Conflicts

From Peter Suber
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What I do and try to do

  • I work full-time to foster the growth of open access (OA) to research. I advocate OA, analyze it, implement it, consult about it, and take public positions about it in my speaking and writing. I also use it as an author and reader.
    • I try to say only what I believe and can defend. My positions and arguments evolve according to what I learn, and I try to learn from as many sources as I can. But I try not to let my positions and arguments shift according to my financial interests, including my interest in pleasing the institutions that fund me, or that funded me in the past. I hope I succeed at this. But I realize that if I don't succeed, I might not notice it.
    • I don't consider potential conflicts (like salaries or grants) to be good reasons to curb my advocacy, stop speaking my mind, or stop recommending what I believe is worth recommending, especially when I've deliberately taken jobs and grants that encourage me to take public positions on OA. Potential conflicts are not reasons for silence, but for disclosure. Hence, I don't make it a principle to avoid comment on the organizations that employ or fund me (or that have employed or funded me in the past). Some of them are major players in areas of my research, writing, speaking, and advocacy. My goal in this doc is to reveal my ties in order to help others decide for themselves how to weigh my arguments.
  • For more detail on what I do, see my home page.

How I'm paid

  • I have a salary from Harvard University to run the Office for Scholarly Communication, based in the Harvard Library.
    • I publicly defended Harvard's OA practices before I had any financial support from Harvard, which started in 2009. But I continued to do so after 2009, when I got a paid fellowship from Harvard, and after 2013 when I started receiving a salary from Harvard.
    • I don't defend all of Harvard's practices in this area (open access, scholarly communication, academic publishing, copyright), and feel no pressure to do so
    • I don't directly raise money for Harvard. But I once spoke at a meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association, and one purpose evident to all was to keep alumni happy and willing to give. When I do my job well, it might have a similar effect of helping Harvard raise money. I've talked directly with a few donors interested in giving to my unit within Harvard. But I limit myself to describing what we do and why I think it's important. I never make the ask. I'm not paid to talk with these potential donors; when they give (and some have) my salary does not go up; when don't give (and some haven't) my salary does not go down.
  • I currently have a grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, starting in September 2016, to run the Harvard Open Access Project, based in the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
  • I've written a few books that earn royalties.
    • Paradox of Self-Amendment (Peter Lang, 1990) never paid royalties. Lang wanted me to pay a subvention, but I refused and it published the book anyway. When the book went out of print in 1997, I made the full text OA.
    • The Case of the Speluncean Explorers: Nine New Opinions (Routledge, 1998) is still in print and still earning royalties. It's my only book (and I believe, my only publication) that is not yet OA. I've asked Routledge to make it open, but it has refused.
    • Open Access (MIT Press, 2012) still pays royalties. MIT made it OA one year after publication, under a CC-BY-NC license, and still sells a paperback edition. I asked for immediate OA, and a CC-BY license, but accepted this compromise with the press.
      • While OA and print sales are compatible, and sometimes the former stimulate the latter, in my case the OA edition reduced sales and reduced my royalties.
      • I received a $2,000 advance for this book. I didn't ask for an advance, and didn't know I'd receive one until I'd already written and submitted the manuscript. I haven't received an advance for any other book.
      • At least three schools once gave away copies of the paperback edition of this book to all new members of their faculty; one was the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (not my decision). In the Harvard case, I learned the number of copies bought and given away for this purpose, calculated the royalties on those copies, and donated that amount to Creative Commons.
      • I was once criticized for accepting an advance for this book, and for not choosing a different publisher that would have allowed immediate OA — essentially, criticized for a conflict of interest. I responded. I won't recap the to-and-fro here, but I link to it so that you can judge it for yourselves.
    • Knowledge Unbound (MIT Press, 2016) may or may not pay royalties. But so far it hasn't. MIT made the book OA from birth, under a CC-BY license.
  • Of course scholarly articles earn no royalties. Hence, I see no conflicts in my scholarly articles on OA, philosophy, or law.
    • In fact it was the realization as a young scholar that scholarly articles earned no royalties that awakened me to beautiful opportunity for making them OA.

