights pilot saw the number of respondents who would recommend Routledge as a publishing outlet increase by 34% while the average willingness to publish with Routledge on a scale of 1 to 10 increased from 6.6 to 8.3. The shift in response from Library and Information Science professionals towards Routledge’s publishing program before and after the launch of this initiative practically demonstrates the enthusiasm for immediate upload of non-embargoed content within the library community...." Also see my January 2014 blog post on this press release.
    • Also see Peter Suber, What doesn't justify longer embargoes on publicly-funded research, January 11, 2014. "Phil Davis has shown that the half-life of research articles differs from field to field. The half-life of an article here is 'the median age of articles downloaded from a publisher's website.' See his study, Journal Usage Half-Life, November 25, 2013....Unfortunately [Davis'] data are not being carefully used by publishers who want to lengthen the permissible embargoes in federal OA policies. Note that Davis himself does not make the careless arguments I'm about to describe. There are two problems in arguing that the Davis study somehow entails that OA policies should permit longer embargoes — longer embargoes in general or longer embargoes in fields with longer article half-lives. 1. The first problem is that the Davis [study] doesn't show that short embargoes cause cancellations. This is a larger problem than it may appear to be. Publishers have been claiming for years that short embargoes cause cancellations, but there is no evidence to support the claim....2. But the second problem is larger and more important than the first. Suppose we had good data showing that short embargoes caused cancellations, or that a uniform embargo across fields caused more cancellations in the fields with longer article half-lives. It still would not follow that policies should permit longer embargoes. To get to that conclusion we'd have to add premises. These premises are often assumed, but they are remarkably weak once made explicit for examination. We'd have to add the premise that public policies should maximize publisher revenue before maximizing public access to publicly-funded research. Or we'd have to add the premise that policies should put publisher interests ahead of researcher interests. I reject these premises. Research funding agencies, especially public funding agencies, ought to reject them as well...."
    • Also see Cameron Neylon, The Embargoes Don’t Work: The British Academy provides the best evidence yet, PLoS Opens, May 14, 2014. "The conclusion I draw from these two sets of data [presented in a July 2013 study by the British Academy] is that there is no value in longer embargoes for H&SS [Humanities and Social Sciences] – indeed that there is no need for embargoes at all. H&SS cluster with physics and maths, disciplines where substantial, and importantly concentrated, portions of the literature have been available prior to publication for over 20 years and where there is no evidence of a systemic failure in the running of sustainable publishing businesses....Why do institutions continue to subscribe to journals when the ‘same’ content is available online for free? This would only be the case if factors others than online availability of manuscripts drove subscription decisions. This might be the case if other factors, such as overall cost, scholar demand or access to the version of record were more important factors. This is exactly what the survey data in the BA report shows supporting the view that short embargoes are not a risk to the sustainability of subscription journals in H&SS. The report itself however comes to the opposite conclusion. It does this by creating a narrative of increasing risk based on potential loss, that things might change in the future, particularly if the degree of access rises, that the survey can only ask about the current environment and hypothetical decisions....For me decades of the ArXiv and Astronomy Data Service and seven years of mandated deposit to Pubmed Central with no evidence of linked subscription cancellations seem like strong evidence. Remember that the report states that physics and maths are similar to H&SS. But increasingly I’m feeling this whole argument is rather sterile...."
    • Also see the STM Statement on Green OA, May 2017 (perma.cc link): "[T]here is an absence of clear evidence of the impact of Green OA...on subscription revenue...."
    • Also see Rachel Pells, Open access: ‘no evidence’ that zero embargo periods harm publishers, Times Higher Education, December 2019 (paywalled): "Tom Merriweather, executive publisher (open access) at SAGE Publications, said he had found 'no evidence to say zero embargo periods negatively affect subscriptions'. To remove them completely, he argued, was 'a friendlier policy'."
    • Also see the Otwarta Nauka interview with Johan Rooryck (undated but c. June 2020) (perma.cc link): "Note that publishers such as Sage and Emerald already allow authors to deposit their articles in a repository without embargo. They report no decrease in their subscriptions."
    • Also see the updates and supplements for p. 152, above, on the state of evidence that rising levels of green OA cause journal cancellations.

