Conflicts

This is a non-public draft. I'll make it public as soon as I'm happy with it.

• I sometimes serve on advisory boards of organizations whose work I do not entirely endorse. I do so when I'm willing to advise them. If the willingness to advise implied an endorsement, I would not accept the position. However, I'm not even willing to serve on an advisory board if I don't think the organization has some good ideas.

• I consult pro bono on open access. Because I'm not paid for this, I see no conflict of interest. Sometimes this pro bono consulting results in policies or practices I do not entirely endorse. At least I tried.

• I sometimes consult for pay, especially with for-profit companies. I started doing this 15 years ago or more, after I gave up my salary as a philosophy professor to work full-time on open access. But when I got more requests than I had time to fulfill, I raised my price until the requests fell to a manageable level. Today I take about 1-2 of of these jobs a year, each for about one hour by telephone. For the past few years, these have always been consultations with investors who want to know whether the stock prices of major, publicly-traded for-profit academic publishers are going up or down. I never express an opinion on those future stock prices. I limit myself to talking about what's happening with OA and academic publishing, and let the investors draw their own conclusions.

• I used to do a lot of public speaking. Today, for medical reasons, I do much less of it. Sometimes I take honorariums and sometimes I waive them. But even when I take them, I'm never paid to espouse any position but my own.

• I have a salary from Harvard University. When I defend Harvard's policies or practices on OA, I always give my reasons. However, you should decide for yourself whether my advocacy is compromised by my salary. (The chief reason to disclose one's conflicts is to enable readers to decide this question for themselves.)

• I have a grant from the Arnold Foundation. In the past I've had grants for my work on OA from the Open Society Institute (today, the Open Society Foundations), the Wellcome Trust, and the Arcadia Fund. I've had a grant for my work in philosophy from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

• Since funders prefer to give grants to a non-profit organizations, rather than individuals, I formerly had arrangements with non-profits to receive these grants on my behalf. I had these arrangements with Public Knowledge, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

• When I published my newsletter on OA, I had a subsidy from SPARC, and occasional ads from Data Conversion Laboratories.