Other things I do

  • I consult pro bono on OA. Because I'm not paid for this, I see no conflict of interest. Sometimes this pro bono consulting results in new OA policies or practices. (That's the goal.) Sometimes I do not entirely endorse the results, but at least I tried.
    • My pro bono consulting is often grant-supported. Several of my grants have included specific provisions to cover this work. When I have funding like that, I feel free to give time without charge because the grant is paying for my time. When my pro bono consulting is not grant-supported, it's an overload.
    • My pro bono consulting for OA is also confidential. There are three reasons why. (1) Many institutions do not want to reveal that they are considering an OA policy until they have a draft they're ready to defend. (2) Even after an institution adopts a policy, it should be the institution's decision, not mine, whether to reveal my role in advising on language, procedure, and strategy. (3) Some faculty or librarians who consult with me do not officially represent their institutions. While they seek substantive policy advice, they also seek strategic advice on how to persuade colleagues, often higher-ups, to make an unofficial policy initiative into an official one.
  • Sometimes I consult for pay. With nonprofit clients, I never charge. With for-profit clients, sometimes I charge and sometimes I don't.
    • I started working as a paid consultant in 2003, after I gave up my salary as a philosophy professor to work full-time on OA. But when I got more consulting requests than I had time to take on, I raised my price until the requests fell to a manageable level. Today I only take a handful of these jobs a year. Each is usually a one-hour phone call. For the past few years, these consultations have always been with investors who want to know whether the stock prices of large, publicly-traded academic publishers will go up or down. I never express an opinion on those future stock prices, and the investors never ask me. I talk about what's happening with OA and academic publishing, and the investors draw their own conclusions. I don't even know what conclusions they draw!
  • I serve on the advisory boards for many organizations, and list them all on my home page. Sometimes I wholeheartedly endorse what they do, and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I agree to join an advisory board when I'm willing to advise, when I think think the organization is willing to hear my advice, when I think it already some good ideas, and when I have time. If the willingness to advise implied a full endorsement, I would accept some but not all of my current advisory positions.
    • When I serve on an advisory board, I do not promote its positions or practices just because I'm a member of the board. Sometimes I promote them because I believe in them. Sometimes I don't promote them at all.
    • When I serve on an advisory board, I do not raise money for the organization, though I will sometimes support its applications for grants.
    • When I serve on an advisory board, I am never paid to do so.
  • Sometimes I make decisions, usually with others, on how Harvard should spend its money, for example, on vendors, publishers, and start-ups seeking support. Sometimes I'm approached by vendors as if I were a decision-maker when I'm not. In no case has someone seeking Harvard's financial support paid me or offered to pay me.
  • I am a non-practicing lawyer. The "non-practicing" part of this means that I don't have clients. Hence I'm never in a position to advocate for a client, and never need to distinguish that kind of private-interest advocacy from my general work, which I consider public-interest advocacy.
  • I used to do a lot of public speaking in support of OA. Today, for medical reasons, I do much less. When I do speak, sometimes I accept honoraria and sometimes I waive them. But even when I accept them, I'm never paid to take any position but my own.
  • I blog and tweet. But nobody pays me for this. And nobody with control over my income has ever tried to influence the positions I take. (If not them, then who else has tried? The gratifyingly large and growing crowd of people with opinions about OA.)

Past funding

  • In the past I've had salaries or stipends for my OA work from Public Knowledge, Yale Law School, the Harvard Law School Library, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. I no longer have any of these salaries or stipends. But I have a new and ongoing arrangement with Berkman. (See above.)
  • In the past I've had grants for my OA work from the Open Society Institute (today, the Open Society Foundations), the Wellcome Trust, the Arcadia Fund, and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. For my philosophy work, I've had a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
  • Since funders prefer to give grants to nonprofit organizations, rather than individuals, I've made arrangements with nonprofits 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. I currently have this kind of arrangement with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
  • When I published my newsletter on OA (2001-2013), I had a subsidy from SPARC, and occasional ads from Data Conversion Laboratory. Neither ever suggested what I should or should not say in the newsletter.
  • For 21 years I was a professor of philosophy at Earlham College. When I left in 2003 to work full-time on OA, I was a tenured full professor. I'm still an unpaid "research professor" of philosophy there.

  • Sometimes it's hard for me to tell the difference between OA work for which I'm paid and OA work for which I'm not paid.
    • Analogy: I support political causes and candidates without pay (indeed, often pay to support them), and much of my support for OA is political in the broadest sense. At the same time, OA is at the heart of my paid work.
    • I feel lucky to be paid to support what I'd also support without pay, and I've deliberately looked for grants, fellowships, and paying jobs to make this happen. But if I had to say whether a given email or phone call to answer a question, a given F2F meeting to discuss OA, a given blog post, a given letter to an editor, or a given speaking engagement were inside or outside the scope of my paid work, I'd often be at a loss. Fortunately, this has never mattered to those who pay me, and again I feel lucky that this is the case.

Bottom line

  • Although I support OA, and work full-time on it, I receive no direct financial gain from its success. For example, I own no stock or stock options in any OA publisher or service provider. I receive no commissions on my OA work, unless you count the royalties on my books. Even in the rare cases when I consult for pay, I charge a flat fee which does not go up or down retroactively based on what I said during the consultation.
    • I do benefit indirectly because the success of OA, and the success my own contributions to it, increase the odds that I'll get new grants to work on it, and increase the odds that there will be paying jobs (like my current job) to work on it. However, even in these cases, neither my grants nor my salary are tied to the progress of OA. Once a funder has accepted my grant application, the amount doesn't increase or decrease, for example, in proportion to the effectiveness of my work. Once I have a salary, the amount is subject to rule-governed annual increases, and doesn't increase beyond those bounds in order to stimulate or reward good work.
    • I don't have a salary or grant from any for-profit organization.
    • I'm not expected to raise money for any organization as part of any grant or job description.
  • I hope I've disclosed everything that might affect my positions and arguments. But if you think I haven't, please let me know.



Last revised June 8, 2018.

I was encouraged to write this page by similar pages from Mike Eisen, Lawrence Lessig, and David Weinberger. I hope this practice spreads.