  • At pp. 159-160, I say, "Some publishers fear that rising levels of green OA will not only trigger toll-access journal cancellations but also increase pressure to convert to gold OA. (Likewise, some OA activists hope for this outcome.)" Add these notes.
    • See Peter Suber, Will open access undermine peer review? SPARC Open Access Newsletter, September 2, 2007. "[Let's] focus on the weakness [of the publisher] claim that if rising OA does cut journal revenue, then the journals will fold up and stop providing peer review. It's much more likely that, if they could no longer sustain themselves on subscription revenue, they would convert to OA and continue providing peer review. Survival as an OA journal would be vastly preferable to folding up, and most would try it at least experimentally before turning out the lights and closing the door....At such a dinosaur moment, some will adapt rather than die, and most will at least try. We know that adaptation is possible because many are already adapting. Every year since 2005 the number of TA journals converting to OA has increased significantly. Publishers don't like this scenario because OA journals have lower profit margins and "unproved" business models. But it's one thing to argue that TA journals might be forced to adapt to a changing world and survive in a less profitable form, and quite another to argue that they will not survive at all. However, publisher lobbyists prefer the Chicken Little objection and invariably fail to draw this distinction. The objection that business models for OA journals are not proven should be taken seriously, and can be seriously answered. Indeed, taking it seriously puts a different color on lobbyist predictions that publishers would fold up their TA journals rather than convert to OA. Suddenly that kind of dramatic ending looks less like the result of inexorable causation than a business judgment made in advance of the facts."
    • See Peter Suber, "Preface" to Solomon, Laakso, and Björk, Converting Scholarly Journals to Open Access: A Review of Approaches and Experiences, Harvard Library, June 2016, p. 5. "If you’re an academic librarian, you probably cancel journals every year for budgetary reasons alone. You're in a good position to tell journals that you cancel with regret, not because they are atrocious (the atrocious ones were cancelled long ago), but because the collision between limited library budgets and fast-rising journal prices makes painful choices unavoidable. You're in a good position to make the case that converting to OA is better than cancellation, for everyone, and that new evidence shows that converting to OA can preserve or enhance readership, submissions, quality, and financial sustainability."

  • At p. 160, I quote Derk Haank, then-CEO of Springer: "In 2008 when Springer bought BioMed Central and became the world’s largest OA publisher, Haank said: “[W]e see open access publishing as a sustainable part of STM publishing, and not an ideological crusade.” " Add this note.
    • Five years later, in September 2013, Springer said in a press release, "Open access is now at the heart of Springer's strategy,...with BioMed Central delivering an increasingly substantial fraction of the company’s growth...."

  • At p. 160, I say, "OA publishing might be more sustainable than TA publishing, as toll-access prices and the volume of research both grow faster than library budgets." Add these notes.
    • Correction. Change "TA" to "toll-access". (I used the abbreviation in my manuscript, but MIT Press wanted to minimize the use of abbreviations; I spelled out most instances of the abbreviation but missed this one.)
    • See Donald Force and Elizabeth Shaffer, Records Management and Peer-Reviewed Journals: An Assessment: Final Report, April 2013. Force and Shaffer ask whether records information management (RIM) professionals in North America should launch a peer-reviewed journal and, if so, whether the journal should be OA. They look carefully at many relevant factors, including the results of a survey of RIM professionals. Deliberations of this kind often focus with fear on the supposed unsustainability of OA journals. But this one takes a notably different turn: "The contemporary journal publishing landscape is currently undergoing reflection and change in the face of evolving technologies and the ever-increasing call for open access to information and publicly funded research. Any new journal entering the current landscape would need to consider the sustainability of a non-open access model."

  • At pp. 160-161, I say, "If publishers acknowledge that gold OA can be sustainable, and even profitable, and merely wish to avoid making lower margins than they make today, then their objection takes on a very different color. They're not at risk of insolvency, just reduced profits, and they're not asserting a need for self-protection, just an entitlement to current levels of profit. There's no reason for public funding agencies acting in the public interest, or private funders acting for charitable purposes, to compromise their missions in order to satisfy this sense of publisher entitlement." Add these notes:
    • See Robert Heinlein, "Life-Line," 1939: "There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
    • For a more elaborate and analytic version of Heinlein's argument (above), see Mark A. Lemley and Mark P. McKenna, Unfair Disruption, Stanford Law and Economics Olin Working Paper No. 532, March 1, 2019 (perma.cc link): "New technologies disrupt existing industries. They always have, and they probably always will. Incumbents don’t like their industries to be disrupted. And they often rely on intellectual property (IP), unfair competition, or related legal doctrines as tools to prevent disruptive entry....Our goal in this paper is to address the broader question of when competition by market disruption is 'unfair.' "

  • At p. 161, I say, "Even if green OA does eventually threaten toll-access journal subscriptions, green OA policies are still justified." Add these notes.
    • I elaborated this point in a blog post from July 2014. "Publishers have been claiming for years that short embargoes [for green OA] cause cancellations, but there is no evidence to support the claim....But...[s]uppose we had good data showing that short embargoes caused cancellations, or that a uniform embargo across fields caused more cancellations in the fields with longer article half-lives [or that increasing green OA increased cancellations]. It still would not follow that policies should permit longer embargoes [or curb green OA]. To get to that conclusion we'd have to add premises. These premises are often assumed, but they are remarkably weak once made explicit for examination. We'd have to add the premise that public policies should maximize publisher revenue before maximizing public access to publicly-funded research. Or we'd have to add the premise that policies should put publisher interests ahead of researcher interests. I reject these premises. Research funding agencies, especially public funding agencies, ought to reject them as well...."
    • I also elaborated this point in Digital access to knowledge: Research chat with Harvard’s Peter Suber, Journalists' Resource, October 16, 2012 (perma.cc link): "Open access would be justified even if it did cause some harm to academic publishers. But it's not causing harm. The Congressional witnesses effectively admit it. {See p. 152 and the updates and supplements for p. 152.}...Academic publishers fear that the harm is coming. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. The case for open access is based on real needs, and the case against it is based on conjecture and fear. Let's adopt an OA policy for publicly-funded research and see what happens. One day, if publishers can show evidence that the policy harms them, then we can look at the evidence and decide, in light of that evidence, what’s in the public interest."
    • I also elaborated this point in Tectonic movements toward OA in the UK and Europe, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, September 2, 2012: "If rising levels of green OA do start to cause cancellations, for example, in fields outside physics, then we can decide what to do about it. We can act in light of the evidence, whatever it turns out to be. We can weigh the demonstrable degree of harm to publishers against the demonstrable degree of benefit to research, researchers, research institutions, and taxpayers. We can see to what extent the publishers experiencing cancellations are doing their best to adapt to the opportunities of the digital age, and to what extent they are laggards at adaptation who deserve no public assistance, especially at the expense of researchers and taxpayers. In short, we needn't let fear of harm serve as evidence of harm, and we needn't assume without discussion that even evidence of harm to subscription publishers would justify compromising the public interest in public access to publicly-funded research. Policy-makers must take seriously the argument that green OA mandates could be justified even if they do eventually cause cancellations. The case for this 'even if' argument can be long or short. It's essentially the argument for OA itself....[I]t's also the argument that public agencies should put the public interest ahead of private interests....But in either form, the argument is essential to avoid the mistake of letting public agencies make insurance for publishers a higher priority than access to publicly-funded research."
    • Here's how I put a similar point in an article in the SPARC Open Access Newsletter for December 2010 (perma.cc link): "I've often praised SCOAP3 as our best hope for a peaceful revolution in the shift from peer-reviewed TA journals to peer-reviewed OA journals. However, SCOAP3 is not the only strategy for that transition. It's just the only one that builds on negotiation, cooperation, and stakeholder consent. The chief alternative to the SCOAP3 strategy is to grow the volume of green OA — whether or not it triggers a shift from TA journals to gold OA. I support both strongly, with equal emphasis on "both" and "strongly". I don't want either to be the only arrow in our quiver. I strongly support green OA mandates and other methods for growing the volume of green OA, and I support them regardless of their effect on publishers....The goal of green OA is not to force subscription journals to convert to gold OA. The goal is to share knowledge and accelerate research. The idea is not for researchers and research institutions to harm or transform publishers, but for researchers and research institutions to act in their own interests. However, the effect could create economic risk for publishers, and hence create economic pressures to avert that risk. Instead of a frictionless flip, brought about by consent and self-interest, the all-green strategy could bring about a high-friction flip, preceded by hostile lobbying and disinformation and followed by resentment and acrimony....But as I said, I support the green strategy regardless of its effect on publishers. I'll take this revolution with or without friction. I support green OA because it delivers more OA more quickly and less expensively than gold OA. It needn't wait for journals to decide to convert or for new born-OA journal to learn the ropes. It isn't limited to new work submitted to OA journals, but can cover new work published anywhere. However, for the narrow goal of increasing gold OA, as opposed to broader goal of increasing OA overall, I support the win-win logic of SCOAP3. Both strategies may bring about the same volume of OA in the end. But if it works, the win-win logic will convert publishers and journals with consent and cooperation. As I argued in SOAN last year, 'Peaceful revolution through negotiation and self-interest is more amicable and potentially more productive than adaptation forced by falling asteroids.' "
    • Apart from the continuing justification for OA, we would face what I've called the disentangling problem. See my Predictions for 2008, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, December 2, 2007 (perma.cc link): "[E]ven if subscriptions fall as OA archiving rises, it will be difficult to disentangle the cancellations caused by OA from the cancellations caused by natural attrition and librarian triage. Some part of the cancellations will be due to unbearable prices and onerous licensing terms....The disentangling problem will be aggravated by the fact that journals respond to cancellations by raising their prices, triggering new cancellations, and we already know (from the study in March 2006) that high prices cause many more cancellations than OA archiving."

Chapter 9: Future

Read the OA text:

Updates and supplements for Chapter 9:

  • At p. 165, I say, "Generational change is on the side of OA." Add these notes.
    • See David Weinberger in an interview with Barbara Fister, Library Journal, May 22, 2012 (perma.cc link): "[W]e have a generation of scholars growing up who consider publishing in closed-access journals a type of selfishness. Someday they'll be on the tenure committees."
    • See Generation Gap in Authors' Open Access Views and Experience, Reveals Wiley Survey, October 8, 2013 (perma.cc link): "Early career professionals were 6% more likely to publish under a Creative Commons (CC) license than more mature researchers, while over half of respondents above the age of 55 preferred not to use CC licenses of any kind." For more detail, see slides 17-18 in the accompanying slide deck.
    • See We’re embracing change say young researchers in latest analysis, Taylor & Francis, October 2014: "Those in the 20-29 year old age group were most likely to agree that open access journals have a larger readership than subscription journals (58% either strongly agreed or agreed with this statement) and that open access journals are more heavily cited. Across all other age groups agreement with these statements decreased with age, with just 15% of those who were 70 or over expressing the same level of agreement on citations. Authors in their sixties and seventies offered the opposite opinion to those in their twenties, being the least likely to agree that open access publication increased readership and citations, and most likely to agree with the statement that there is ‘no fundamental benefit to open access’."
    • See Hamish Campbell, Mariana A. Micheli-Campbell, and Vinay Udyawer, Early Career Researchers Embrace Data Sharing, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 2018. "Responses [to data-sharing requests] were positive in only 11% of requests made to corresponding authors (CAs) that were senior researchers, while 72% of responses were positive when CAs were early career researchers (ECRs)."
    • See Sarah Wipperman, Scholarly Communication Survey Results on Open Access Themes, September 19, 2018. "94% [of survey respondents] were in favor of implementing an open access policy at [the University of Pennsylvania], with 68% strongly in favor....[All] graduate students who answered this question were in favor of an open access policy, with none opposed...."
    • See the Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2018, April 12, 2019 (perma.cc link), Figure 32 (p. 41): More than 70% of surveyed researchers aged 22-34 agreed with the statement, "I would be happy to see the traditional subscription-based publication model replaced entirely by an open access publication system in which all scholarly research outputs would be freely available to the public." A majority of researchers in each age group agreed with the statement, but the percentage was highest in the youngest group, the 22-34 age group.
    • See the Taylor & Francis researcher survey 2019, October 2019 (perma.cc link), and the Phys.org summary of its findings on generational change (perma.cc link). Quoting the latter: "Those in the 20-29 year old age group were most likely to agree that open access journals have a larger readership than subscription journals (58% either strongly agreed or agreed with this statement) and that open access journals are more heavily cited. Across all other age groups agreement with these statements decreased with age, with just 15% of those who were 70 or over expressing the same level of agreement on citations. Authors in their sixties and seventies offered the opposite opinion to those in their twenties, being the least likely to agree that open access publication increased readership and citations, and most likely to agree with the statement that there is 'no fundamental benefit to open access'."
    • See Elizabeth D. Dalton, Carol Tenopir, and Bo-Christer Björk, Attitudes of North American Academics toward Open Access Scholarly Journals, Portal, January 2020, preprint edition, (perma.cc link): "[Previous] research examining age and attitudes toward OA has found that older researchers may be less aware of OA and find it less prestigious than younger academics do. Similarly, the current study found more negative attitudes among those more advanced in their careers."
    • See Daniel Toribio-Flórez et al., Where Do Early Career Researchers Stand on Open Science Practices? A Survey Within the Max Planck Society, Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics, January 22, 2021 (perma.cc link): "ECRs seemed to hold a generally positive view toward these different practices and to be interested in learning more about them. Furthermore, we found that ECRs’ knowledge and positive attitudes predicted the extent to which they implemented these OS practices, although levels of implementation were rather low in the past."
    • See David Nicholas, Breaking down barriers, Research Information, February 5, 2020 (perma.cc link). Curbing my optimism about generational change, the three-year CIBER study of early-career researchers (ECRs) uncovered a disturbing number of harmful misunderstandings of open science and (to a lesser extent) open access.
    • See The importance of early career researchers for promoting open research, PLOS Blog, April 29, 2021 (perma.cc link): "Medical researchers reported being less likely to submit to the journal if it had a mandatory code sharing policy, as did researchers with more than 100 publications. Whereas, researchers with fewer than 20 published papers showed more positive responses towards submitting to the journal if it implemented a code sharing policy."
    • See the Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2021, July 14, 2022: "Younger faculty are more open to an open access publication model than their older peers: 70 percent of faculty ages 22 to 44 agree that they would be happy to see an open access publication system replace the traditional subscription-based system, followed by 63 percent of faculty ages 44 to 54, 61 percent ages 55 to 64, and 57 percent ages 65 and older."

  • At p. 165, I say, "Time itself has reduced the panic-induced misunderstandings of OA." Add this note.
    • See my Predictions for 2008, SPARC Open Access Newsletter, December 2, 2007. After listing several OA initiatives from publishers formerly opposed to OA, I predict more of the same: "Some of these OA projects will be motivated by fear of OA and the desire to prepare for it. But some will be motivated, in effect, by the decline in fear. We're entering the post-panic period of the OA revolution, and as panic subsides, more and more former opponents will be willing to acknowledge the virtues of OA and try to benefit from them. It will be easier see nuance, rather than undifferentiated menace, and recognize that some variations on the theme may fit a given publisher's plans and research niche even if other variations do not."

  • At p. 167, I say, "Even if we acknowledge the need for cultural change in the transition to OA — far more critical than technological change — it's easy to underestimate the cultural barriers and the time required to work through them." Add these notes.
    • See Hofstadter's Law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."
    • See Peter Suber, Analogies and precedents for the FOS revolution, Free Online Scholarship Newsletter, March 11, 2002: "If asked for a precedent for the kind of revolution represented by FOS [free online scholarship], we might first mention the Gutenberg Press. But it isn't a very good fit. It's a technological advance, and all the technology required for FOS already exists. We're trying to bring about an economic change that will take advantage of existing technology."
    • See Michael Nielsen, Reinventing Discovery, Princeton University Press, 2011 (perma.cc link), p. 206: "The inventor and scientist Daniel Hillis has observed that "there are problems that are impossible if you think about them in two-year terms —which everyone does— but they're easy if you think in fifty-year terms." The problem of open science is a problem of this type. Today, creating an open scientific culture seems to require an impossible change in how scientists work. But by taking small steps we can gradually cause a major cultural change."
    • See Brian A. Nosek and Yoav Bar-Anan, Scientific Utopia: I. Opening scientific communication, arXiv, May 4, 2012 (perma.cc link): "We address conceptual and practical barriers to change, and provide examples showing how the suggested practices are being used already. The critical barriers to change are not technical or financial; they are social. While scientists guard the status quo, they also have the power to change it."
    • See Science as an open enterprise, Royal Society, June 2012 (perma.cc link): "This report focuses on the challenges and opportunities offered by the modern data deluge and how a culture of open data and communication can, with some exceptions, maximise the capacity to respond to them....The priority is to ensure that actors in the science community – scientists, their institutions, funders, publishers and government – agree on...a shift away from a research culture where data is viewed as a private preserve....Pathfinder disciplines have committed themselves to and are benefitting from an open data culture....Universities and research institutes should play a major role in supporting an open data culture....The learned societies are well placed to play an important role in promoting a culture of open data as the norm in their disciplinary area, in articulating how it will operate and in seizing the new opportunities that follow from a more open culture."
    • See Victoria Stodden et al., Setting the Default to Reproducible, February 16, 2013 (perma.cc link). Two of the authors' three recommendations are: "1. It is important to promote a culture change that will integrate computational reproducibility into the research process. 2. Journals, funding agencies, and employers should support this culture change."
    • The University of Liege adopted an OA mandate in 2007, and was the first institution anywhere to limit assessment of candidates for promotion, tenure, and awards to works on deposit in the repository. Ten years later, Bernard Rentier, the rector who recommended the policy, reported that it had succeeded in changing the culture at the institution and was no longer necessary. "And 10 years after the launch of the 'ORBi' archive [and its accompanying OA policy], the pressure of the mandate is no longer needed. Everyone has understood the incomparable advantages of the tool in terms of article visibility and on many other aspects. Closing the archive would cause an internal revolution!" If other evidence shows that cultural change is necessary for effective implementation, this report is evidence that cultural change may be sufficient.
    • A survey of publishers (perma.cc link) conducted by the DOAJ (summer 2018, released January 2019) documented one of the major cultural obstacles to OA: "86% of respondents said that in their countries researchers are evaluated on where they publish rather than what they publish."
    • See Lucy Montgomery et al., Universities and knowledge sharing: Evaluating progress to openness at the institutional level, ELPUB 2019, June 2019 (perma.cc link): "An effective Open Knowledge Institution embodies core values that deliver the benefits of open science culture and practice. It achieves this through providing an environment, platforms and culture that deliver and also hold in tension three key areas: communication, diversity and coordination. Cultural change at institutional level and in response to national or regional initiatives and mandates is fundamental to achieving openness."
    • See Brian Nosek, Strategy for Culture Change, June 11, 2019 (perma.cc link): "When norms, incentives, and policies are misaligned with desired behavior, a much more encompassing strategy is needed to effect culture change. Here is our strategy [at the Center for Open Science] to change the research culture to accelerate discovery, solutions, and cures....COS's strategy for culture and behavior change requires five levels of intervention represented by the pyramid above: Make it possible [through infrastructure], make it easy [through the user interface or experience], make it normative [through communities], make it rewarding [through incentives], and make it required [through policy]."
    • See Shaun Khoo, Boycotting Elsevier Is Not Enough, The Scientist, October 22, 2019 (perma.cc link): "There is a plethora of free open source software for running journals and typesetting articles, which leaves us with very minimal costs [in running our no-fee OA journal]. Our main challenge is cultural — convincing scientists it doesn't have to cost $3,000 to publish an article and to take a risk with a new and unproven outlet."
    • See Room for everyone's talent: towards a new balance in the recognition and rewards of academics, from five Dutch public knowledge institutions and funders (VSNU, NFU, KNAW, NWOm ZonMw), November 2019 (perma.cc link): "We want to share our academic research and education with society and to make it accessible (open science)....[This] requires a modernisation of the system of recognition and rewards....Modernising the system of recognition and rewards requires a culture change as well as national and international coordination between all parties involved."
    • See Marcus Munafò, Raising research quality will require collective action, Nature, December 10, 2019 (perma.cc link): "Changes to incentives at a single institution will not make new behaviours stick, not least because practices required in only one place can act as a career tax on its scientists. Only if changes occur across many institutions will the impacts permeate scientific culture....But these cultural changes might falter. Culture eats strategy for breakfast — grand plans founder on the rocks of implicit values, beliefs and ways of working. Top-down initiatives from funders and publishers will fizzle out if they are not implemented by researchers, who review papers and grant proposals. Grass-roots efforts will flourish only if institutions recognize and reward researchers’ efforts....Cultural change is just as essential to long-term success."
    • See UNESCO's Preliminary report on the first draft of the Recommendation on Open Science, October 2020: "To achieve its aim, the key objectives and areas of action of this Recommendation areas follows:...(v) transforming scientific culture."
    • See the League of European Research Universities (LERU), Implementing Open Science, December 14, 2020 (perma.cc link): "It is a significant culture change to move from the current landscape, where the sharing of data is not universally the norm, to one where it is. Reward and promotion schemes in universities need to change, if such Open Science approaches are to become the norm....As for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), a tremendous amount of work remains to be done culturally and practically to enable the EOSC to engage with individual research-intensive universities."
    • See Kazuhiro Hayashi, How Could COVID-19 Change Scholarly Communication to a New Normal in the Open Science Paradigm?, Patterns, January 8, 2021 (perma.cc link): "The essence of open science is not in the technology itself, but in the formation of new practices and cultures by changing human behavior. It needs time to change the culture."
    • See Corona virus will strengthen Open Science, LERU, January 25, 2021 (perma.cc link), an interview with Paul Ayris. Quoting Ayris: "As an academic community, we in Europe have come a long way [toward open science] in the last 10 years. I would have liked to get where we are now in five or six years rather than ten, but I've known from the beginning that changing the culture of universities and university researchers would take time."
    • See Guide to Accelerate Public Access to Research Data, Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), April 15, 2021 (perma.cc link): "Overcoming these barriers [to open data] will require...a major cultural shift within universities, scientific disciplines, and individual university departments concerning how faculty members are evaluated, assessed, recognized, and rewarded regarding their data stewardship practices."
    • See Libraries and Librarians as Key Partners in Accelerating Public Access to Research Data (perma.cc link), Association of Research Libraries, April 27, 2021: "[ARL libraries should] articulate the libraries’ role in accelerating public access to data with the mind frame of culture change. How is your library working from the bottom up (with faculty and graduate students), middle out (with department chairs and center directors) and top down (provosts, presidents, vice presidents for research, and others) to engage and influence public access to data?"
    • See Nick Plant, Publishing deals can drive change in research culture, Research Professional News, May 18, 2021 (perma.cc link): "Ultimately, the most important thing to do with research is share it. We need cultural change for that to happen at its full potential."
    • See Anon., Over 33TB of distributed data to secure the future of open science, SamaGame, July 4, 2021 (perma.cc link) on the problem of sharing gigantic datasets. "Today, BitTorrent is a well-known, efficient and easy-to-implement technology.…The main obstacle was not technical. It was social. In these four years of work, the hardest thing has been convincing the researchers that a technology as demonized as torrents could have legitimate scientific use. And not only that because, once they convinced the researchers, they touched an even tougher bone: convincing the institutions."
    • See MacKenzie Smith, Practical Idealism: UC’s Approach to Open Access, July 6, 2021 (perma.cc link): "For generations, academia has rewarded authors who publish in the most prestigious journals. Yet, because the high cost of subscriptions to top journals is borne mainly by libraries, the authors who benefit from this scholarly 'prestige economy' have been shielded from its cost. As UC authors encounter the high publishing charges (APCs) of the most prestigious journals, some ask why they are so expensive and what alternatives they have, even though the university will bear that cost on their behalf if needed. That is a good question to be asking. Culture change is a long game, but awareness is the first step."
    • See Stuart Buck, Beware performative reproducibility, Nature, July 6, 2021 (perma.cc link): "Idealism from early-career scientists must be matched by strong signals from senior leaders and institutions that it is possible to be hired and get tenure while engaging in best practices. A hopeful sign is that some university job advertisements now ask about an applicant's commitment to open-science practices. That sort of cultural change is where the real challenge lies."
    • When announcing its new OA policy (perma.cc link) on August 6, 2021, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) made a point of saying that it plans to continue its "work to support culture change around publication, in that research should be recognised for its intrinsic merit rather than where it has been published."
    • See Parveen Yaqoob and Robert Darby, Eight ways your university can make research culture more open, THE Campus, September 17, 2021 (perma.cc link): "Achieving greater openness requires long-term culture change. Here are eight key actions your university can take to stimulate that process."
    • See Robert Darby, UKRN Checklist for an Open Research Action Plan, October 15, 2021: "An Open Research Action Plan describes strategic, co-ordinated institutional action to transform research culture [emphasis in original]. Implementing the plan requires a multidimensional and integrated approach, and involves developing institutional leadership, policies, services and infrastructure. Change can be enabled in various ways: knowledge, skills and norms of good practice can be transmitted through communications, training, allies in the research community, and business processes; services and infrastructure can be developed to reduce barriers to adoption of new practices;incentive structures can motivate behaviour; and policies can enforce compliance."
    • See Open science needs no martyrs, but we must recognize the need for reform, ERC Magazine, October 28, 2021 (perma.cc link). An interview with physicist Toma Susi: "[The current research] culture and the resulting regime of evaluation are the main obstacles to open science....In open access we are on the last stretch. I don’t think there will be much research that is not openly accessible in five years. When it comes to open data, it will take more time. We’re advancing but we are maybe half-way there. In other aspects, in cultural changes, we’re just getting started, and it’s hard to say when we will get to the end."
    • See Dylan Ruediger et al., Leveraging Data Communities to Advance Open Science, ITHAKA, August 9, 2022 (perma.cc link): "Absent strong incentive and reward structures, researchers are often reluctant to take on this 'extra' labor [of sharing their data]. Successful data sharing ultimately depends on cultural and social infrastructures as much as on technical infrastructures."

Chapter 10: Self-Help

Read the OA text:

Updates and supplements for Chapter 10:

  • I restated many of the points from this chapter in a public talk at the Berkman Klein Center, October 23, 2012. See the online handout I wrote to accompany the talk, How to make your own work open access. The handout includes active links and I update it as needed.

  • At p. 170, I say, "[A]bout 30 percent of OA journals charge author-side fees and about half the articles published in OA journals appear in those fee-based journals." Add these notes.
    • See William Walters and Anne Linvill, "Characteristics of Open Access Journals in Six Subject Areas," College and Research Libraries, August 2010. "While just 29 percent of OA journals charge publication fees, those journals represent 50 percent of the articles in our study."
    • See Mikael Laakso and Bo-Christer Björk, Anatomy of open access publishing: a study of longitudinal development and internal structure, BMC Medicine, October 22, 2012: "OA journals requiring article-processing charges have become increasingly common, publishing 166,700 articles in 2011 (49% of all OA articles)."
    • See Walt Crawford, Open Access Journals 2014, DOAJ subset, April 2015, showing that 64% of the articles published in OA journals in 2013 were published in fee-based OA journals.
    • See Walt Crawford, The Gold OA Landscape, 2011-2014, Cites & Insights, October 2015, p. 20: "Most gold OA journals (not quite three-quarters) are funded by societies, universities and colleges, libraries, government agencies, grants or subsumed costs, without charging APCs (although some of those are using temporary no-APC periods to boost article submissions). But the 26% of journals that do charge APCs...published 57% of the OA articles (in reputable journals) in 2014, and assuming level APCs, pay journals have published a majority of OA articles since 2013."

  • At p. 173, I say, "[If you don't have an OA repository in your institution or field,] consider one of the universal repositories open to research articles of all kinds. I recommend OpenDepot, OpenAire, Academia, and Mendeley." After Elsevier bought Mendeley (April 2013, after this book came out), I stopped recommending Mendeley and wrote a blog post about it. In October 2013 (also after this book came out), I wrote a new version of Chapter 10 as a wiki-based handout, How to make your own work open access. That handout has long since stopped recommending Academia and Mendeley, for the kinds of reasons since summarized (December 2015) very well by the University of California Office of Scholarly Communication. My top recommendation for a universal repository is now Zenodo.

Glossary

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Updates and Supplements for the Glossary:

  • At p. 175, I define "gold OA" among other terms. See my update for p. 53, above, for further comments on my definition.

  • At p. 175, and elsewhere in the book, especially Section 3.3, I define OA to include both gratis access and libre access. Moreover, I define libre access to cover the whole spectrum beyond fair use, not just the most-free or least-restricted end of that spectrum (that is, not just the CC-BY and CC0 end of the spectrum). Some allies differ from me on both of these points. That is, some want to define OA to mean libre access only, and some want to define libre access to cover just the most-free end of the spectrum beyond fair use.
    • I first defended my use of these definitions in the August 2008 article in which I borrowed the gratis/libre terminology from the world of software and introduced it into world of scholarship. I defended it several times thereafter in blog posts, and defended it most recently in the second postscript to my June 2012 article on the rise of libre OA. Undoubtedly some disagreements still remain. However, in my view, these disputes are entirely verbal, and turn on how we should define and use certain terms. Unless we are careless, they should not interfere with our understanding of the underlying issues, distinctions, and policies, let alone with the actions we take based on that understanding. For example, we can use and recommend CC-BY while allowing that the term "open access" and even the terms "libre access" and "libre OA" cover more than CC-BY.
    • In too many discussions for too many years, important substantive questions were obscured by verbal disputes and definition wars. The gratis/libre terminology, or the equivalent, and the names of well-defined open licenses, can help us get past verbal disputes and focus on substance.
    • I stand by my position on p. 70: "The best way to refer to a specific flavor of libre OA is by referring to a specific open license. We’ll never have unambiguous, widely understood technical terms for every useful variation on the theme. But we already have clearly named licenses for all the major variations on the theme, and we can add new ones for more subtle variations any time we want."

  • At p. 176, the term "toll access" appears in the glossary. See my update to p. 6 above, where I say that I now prefer the term "paywalled".

Notes

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For updates and supplements to a given endnote, see the page for the note call. For example, the note call for endnote 2 in Chapter 3 occurs on p. 50, and the note text occurs on p. 187. Any updates and supplements to that endnote will be collected in an entry for p. 50, not in an entry for p. 187.

Additional Resources

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Index

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Updates and supplements for the index:

  • Add new entry: Students, 73, 174. See also Theses and dissertations.
  • Add new entry: Terry, Sharon, 204-205
  • Toll-access (or conventional) journals and publishers.
    • Add new sub-entry: Right to refuse to publish any work for any reason, 126-128
  • Add new entry: Translation, 27, 74



In many places above I link to tag libraries from the Open Access Tracking Project. All OATP tag libraries are crowd-sourced and updated in real time. You can make them more complete by taking part as an OATP tagger. (Disclosure: I launched OATP in 2009 and still oversee it.)

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